A House of Prayer for All Nations

As I begin to write this entry it's about 5:15 on Saturday evening here in Jerusalem, and the Muslim call to prayer has just begun sounding over loudspeakers throughout the city.  Yesterday I was walking near my hotel when that call began to sound, and suddenly a Muslim man who was walking just ahead of me stopped, unrolled a prayer mat on the sidewalk, and dropped to his knees, facing toward Mecca and bowing repeatedly as he prayed.  Earlier this morning our group returned to Western Wall of the Temple Mount where we had been a few days earlier, only this time it was much different, because this time it was the Jewish Sabbath and literally hundreds of devout Jews were gathered there to pray, sing and remember. 
(see photo)

Jewish faithful praying at Western Wall on Sabbath

As they prayed, many of them moved, too -- some bobbing forward and backward, some side to side, and a few moving their arms and hands in repetitive motions.  At its best the Temple Mount is a place of prayer, a place where people of all backgrounds can come and bow in humble worship.  That was God's design from the founding of the Temple hundreds of years before Jesus, as we're reminded in Isaiah 56:7, "...my house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples."  Unfortunately, like many of us today, God's people forgot that central purpose and, as a result, God allowed the first Temple to be destroyed in 586 B.C.

Six-hundred years later, Jesus felt compelled to remind God's people once more of what they seemed to have forgotten yet again, as he saw what was happening in the Temple.  He saw the money changers charging unfair exchange rates to those who needed to convert their local currency into the proper coinage for the Temple tax.  He saw those conducting business in the Court of the Gentiles (non-Jews), which surrounded the central area of the Temple where only Jews were allowed, in such a way that it created an unnecessary distraction for the Gentiles who had come to worship God.

So, when he entered the Temple early in his last week, he took matters into his own hands, driving out the merchants and turning over the tables of the money changers as he shouted, "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations'?  But you have made it a den of robbers!"

This morning, after visiting the Western Wall, we again walked past the ruins of the ancient Temple where archaeologists have uncovered a series of four stone cubicles (see photo below) where, from all indications, merchants and money changers of Jesus' day would conduct their business. 

Stone cubicles in Temple ruins where merchant and money changers used to conduct business

Later, as we walked through a crowded market area nearby, I couldn't help but notice a small shop housed in a stone alcove about the size of those I had seen in the Temple ruins.  Above the entrance to the shop was a sign that read, "MONEY CHANGER" (see photo), and I thought to myself, "Is this what it was like back then?"

Stone cubicle in present-day money changers shop

Today there is no longer a physical Temple.  It lies in ruins.  Yet 1 Peter 2:5 reminds us that WE are called to be "living stones... built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ."

I guess it raises the question:  Are WE "a house of prayer for all nations"?