Charles Ellicott Commentary John 2:17

"His disciples remembered that it was written, Zeal for thy house shall eat me up." — John 2:17 (ASV)

Was written . . . hath eaten me up.—More literally, is written . . . shall eat me up. The verse is full of interest in many ways. It gives us the thought of the disciples at the time , which could be known only to one of their number.

It shows us what we too seldom realize in reading the New Testament: that the Jewish mind was filled to overflowing with thoughts of the Old Testament.

The child was taught to recite by heart large portions of the Law, Psalms, and Prophets, and these formed the very texture of their minds, ready to pass into conscious thought whenever occasion suggested.

With the exception of the 22nd Psalm, no part of the Old Testament is so frequently referred to in the New Testament as the psalm from which these words are taken (Psalms 69:9). Yet, that psalm could not have been Messianic in its original historical meaning (see, e.g.,John 2:5; John 2:22–25).

This reference to it, then, shows us their method of interpretation.

Every human life is typical. The persecution without reason, the wrong heaped upon the innocent, the appeal to and trust in Jehovah, the song of thanksgiving from him whose parched throat was weary of calling—all this was true of some representative sufferer of earlier days. We may hear in it almost certainly the voice of Jeremiah; but it was true of him because he was a forerunner of the representative Sufferer.

The darker features of the psalm belong to the individual. The Life that sustains in all, and the Light that illumines in all, was even then in the world, though people did not know Him.

The words of Jeremiah are Messianic because his life—like every noble, self-forgetting life that bears the sorrows of others and loves God and humanity—was itself Messianic.

The change of tense, from the past of the Psalmist to the future here, is itself significant. The words were true of the inner burning that consumed the prophet-priest.

They come to the heart as true, with a fuller truth, of Christ’s spirit burning with righteous indignation and cast down by deepest sorrow, yet not shrinking from the painful task, which leaves its mark falling on that face like the shadow of a deeper darkness.

They are to be, in a deeper sense, truer still.