John 2:13-17 NASB95
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. [14] And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves and the money changers seated at their tables. [15] And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables; [16] and to those who were selling the doves He said, “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business.” [17] His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal FOR YOUR HOUSE WILL CONSUME ME.”
Jesus called the temple “My Father’s house” because, to the Jewish people, the temple was where God and man met. Jesus came with a zeal for the meeting place between God and man that ended up consuming Him at the cross. In the last verse of John chapter 1, Jesus revealed that He would be the open heaven between God and mankind. Jesus came to be the meeting place between God and us. At the Passover festival, people were bringing oxen and, sheep, and doves (pigeons – offered by the poor) to be sacrificed to God as their expression of worship, but the corrupt officials were rejecting all their sacrificial animals as too blemished and were selling more perfect offerings to the people. In cleansing the temple, Jesus was prophetically and symbolically doing what he came to do, which was to create in His person the perfect place of intimacy and worship as a free gift to humanity. Our intimacy with God and our worship of God has nothing to do with any sacrificial performance we can offer but is found in the person of Christ as a gift of grace. “For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” 1 Timothy 2:5. Jesus is our open heaven. He is our fellowship with God. We have been baptized into (immersed in) His relationship with the Father by the Holy Spirit. Because of our union with Christ, we have communion (His communion) with God. In our weakness, our worship before the Father is totally pleasing because it is joined to and assumed by Jesus’s perfect worship offered as ours.