Most of us have a mental picture of Jesus as being a loving, open, and even-tempered person (well God in human flesh), which always makes it a bit surprising when we get to a passage such as this one where instead we read of an angry Jesus. The temple was the seat of the religious life of the Jewish people at this point in time. People would make pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the three high holy days: Passover, Pentecost, and Sukkot, and when they were in the holy city, they would offer sacrifices of thanksgiving, for atonement of their sins, and sometimes simply as a way of acknowledging the awesome power of God. This practice was part of the Law given by God to Moses; it was how people were supposed to worship.
Yet somewhere along the way, a business formed in the temple where people would exchange their money for “holy currency” and purchase the animals that would be offered as sacrifices, all within the outermost court of the temple: the Court of the Gentiles. The problem with this practice was multifold, and I would argue that Jesus’ chief issue with it was that it had turned the Court of Gentiles away from its initial purpose which was to be a place where God-fearing Gentiles could come as close to the presence of the Lord as possible to pray. The other issues were that the money changers charged exorbitant rates to change the funds, which could be argued as violating God’s command to not make people pay interest on loans, and that the sacrifices offered in the temple were to have been animals that the people themselves raised, making that offering dearer to lose an animal that they had cared for since birth.
By closing off the Court of the Gentiles through the obstruction of this “den of robbers,” the Gentiles lost their ability to approach God in a way that was understandable for the Jewish people, and for the Israelites of this time, it was most likely intentional, as the majority of those Gentiles would have been Roman occupiers. The money-changers and animal-sellers were allowing their political agenda (and their desire to thrive economically) to hinder the chance that people would come to know God.