Common Sense Reborn

Flippin Tables

¹⁵When they arrived back in Jerusalem, Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out the people buying and selling animals for sacrifices. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves, ¹⁶and he stopped everyone from using the Temple as a marketplace. ¹⁷He said to them, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves.” (Mark 11:15-17)

Welcome to Holy Week fam. This week we will be spending time looking at the events that unfolded in Jesus’ life as He prepared to die for the sins of the world. Yesterday, we looked at Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem for the Passover celebration and how the crowd met Him with jubilee and laid down palm branches to create a royal procession for their King of Kings. Now today, we look at what Jesus did when He reached the Temple on Monday morning: He started flipping tables.

Jesus came to the Temple and was greeted by a scene of capitalistic corruption as the “money changers” sought to exploit the Jewish pilgrims. As Jews came to Jerusalem for Passover, they would have to exchange their foreign currency for the “Temple Tax”, and the exchange rates were usually set by the money changers at a rate that would surely profit them. Pilgrims would also bring their sacrificial offerings and would be turned away if their animals were not creatures “without blemish”. So merchants would be ready to sell them a perfect sacrifice, taking money from extremely poor people who were offering what they knew in their hearts was their best to give, but to the religious elite, they demanded more. This infuriated Jesus because it turned God’s house into a crooked money-making scheme. It made Jesus so mad that He flipped tables and chased out the merchants with a bull-whip.

Jesus’ final week of ministry was just beginning and some of His greatest teachings came after He cleansed the corruption out of His church.

If you want to have the true, life-changing relationship with Jesus, you have to flip the tables of everything that is corrupting your life. All the distractions, all the sin, all the anger, all the disappointment, all the doubt. Pile it all up on your table. And flip that table over.