In John's Gospel, he recounts a time when Jesus noticed something that was terribly wrong and decided to take action. Jesus discovered that traders and money changers were using the temple grounds for personal profit, selling oxen and sheep and pigeons to temple-goers who needed animals for sacrifices. So, Jesus got busy:
And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, "Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade." (John 2:15-16 ESV)
John then adds a postscript, a statement that tied Jesus' action to the ancient Jewish scriptures:
His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me," (John 2:17)
What do you think this means? How would you paraphrase or re-state the sentence, "Zeal for your house will consume me"?
If you had asked me this recently, I might have said something like this: "Passion, love, and concern for God's temple will overwhelm me and drive me to action."
This morning I read this account from a translation I have rarely used, the Easy-to-Read Version (ERV). The ERV isn't a translation typically recommended for serious Bible study, but I'm finding that its fresh and simple expressions make me hear the Bible with ears that are awake—and that is a crucial part of all fruitful Bible study, right?
(Someone recently left a copy of a little booklet called The Life and Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth on one of the book displays I service as a rep for Choice Books. This booklet uses the ERV. It is a compilation of passages from all four Gospels, arranged roughly chronologically, covering most of the content of the Gospels but avoiding duplicate tellings of the same events. It is published and distributed for free by the Bible League International, through an initiative called PlusNothing. I don't know much about this project, but you can go here to learn more or request free copies.)
Back to John 2. Here's how the ERV translates this OT quote:
My strong devotion to your Temple will destroy me.
Woah! Destroy?
Well, yes, the English word consume can mean that, but typically when we use the word to refer to humans, we use it metaphorically. (Thankfully!) Did the disciples, and the Gospel writer John, mean something more literal?
The Greek word that is used here, both in John's Gospel and in the LXX (Septuagint) text of Psalm 69, is κατεσθίω, a word that in a non-metaphorical sense means to eat or devour something. In the NT it is used of birds devouring seeds, the apostle John eating a scroll, and a dragon hoping to eat a child. Less literally, it is used of fire devouring people, the prodigal son devouring his father's possessions, and—perhaps in closest parallel to our current text—of religious hypocrites devouring the houses of widows (Mark 12:40; Luke 20:47; cf. 2 Cor. 11:20; Gal.5:15). The image is of being eaten alive, as if by a wild animal.
Since context matters, I looked back to the OT source for this quote. It comes from Psalm 69. Here it is, in context:
1 Save me, O God!
For the waters have come up to my neck...
4 More in number than the hairs of my head
are those who hate me without cause...6 Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me,
O Lord God of hosts;
let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me,
O God of Israel.
7 For it is for your sake that I have borne reproach,
that dishonor has covered my face.
8 I have become a stranger to my brothers,
an alien to my mother's sons.9 For zeal for your house has consumed me,
and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.
10 When I wept and humbled my soul with fasting,
it became my reproach.
11 When I made sackcloth my clothing,
I became a byword to them...15 Let not the flood sweep over me,
or the deep swallow me up,
or the pit close its mouth over me...19 You know my reproach,
and my shame and my dishonor;
my foes are all known to you.
20 Reproaches have broken my heart,
so that I am in despair.
I looked for pity, but there was none,
and for comforters, but I found none.
21 They gave me poison for food,
and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.
In this text, the psalmist is in up to his neck. He is surrounded by enemies who are about to send him to the grave. They are already mocking him and covering him with shame.
And why? All because he has been sticking up for God. It's because he has been identifying himself with God and defending God's name and temple that he is facing all this opposition. If he had happily went along with those who showed no respect for God, he would have been left in peace. But he couldn't do that, because he was utterly devoted to God.
Therefore, "the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me." That is, the attacks that the wicked aimed at God landed on him. Or, as the parallel line says, "zeal for your house has consumed me."
So, who or what consumed the psalmist? Was it zeal, or was it God's enemies? Both, really. Most directly, the psalmist is consumed by zeal. But his main point is that this zeal is leading to his destruction. Or, as the ERV puts it here in this psalm, "My strong devotion to your Temple is destroying me. Those who insult you are also insulting me."
Perhaps the best explanation is that the psalmist is making a pun; he is using a term with a double meaning, intending us to be aware of both. And until I read the ERV, I had missed the pun. (I don't know Hebrew, but a glance at a Hebrew concordance suggests the pun would have worked in that language, too.)
So yes, I think the ERV communicates something important here. Though it loses the imagery of being eaten by something, it clarifies that the subject (Jesus, or the psalmist) is not merely being overwhelmed by passion; rather, his very life is in danger.
In addition, notice that John changes the tense of the verb when he quotes the psalm—in the ESV, for example, the psalmist says "has consumed" (past tense) but John quotes it as "will consume" (future tense). (The tense forms are also different in Greek.) This switch means John may be pointing ahead, rather than referring to something Jesus experienced in the present as he cleansed the temple.
These observations open a new window onto what John was thinking as he added this quote at this point in his Gospel account.
Why would Jesus ultimately be destroyed? The primary reason was because he claimed to have a divine identity and authority that the Jewish religious leaders weren't willing to acknowledge. And it was the way he expressed that authority publicly, by doing things like cleansing God's temple, that made his claims insufferable to these leaders. Zeal for God's temple destroyed him.
After coming to this interpretation, I checked some commentaries. Craig Keener puts it like this:
The psalmist's zeal for God's house... led to his suffering, and thus provides a model for Jesus' zeal. As this zeal "consumed" the psalmist, so Jesus would be "consumed"—bring life to others by his death. (Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, Vol. 1, p. 528)
Not all commentators agree, but this is clearly a respected reading. Here is D. A. Carson:
John detects in the experiences of David a prophetic paradigm that anticipates what must take place in the life of "great David's greater Son." That explains why the words in 2:17... change the tense to the future... For John, the manner by which Jesus will be "consumed" is doubtless his death. If his disciples remembered these words at the time, they probably focused on the zeal, not on the manner of the "consumption." Only later would they detect in these words a reference to his death (cf. 2:22). (Carson, The Gospel According to John, p. 180)
Truly, zeal for God's house destroyed Jesus.
This, of course, is the path that we are also invited to walk. Because of our devotion to God, we take up our crosses and follow after Jesus, sharing in his shame and suffering. Zeal for God's house very well may destroy us, too.
But the resurrection! "His heart beats." And speaking of destroying things, don't forget this: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" (1 Cor.15:26).
When I discussed these John 2 translation insights with my wife, she remembered what she had just read in a Philip Yancey book, about Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia community in rural Georgia, who aimed to use the weapons of love and peace in the face of KKK attacks. Reaching for her reading journal, she quoted the following passage from Phillip Yancey:
Christians sometimes describe their faith as a force that runs counter to culture. I wonder if we have it backwards. Perhaps the city of God is the culture and the city of this world the counterculture. Perhaps Jesus the revolutionary was actually setting out a normal pattern for life on this planet as revealed by its Designer. That he appears radical and got murdered for his beliefs may say more about us than about him. (Yancey, Rumors of Another World, p. 237)
May we have courage to follow in his steps.
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