Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the

Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest serving at St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston,

West Virginia. Then he went into the temple and began to drive out those who bought and sold in it,

saying to them, it is written, my house is a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.

So notice, this isn't, remember in St. Matthew's Gospel, there was sort of this very structured week, right?

The first day where we had this whole pattern where Jesus was staying in Bethany, then he'd go into Jerusalem, and then he'd come back out, and then he'd go into Jerusalem and come back out, right?

Here this is sort of all one motion. remember what we were saying about how st. Luke

structures his gospel right point A to point B so Jesus rides into town goes straight to

the temple right straight there goes and drives out everybody who's who's buying and selling

I notice he doesn't say anything's buying and selling.

I notice he doesn't say anything about buying and selling for a profit. He doesn't say, wherever St. Matthew's Gospel, we got a little more elaboration.

This is just anybody doing commerce, period.

In the temple.

And he quotes, my house, says, Alsa Prairie says, you've made it, you've made it a den of thieves.

Now this is not just, right, one of the reasons why we've seen St. Luke has an interesting relationship to issues of wealth and poverty, right?

With St. Matthew's gospel, in his account of this,

he tries to make clear that what they were doing was

these individual people were abusing pilgrims, essentially.

Because if you're coming from, you're coming on a three days walking journey to Jerusalem for a

feast like Passover okay you're not going to drag a lamb with you right you're not going to grab a bunch of

your livestock that you're going to sacrifice to try drag it with you and keep stable it for three days

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