Matthew 21:12-13 - Homilies By R. Tuck

The fitting and the unfitting in God's house.

"My house shall be called a house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves." Selling oxen, sheep, and doves, and changing foreign money into temple shekels, was right enough in its place; but the point is, that all this was being done in the wrong place. The sense of the appropriate, of the becoming, was lost; it was covered over and bidden by the greed of the trader, and the avarice of the money changer. Trade is not wrong, if it be honest trade, and buyer and seller pass fair equivalents. Banking is not wrong in itself, though it gives great opportunities to the covetous. Our Lord never interfered with tradesfolk or with money changers; he only taught principles that would ensure their bargaining fairly. His righteous anger was roused by the offence these traffickers gave to his sense of the fitting, of the becoming. The true consecration of a building is no mere ceremony, it is the feeling of consecration that is in all reverent souls in relation to it. The consecration should have been in these traders, it was fitting to the place where they were; if it had been in them, they would never have thought of bringing the beasts, the cages, and the tables inside the gates of the temple of Jehovah.

I. THE SENSE OF THE FITTING AN IMPULSE TO JESUS . We might properly expect that this "sense" would be at its keenest in the case of Jesus. The honour of the Father-God was the one all-mastering purpose of his life. He could not bear any slight to be put on God, on anything belonging to God, on anything associated with his Name. He was specially jealous, with a sanctified Jewish jealousy, of the temple where God was worshipped. He felt what was fitting to it—stillness, quiet, prayer, reverent attitudes. He felt what was unfitting—noise, dirt, quarrellings over bargains, shouts of drovers, and the greed and over-reaching of covetous men. So the consecration of our worship places is really the response to our quickened, spiritual, Christly, sense of what is fitting. The one thing we ask for is the sustained sense of harmony

II. LACK OF THE SENSE OF THE FITTING GAVE LICENCE TO THE TRADERS . In them the spiritual was hidden. Custom had covered it. Greed had covered it. They were thinking about themselves and their gettings, and so lost all sense of the becoming. They must learn, by a hard, humbling, and awakening lesson, that God's temple is for God.—R.T.