Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” – John 2:19

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 11, 2014): John 2

In my office I have two pictures hanging on the walls. Both have an overt message and a hidden one. For one, it is a picture of a man sitting under a tree reading a scroll. But if you look a little longer, you can see the image of another man (the author intended this man to be a depiction of Jesus) staring down and looking at the man. And across from this drawing is another one. This one is a scenic picture of a waterfall in a forest. But again, if you look a little closer there is another image in the drawing. This image is of a man (once again the artist intended this to be an image of Jesus) riding on a donkey. For both of these paintings, one image is dominant while the other is a little harder to see. But, for both of these paintings, once you have seen the hidden image, you can never not see it again. The recessive image becomes more dominant once you know that it is there.

There is a definite double meaning in Jesus words. Standing inside of the temple he is asked for the authority for the things that he says and does (in this case the clearing of the temple itself of those who were trying to sell things within its gates.) And the answer that Jesus gives is that if the temple was destroyed, that he could raise it – or rebuild it – within three days. The obvious meaning was that Jesus meant the physical temple, this place made of stone and filled with precious artifacts. But the idea of rebuilding of the temple in three days was almost as unthinkable as ever letting anyone destroy the holy place again.

And while that was the most obvious meaning, it was not the one that Jesus intended. As he spoke of the destruction of “this temple,” it was not the temple that he was standing in that he meant – it was the temple that he was. What the original hearers missed, and what we can never lose sight of again, is that Jesus was possibly making his first assertion that he would die and rise again. (It is the first assertion of his eventual death and resurrection if we accept that the clearing of the temple in John is an earlier version of a similar event that is described in the synoptic gospels. The synoptic version of the clearing of the temple takes place during the last week of Jesus life.)

But maybe even more disturbing is that Jesus might have also been saying that when he rose again, he would erase the need for the temple in Jerusalem. The time would come when once again the temple would be destroyed, but this time it would not be rebuilt. And there would be no need for it to be rebuilt, because the Messiah had made the whole world the temple of God.   

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: John 3