John 2:17Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

At this, His disciples remembered that it was written: "Zeal for Thy house has consumed Me" (Jn 2:17; cf. Ps 69:9). For by zeal for the house of God the Lord drove those merchants out of the temple.

Brethren, let every Christian be consumed by zeal for the house of God. Who is consumed by zeal for the house of God?

The one who strives to correct whatever perverse thing he sees in it, longs to improve it, and does not remain indifferent. If he cannot improve it, he endures and weeps over it.

Grain is poured out on the threshing floor, and it bears with the chaff so that, when the chaff is separated, it may pass into the granary. If you are grain, remain on the threshing floor before entering the granary.

Otherwise you may be pecked up by the birds before you are gathered in. For the birds of heaven, the powers of the air (cf. Eph 6:12), wait to snatch something from the threshing floor.

They can snatch nothing except what has fallen outside the floor. Therefore let zeal for the house of God consume you.

Let zeal for the house of God consume every Christian, in which house of God he is a part, membrum. Augustine uses membrum, often in the expressions membrum corporis Christi and membrum Ecclesiae, a member of the Body of Christ and a member of the Church.

The sense is that the Christian is not merely an inhabitant of the Lord's house, whose purity he must care for. He is also a part of it, just as he is a member of the Body of Christ, the Church.

Your own house is not more important than the house in which you have salvation forever. You enter your own house for temporal rest. You enter the house of God for eternal rest.

If you are troubled when something disorderly happens in your own house, should you tolerate it, insofar as you are able, when you see something disorderly in the house of God?

There salvation and endless rest have been prepared for you. For example, you see a brother hurrying to the theater. Stop him, warn him, and show sorrow for him, if zeal for the house of God consumes you.

You see others hurrying and wishing to get drunk with wine. They want to do in holy places what ought not be done anywhere at all.

Stop those whom you can. Restrain those whom you can. Frighten those whom you can. Speak gently to those to whom you can, but do not be silent.

If it is a friend, he should be warned meekly. If it is a wife, she should be restrained with particular severity. If it is a maidservant, she must be restrained with blows.

Do what you can according to the role you bear, whether friend, husband, or master. Then you will fulfill the words, "Zeal for Thy house has consumed Me" (Jn 2:17).

But if you are cold and sluggish, thinking only of yourself as though that were enough for salvation, you may say in your heart, "What concern have I with another's sins?"

"It is enough for me to care for my own soul, that I may keep it unharmed for God." Will that servant not come to your mind who hid his talent and did not spend it (cf. Mt 25:25-29)?

He was not accused because he had lost it, but because he had kept it without profit.

Therefore hear, my brethren, that you must not remain without concern. I intend to give you counsel. May He Who dwells within give it, for although He gives it through me, it is still He Who gives it.

You know what should be done. Each of you, in his own house, toward friend, guest, client, elder, or younger, must act as God grants entrance.

As He opens the doors by His word, do not cease to bring profit to Christ. For you too will receive profit from Christ.

It was not so much the action of His scourge as the divine power with which He rose up against them. He feared neither the authority of the priests nor the number of the merchants themselves.

It was also the action of their own conscience, awakened by this same power, that compelled them to depart quickly from there. The court began to be cleansed.

Looking at this impartially, one could not deny the moral greatness of Jesus' action. He alone rose up against disorders that had been tolerated and protected for so many years, even by those who claimed to be the strictest zealots of the law.

The holiness of the temple, long since trampled down, demanded this. But the Lord gave the Jews to understand that this action should not be attributed only to pious zeal, as when certain kings in former times cleansed the temple from idol-service.

His relation to this temple was much closer. It was the house of His Father. And after John had already announced the One coming after him, who was incomparably mightier than he, it was fitting to expect Him here.

"The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple, and the Angel of the covenant whom you desire" (Mal 3:1). What they had not done to receive the Lord remained for Him to do.

After the preaching of repentance among the people, He brought cleansing into the temple itself, which had been defiled by its injustices. This is the beginning of the cleansing works of the Son of God on earth.

The Jews understood these words literally. Therefore they said to Him mockingly: "This temple was built in forty-six years, and will You raise it up in three days?"

But if the inner meaning of the Lord's words was dark and incomprehensible to them, they still should not have understood them so outwardly and literally. It was evident that Jesus Christ was not speaking of this visible temple, but pointing to certain events of the moral world.

Yet the Jews deliberately did not seek a deeper spiritual understanding of the Lord's words. Later they used them as testimony against Jesus (Mt 26:61; Mk 14:58), and now for mockery of Him.

By expressing in this form a prediction of His death and resurrection, Jesus Christ gives the following thoughts. All the Old Testament institutions and rites pointed to the coming Messiah, His person and His work.

Their center, the temple of Jerusalem, as the symbolic dwelling of God, was a type of Christ's body, in which God the Word truly dwelt.

"The defilement of this temple, already begun by you," the Lord was saying, as it were, "you will extend so far that you will destroy what constitutes its very essence. You will put Me, the Messiah, to death. But after three days I will rise."

Soon afterward this visible temple, then deprived of its inner meaning and essence and therefore no longer needed, would also be destroyed by God's judgment. Together with it the whole Old Testament religious order, whose center it served, would be destroyed.

But in place of the destroyed religion, through My resurrection, I will raise up a new and higher religion.

This understanding of the prophecy is required by the observation that, in other prophecies, what is foretold of the thing represented is also foretold, in essential features, of the image itself. Three days, in relation to the destiny of the image, signifies in general a short period of time.

In the passage under consideration, that is, in its application to the Lord, compassion expresses His burning desire or striving to compel respect for the purity and inviolability of the temple, and in general for everything consecrated to God.

