After my sermon on Jesus preaching at Nazareth some of us talked further on the question of how you should treat your enemies, if you're not supposed to kill them. During this discussion we got onto the story of Jesus clearing the temple and I thought it would be worth a closer look. The story appears in three of the gospels. In Mark 11:15-19 and Matthew 21:12-17 it comes in the final week of Jesus' life, right after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In John 2:12-25 it plays a somewhat similar role to the story of Jesus in Nazareth in Luke, a public introduction to the purpose of his ministry. I have read some commentators who think this means Jesus did it twice, but this seems to be an absurd concession to the idea of inerrancy . John has placed the story in a different place but it serves the same purpose - to introduce Jesus' terminal conflict with the Jewish authorities. Here is the story as it appears in Mark. On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temp
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson