Mark 11:15-16

IN THE COURT OF THE GENTILES

‘And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple.’

Mark 11:15

The place where the market was held was not actually the Temple, properly so called. 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. It may have been on purpose to show their contempt for the Gentiles that the Jews allowed the traffic which Christ interrupted.

I. The true cause of our Redeemer’s interference.—It was not as a simple man, 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 resolve on the part of the Jews of considering themselves as God’s peculiar people, to the exclusion of all besides.

II. Neither Jew nor Greek.—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.

III. God’s purpose towards the Gentiles.—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.

Rev. Canon Melvill.