This compassion was so strong in Him that it consumed Him. In general, this saying points not only to the Lord's desire to compel the Jews to sanctify and honor their temple literally, as a house of prayer.

At the same time, and chiefly, it points to honoring the One to whom this temple belongs, that is, God. This is how the disciples understood the Lord's zeal. Therefore they responded to His action with sympathy.

It is fitting here to speak of the falsification to which L. Tolstoy resorts in his gospel, only to advance his sectarian teaching about the temples of God.

The narrative under consideration stands in his work under the heading: "the destruction of the external temple." But the whole narrative speaks directly against this blasphemous teaching, and verse 17 especially does so.

Verse 17 clearly states that the Lord cleansed the temple from worldly impurity out of zeal for the holiness of the temple. Since verse 17 is not to Tolstoy's taste, and since it exposes the falsity of his teaching about the destruction of God's temples, he does not even mention it.

Here is a sample of his interpretation. "According to John the Evangelist," says Tolstoy, "Jesus' first act was the so-called cleansing of the temple, but in reality the destruction of the temple. Jesus comes into the temple and destroys everything needed for its service."

He continues: "To explain this is the same as explaining that in our time the Doukhobors would come into an Orthodox church and throw out all the antiminsia, crosses," and so forth.

This is exactly what sectarians did in Pavlovki of Kharkov province. After this, it seems there is nothing to add about where Tolstoy's teaching in the new gospel leads. It leads to turmoil, and Tolstoy strives for this turmoil with all his strength.

This was a deed that only a Mattathias, a Judas Maccabeus, or some prophet could undertake. But on the more dignified persons, the priests and Levites, scribes and Pharisees, He made an even stronger impression.

They involuntarily felt pangs of conscience. As the chief guardians of religion and propriety, they had not done this themselves. They had left the honor of zeal for God to an unknown Galilean.

Strict rules concerning the holiness of the temple had long existed among them. According to these rules, no one could enter the mountain of the Lord with a staff in hand, or in boots, or with money in his belt, or with a bag over his shoulder.

One could not enter even with dust on his feet. No one could carry any burden through the temple, or even spit within the temple precincts.

Despite these petty rules, through greed they still permitted all the defilement that now gave the unknown Galilean occasion to manifest His zeal for the holy place.

This zeal fully corresponded to the ministry of Christ. As the house of His Father, the temple was under His special care. He merely used His right and fulfilled His duty as Messiah by cleansing it from defilement.

This was a sign and the beginning of the spiritual cleansing He had come to accomplish. In it the character of His future ministry was wondrously manifested.

The prophet Zechariah had foretold that in the days of the Messiah "there shall no longer be a trader in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day" (Zech 14:21). Therefore the prophets honored by the people justified His actions.

Thus the authorities could say nothing in condemnation of this righteous deed, although they were boundlessly indignant at the unknown zealot because He had taken upon Himself a duty belonging to them.

The people, however, showed by their silence that they approved the deed. The crowds of pilgrims undoubtedly regarded with reverence this act of the young Galilean, about whom a mysterious rumor had already begun to spread from the banks of the Jordan.

Here Christ entered the field of His public activity in the way most capable of striking the people's imagination. He appeared as a true prophet, who fearlessly showed zeal for God by rising up against the defilement of His house.

Saint Paul indicates the typological relation of this psalm to Christ in Rom 15:3; cf. Rom 11:9-10. Likewise, the Apostle Peter applies verse 26 of this psalm to the apostasy from Christ of the betrayer Judas (Acts 1:20).

The Lord's disciples now remembered the indicated saying of the psalm. Consequently, even at that time they already considered the Lord to be the Messiah and understood this psalm as referring to the Messiah.

In relation to God, zeal, zelus, is the striving to compel reverence for His Name, His temple, and everything consecrated to Him. The true Latin word is ardor or fervor, though zelus is also found among Latin writers.

All these feelings were completely stifled among the Jews of Jerusalem in the time of our Lord Jesus Christ. This was especially true in the hearts of the Sadducee atheists, who held power in their hands.

It was also true in the hearts of the Pharisees. They had replaced the zeal of Moses, Phinehas (Num 25:7), Samuel, David, Elijah, the prophets, and the Maccabees with a literal interpretation of the law.

To gratify their greed and vainglory, they allowed a petty casuistry. According to it, anything not directly specified in the law was permitted, even if it contradicted the spirit of the law.

It was precisely against this neglect of the spirit of the law and neglect of God that the Lord rose up. By His first act in Jerusalem, He began the struggle that was to wipe "Judaism" from the face of the earth.

He replaced worship of God according to the letter with worship of God in spirit and truth (Jn 4:24). These unbelieving and embittered Jews approached the Lord with a treacherous question.

They do not insist that a marketplace may be allowed in the temple. By passing over this in silence, they clearly show that they know the Lord acted justly. But they ask the Lord who gave Him authority to give orders in the temple.

Seeing that the Lord acts as one having authority, the Jews dimly understand that He is the expected Messiah; see Jn 7:26, 41; 10, and many other places. But precisely this embitters them.

Christ destroyed their authority and influence over the people. He overthrew their customs and reproached them for greed and impurity of heart. Such small, greedy, unrighteous souls could not acknowledge Him. Therefore they resolved to destroy Him.

For this purpose they put their treacherous question. If the Lord publicly declares that He is the Christ, then the Jews have occasion to accuse Him before the Sanhedrin as a false prophet on the basis of Deut 18 and other passages.

They would also accuse Him before the Roman authority as a dangerous claimant to independent royal power in Palestine.