This is a story and a teaching about one of the oldest religious ideas there is, which is that something has to be killed or handed over before God will deal with you. Almost every ancient faith practiced some version of it, and softer versions of it are still with us, in the feeling that you owe God a payment, or that a person who has done wrong has to suffer a while before mercy is allowed to reach them.
Jesus answered that idea with a single sentence, taken out of an old prophet, and he said it on two different days in two different arguments. Both times he was standing between a person and somebody who wanted that person condemned.
So let us look at both days, and then at what he did with the holy room itself, straight from the scriptures.
The first day: a dinner nobody approved of
Jesus was eating at a table with tax collectors. A tax collector worked for Rome, collecting money from his own neighbors and keeping a share, so most people counted him a traitor and a thief at once. Other men the religious teachers called sinners were at that table too.
The Pharisees were watching from outside. They were a strict religious movement, careful men who worked hard at keeping the law of Moses exactly right. They asked his students why their teacher would eat with people like that.
Jesus heard it, and he answered them with a line those men had read all their lives.
But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.Matthew 9:13
He was quoting Hosea, a prophet who had lived seven hundred years before, up in the northern kingdom of Israel. Hosea was not alone in it either. Samuel told King Saul that obeying God is better than sacrifice. Isaiah wrote that God took no delight in the blood of bulls. Micah wrote that what God asks of a person is to do justly and love mercy and walk humbly.
The second day: hungry men in a grain field
Some time later Jesus and his students were walking through a field of standing grain on the sabbath, the seventh day of the week, the day set apart for rest. They were hungry, so as they walked they pulled the heads off the stalks, rubbed them in their hands, and ate.
The Pharisees saw it and told them to stop. Not on this day.
Before Jesus repeated his line, he said something larger.
But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple. But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.Matthew 12:6-7
Greater than the temple, and then the same seven words again.
A scribe says it, and Jesus blesses him
Later, in Jerusalem, a scribe came to Jesus with a question. A scribe was a Jewish scholar of the law, a man who had spent his whole life inside the tradition, copying it and teaching it.
He asked which commandment was first of all. Jesus told him: love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Then the scribe answered him back.
And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.Mark 12:33-34
The scribe says that love outranks every burnt offering, standing in the temple courts, in front of a crowd. Jesus tells him he is not far from the kingdom of God. Not the offering. The love.
What he did at the altar
Jesus sent people to the altar. He healed a man of leprosy and told him to go show himself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded. He taught in the temple courts nearly every day of his last week. He called that place his Father’s house, and his friends went on praying there for years after he was gone.
And in the Sermon on the Mount he told the crowd what to do when they were standing at that altar with the gift already in their hands.
Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.Matthew 5:23-24
Set the gift down. Walk out. Go find the person and make peace. Then come back.
Even inside the system, the person outranked the offering.
The room moved
Then Jesus did something stranger still.
John tells the story of Jesus driving the traders and the money changers out of the temple courts. For that place John uses the Greek word hieron. It means the whole temple grounds, the courtyards and porches and the open market where the animals were sold.
The men there asked him what sign he could show them for doing such a thing.
Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body.John 2:19-21
Right there John changes his word. Not hieron anymore. He writes naos, which means the inner sanctuary, the small holy room at the center where God was said to dwell. Then John stops the story and tells you plainly what Jesus meant by it. He spoke of the temple of his body.
The holy room moved. Out of a building, into a person.
The rabbis went the same way
About forty years after Jesus, in the year 70, Roman soldiers burned the temple to the ground. The rabbis, the Jewish teachers who carried the faith forward after that, tell a story about the days right after.
A teacher named Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the leading rabbis of that generation, walked past the ruins with a student of his. The student broke down crying and said the place where the sins of the people were forgiven was gone, and asked what they were supposed to do now.
The old rabbi told him not to grieve, because they had an atonement like it still. Acts of loving-kindness, he said. And to prove it he quoted a verse.
He quoted Hosea. The same line Jesus had quoted twice.
The temple was gone and the sacrifices had stopped. They never started again.
What some Christians are taught to wait for
Some Christians today are taught to expect a rebuilt temple with a working altar. Lambs again. Blood again.
Here is the fact.
the push to build one right now comes from a very small minority. Israel’s Chief Rabbinate forbids Jews from setting foot on that platform at all, out of reverence for how holy the ground is. So “the Jews are trying to rebuild it” is simply not true. And a great deal of the money and the enthusiasm has come from Christians.
Which means the question belongs to us. We have no business telling Jewish people what to hope for. We have every business asking Christians what Jesus said.
And there is our own record to say out loud. Christians once marched armies across the world and took that city by force, with his words sitting in our own book, and we went anyway.
If you were taught this, you are not foolish
If you grew up waiting for that altar, you did not invent it. Somebody taught it to you, and it was probably somebody who loved you. It may have been printed in the small notes under the verse, in the Bible you were handed as a child, and you trusted that page the way a child should trust a page.
That is not stupidity. That is faithfulness. You were loyal to your teachers, and they were loyal to theirs. Nobody in that chain was a villain. The chain just drifted.
The account is closed
Paul, the traveling teacher who wrote a good part of the New Testament, wrote a letter to a small church at Colossae, and in it he reached for a money word on purpose.
Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.Colossians 2:14
The word behind “handwriting” is cheirographon. It was an ordinary business word in the Greek of that day. It meant a handwritten note of debt, an IOU, signed by your own hand and held by whoever you owed. That is what Paul says was nailed to the cross. Not a rule book. A bill.
Paul does not say the amount was lowered or the deadline moved. He says the writing was blotted off the page, the note was carried away, and what was left of it was nailed up in public where anyone walking by could see there was nothing on it.
The killing was never what God wanted. Hosea said so seven hundred years early. A scribe said so in the temple courts and Jesus blessed him for it. Then Jesus settled the account himself, with mercy, and moved the holy room into a body so that nobody would ever have to travel to find God again.
To rebuild that altar is to ask for a settled account to be reopened.
He said it twice. Mercy, not sacrifice. He never said it once the other way round.
Come walk with us. We are New Testament Only, and this is what we do all week, slow and plain walks back through his own words, with the hard parts left in. It is free. Put your name in at newtestamentonly.com and the next one will find you.