The Destroyers and the Restorer.
This is our Lord's answer to the Jewish request for a sign which should warrant His action in cleansing the Temple. "Destroy this temple," said our Lord, as His sufficient and only answer to the demand for a sign; "and in three days I will raise it up." We see in these words
I. An enigmatical forecast of our Lord's own history. Notice, (1) that marvellous and unique consciousness of our Lord as to His own dignity and nature. "He spake of the temple of His body." Think that here is a Man, apparently one of ourselves, walking amongst us, living the common life of humanity, who declares that in Him, in an altogether solitary and peculiar fashion, there abides the fulness of Deity. And not only does the fulness abide, but in Him the awful remoteness of God becomes for us a merciful presence; the infinite abyss and closed sea of the Divine Nature hath an outlet and becomes a river of water of life. And as the ancient name of that Temple was the tent of meeting, the place where Israel and God, in symbolical and ceremonial form, met together, so in inmost reality in Christ's nature, Manhood and Divinity cohere and unite; and in Him all of us the weak, the sinful, the alien, the rebellious may meet our Father. (2) Still further, notice how we have here, at the very beginning of our Lord's career, His distinct prevision of how it was all going to end. The Shadow of the Cross fell upon His path from the beginning, because the Cross was the purpose for which He came. He knows that He goes up to be the lamb of the offering, and knowing it, He goes. (3) We have here our Lord's claim to be Himself the Agent of His own Resurrection. "I will raise it up at the last day." He is the Lord of the Temple as well as the Temple.
II. We see here, in the next place, a prophetic warning of the history of the men to whom He was speaking. Christ's death having realised all which Temple worship symbolised, that which was the shadow was put away when the substance appeared. The destroyed Temple disappears, and out of the dust and smoke of the vanishing ruins, there rises, beautiful and serene, though incomplete and fragmentary and defaced with many a stain, the fairer reality, the Church of the living Christ.
III. We have here a foreshadowing of our Lord's world-wide work as the restorer of man's destructions. If you will put yourselves in His hands and trust yourselves to Him, He will take away all your incompleteness, and will make you, body, soul, and spirit, temples of the Lord God; as far above the loftiest beauty and whitest sanctity of any Christian character here on earth as is the "building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," above "the earthly house of this tabernacle."
A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth,April 20th, 1886.
References: John 2:19. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 46; J. Keble, Sermons from Easter to Ascension Day,p. 54.John 2:19-22. D. Fraser, Metaphors of the Gospels,p. 257. John 2:21. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 403; Homilist,3rd series, vol. v., p. 286. John 2:23. C. W. Furse, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 32 1 John 2:23-25. T. Hammond, Ibid.,vol. xiii., p. 165.John 2:24. Homiletic. Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 424.John 2:24; John 2:25. G. T. Coster, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvi., p. 116; A. F. Muir, Ibid.,vol. xvii., p. 365.