Look:
I. At the place where the market was held. It is called a temple. But you are not to think that it was actually a temple, properly so called; this would be to do the Jews great injustice. They were wonderfully scrupulous about their temple, and would never have actually held a market in any place which they themselves accounted sacred. It was in the outer court the court of the Gentiles that the sheep and oxen and doves were sold, and the money-changers had their tables. As the Jews did not regard this court as having any legal sanctity, they permitted it to be used as a market, the temple of those who came thither to worship.
II. There is too much reason for supposing that it was on purpose to show their contempt for the Gentiles, that the Jews allowed the traffic which Christ interrupted. And here, as we believe, you may find the true cause of our Redeemer's interference. It was not as a simple man, acting under the passions and upon the principles of men, but it was exclusively as a prophet and a teacher sent from God to inculcate great truths, that Jesus drove out the buyers and sellers. When Christ entered the court of the Gentiles, and found, in place of the solemnity which should have pervaded a scene dedicated to worship, all the noise and tumult of a market, He had before Him the most striking exhibition of that vain resolve on the part of His countrymen, and which His Apostles strove in vain to counteract, the resolve of considering themselves as God's peculiar people, to the exclusion of all besides; and the refusing to unite themselves with converts from heathenism in the formation of one visible Church. Christ declared, as emphatically as He could have done in words, that the place where the strangers worshipped was to be accounted as sacred as that in which the Israelites assembled, and that what would have been held as a profanation of the one, was to be held a profanation of the other. To ourselves, at all events, this is manifestly the import of the symbolical action; it is prophetic of God's gracious purposes towards the Gentiles. It was our church, if we may so express it, for it was the church of the Gentiles, within whose confines the oxen were stabled, and the money-changers plied their traffic. They were our rights which the Redeemer vindicated, our privileges which He asserted when He made a scourge of small cords and said, "Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations a house of prayer? but ye have made the court of the Gentiles a den of thieves."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1,589.
References: Mark 11:15-17. C. C. Bartholomew, Sermons Chiefly Practical,p. 387; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 181.Mark 11:20. H. Griffith, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., pp. 264, 281, 299. Mark 11:20-26. H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man,p. 240. Mark 11:20-33. W. Hanna, Our Lord's Life on Earth,p. 382.Mark 11:22. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxiv., No. 1444; vol. vi., No. 328; J. Aldis, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvi., p. 312; W. F. Hook, Sermons on the Miracles,vol. ii., p. 211; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. viii., p. 98; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 67. Mark 11:22-24. A. Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer,p. 86. Mark 11:22-24. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 281.Mark 11:24. A. Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer,p. 78; T. G. Bonney, Church of England Pulpit,vol. v., p. 257. Mark 11:25. A. Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer,p. 102; J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,10th series, p. 149.