It was this aspect of Jerusalem which one might have expected Jesus to be most greatly influenced by. One of the most famous of the many would-be Messiahs, some years after this, went with a multi- tude of followers to blow his trumpets as the priests had blown their horns at Jericho. Jesus acted on principles directly the opposite of these. He saw the Roman buildings without either admiration or protest. His certainty of the end of all was no less positive than that of Theudas and such rash men, but it only made Him the more calm in His acqui- escence until the providential moment should arrive. That was so sure — that day when the Rome which had glorified the city would destroy it — that the thought of hastening the doom, or of preventing it, never occurred to Him. Yet that very fact embittered and terrified His enemies. They did not, indeed, approve of the rebellious patriots ; but that was because they regarded them as Galilsean bunglers who undertook work whose gravity they did not understand. Had any of tiiem succeeded, Jerusalem would have welcomed him with shouts. But hei'e was a far more serious offence. Macaulay's New Zealander on London Bridge represents to British readers a familiar and a quite legitimate kind of speculation. To Pharisees of Jerusalem such an idea was sheer treason even to think of, far more to discuss in jjublic.
Not less directly did the attitude of Jesus to the Temple draw the nets of death around Him. Like all religious Israelites, He directed His steps to the Temple as to the natural seat and centre of His religious life. From the first it Avas in His Father's house that the Son of God found His appropriate home (Lk 2^). But the pleasantness of that boyish visit yielded in later years to slow and deepening bitterness, as the accepted meaning of the Temple became more and more unmistak- able. The Jews have a legend that in the .sacred rock now covered by the iNIosque of Omar there was inscribed the mystic name of Jehovah, and that Jesus alone of men had been able to discover and to read it. The heart of every Christian understands the unsuspected truth of that legend. Jesus ever went to that Temple as one going to His Father's house.
All the more tragic is the contrast, as it must have come upon Him, between the real and the ideal Temple of the Lord. The priestly families were Sadducees, men in whom the national hope had largely died out, and in whom His acquiescent attitude to Rome would awaken neither anger nor surprise. Indeed, it is probable tliat they mistook His views, and carelessly classed Him among the
other revolutionaries of the time. At least the high priest frankly avowed that it was necessary that He should perish, to avert the Roman anger and revenge. But if it was onlj' by mistake or by pretence that they found this ground of accusation against Jesus, there were other grounds on which they and He stood in plain and deadly opposition. The Sadduca?an priestlj* families were the chief representatives of a spirit of scepticism regarding spiritual things (in reaction from the Pharisaic spirit) which had lapsed into a kind of hard secu- larism, a lax morality, and an unconcealed world- liness which were indifferent alike to tlie glory of worship and to the shame of its degradation. The shadow of Herod had fallen across the Temple and its services. Herod, who at one time had thought of himself posing as Messiah, had built the Temple ; and while the Roman idolater Agrippa had ottered sacrifice there, Herod had sacrificed to Roman gods at Rome. With such a patron at its head, secular life flowed into the Temple unchecked. The courts were made into a market where fraudu- lent bargains were driven Avith country-folk in connexion with the very rites of their religion, and we see how Jesus resented this in the strange out- burst of holy anger with which He drove these merchants forth (Mt 2V^). A large number of synagogues had arisen within the precincts, but there is no record of His visiting them. By pre- ference He chose the streets for preaching in, or He spoke in the open Temple court. In the East, religion tends ever to degenerate into ritual pure and simple, devoid alike of meaning for the intel- lect and of emotion for the heart (W. R. Smith, Ed. Sem. p. 16). Never had this taken place more completely than in the Sadducaean priesthood at Jerusalem then. From the abode of holiness and the centre of truth, He found His Father's house become a den of thieves, and a patent sham of ritual whose performers never dreamed of treating it even as a symbol of realities. It is this that explains that most strange and ominous of records, where Jesus is described as sitting silently in the Temple during long periods of the latest days of His life (Hausrath, ii. 250). What thoughts were passing in His mind then we cannot know, and we hardly dare try to imagine. But one thing is clear. Just as He changed the conception of the Messianic Kingdom from the outward to the inner region, so He did that of the Temple. When the priests poured out the water from great jars at the feast. He cried aloud that out of those who believed on Him would come rivers of living water (Jn 7'*''). And the words of which He was afterwards to be accused, as to the destruction and rebuilding of ' this temple,' were spoken ' of the temple of his body' (2-1).