Read John 2:13-22 with your family.

In the Gospel of John, everyone knew that Jesus was the Messiah from the very start. The other Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke kept Jesus’ identity a secret until almost the end.

Since everyone knew who Jesus was supposed to be, they didn’t listen well to what he said. They wanted to take things ‘literally’, which means only hearing the words and thinking that is the whole message. However, Jesus wants people to understand his words had more meaning than just the surface understanding. He wanted to talk about God’s world with word pictures so people would use their imaginations to learn more about how wonderful God really was.

When Jesus said he would ‘raise the Temple again in three days’, he did not mean a whole new building would poof into existence after three days. He was trying to get people to understand that a building like the Temple was not the only place to worship God. That Jesus would rise on Easter morning, three days after he was killed, and we were to celebrate how good God was with Jesus anywhere, not just one building, because Jesus was the “new Temple” (he wasn’t meant to be a building, it was just a word picture for a place to talk to God).