The Prophet's Whip of Cords

He made the whip himself (John 2:15). Therefore his act of enraged violence was premeditated, not an impulsive outburst. He made a plan and he carried it out. Seizing tables piled with coins he tossed them on their sides. An uproar of protesting and excited voices was heard amid crashes of heavy furniture on stone, tinkling of rolling coins, and the swish and crack of his whip. Sheep bleating, oxen lowing drowned out the muted sounds of the frightened pigeons.

Whether or not the whip bit deep into the flesh of human shoulders we do not know, though I suspect it lashed down on people as well as on animals. Some translations read that he turned over the stools of the pigeon sellers, and as likely as not he unseated some by doing so. They would lie sprawling as the panicked animals stumbled over them.

The miracle is that protests were as feeble as they were vain. He would be sweating and panting with exertion, and there would be a calm purposefulness in his eyes that people could not face. Sheep, oxen, pigeons and people (who would snatch up whatever they had time to) were forced amin the hubbub through the gates.

Nor having done so much did he stop short. Each unsuspecting merchant arriving with more animals would be startled to find his way barred and a whip gripped in the menacing fist of the man with
the unflinching gaze (Mark 11:16).

His controls of the crowd was by a moral force, forged by his total lack of ambivalence and the money changers' uneasy consciences. He was expressing what the common people deep within their hearts had known for years.

What was it about the traffic in coins and animals that offended him so deeply? "A house of prayer" he had called it, not a place of teaching nor yet a place of sacrifice. (He himself was to be the sacrifice.) What was in his mind?

[John White, The Golden Cow]