Making sense of injustice
How are we supposed to read the confrontational Jesus?
- Jesus walks into synagogues and heals people on the Sabbath.
- He rides a donkey into Jerusalem like the Son of David.
- Then heads to the Temple to flip tables and drive out the payday lenders.
These actions don’t seem like the moves a Prince of Peace would make. They seem directly confrontational. Insolent and rude. Uppity.
How do Christians deal with this? Here are four common responses to the confrontational Jesus.
1. The Cheerleader
Some love a confrontational Jesus because he’s taking on an authority they don’t want to like. Jesus takes on “the bad guys” (and we want to take them on too).
This is where anti-semitism and replacement theology arises. Some in this group don’t see Jesus as confronting power in general, but in specific. They like a confrontational Jesus because he is THEIR warrior and they enjoy watching him beat up the bad guys.
Jesus also seems to serve as cover for their desire to join in.
2. The Technocrat
Some get very technical with the confrontational Jesus. These are the historical-critical set.
We want to know the very specific historicity of Jesus’s context so that we can speak to that particular moment, and ultimately leave it there. So we might argue That was then. We have clearly progressed beyond that time.
This conveniently allows us to only translate these moments into a present context.
3. The Theorist
Some see everything through metaphor and universalism.
Jesus must be confrontational for an abstract purpose, so we often think of the ways that Jesus reflects a generic human condition that we must all figure out how to transcend.
This makes it easy to explain why Jesus should never actually confront the leadership because they aren’t actually bad because no person is bad. Therefore, Jesus must not actually be confronting them because that would make him bad.
This often makes it hard to even read the words of Jesus because he is frequently confrontational. And the desire to make a universal pronouncement about Jesus being “good” doesn’t like the idea that he could be “bad”.
4. The Activist
Some love the vision of the confrontational Jesus because he takes on the powerful on behalf of the weak. These are often referred to as social justice Christians.
Understanding the nature of Jesus is of lesser importance to these than the gospel he proclaimed. Unlike the Cheerleader, these don’t want to beat up bad guys for Team Jesus (though that impulse may be there). It is more that they don’t stress over inconsistency when there is injustice to transform.
So the problem is the power itself rather than the people who wield it.
Jesus Is Confrontational
Regardless of how you respond intuitively to the confrontational side of Jesus, we can neither avoid it nor pretend that it isn’t connected to his mission.
We must contend with the fact that this is not merely abstract consistency or the context-dependency of Jesus in the most general sense. Extrapolating the nature of Jesus only from this moment is like evaluating a person entirely by how frustrated they got in the checkout line. It is we who become small and petty.
And yet, these moments of confrontation possess a valuable insight. This is the way Jesus directly approaches his mission.
So what we see in Holy Week at the Temple, confronting its leaders, is that he comes in saying that God is doing this amazing thing and it is fundamentally about equality and justice. And the one thing we must eliminate is inequality and injustice. And if you are choosing the side of inequality and injustice, you are choosing to side against God.
Think of it this way.
It is one thing to critique polluters who didn’t really know they were killing the planet. And even as they started collecting data in the 1960s and ‘70s, they continued to exploit the planet. This is the sin of our ancestors.
But it’s different now. Since 1990, we’ve known the degree to which human action affects the environment. So those who now know and yet still do nothing to change the systems they’ve inherited are committing a different and also serious sin.
We aren’t victims of the sin of our ancestors. And yet we frequently choose to be sinners by maintaining unjust systems. This is the kind of sin Jesus is condemning the leaders for. They know they are obstructing the way of God.
The Heart of Confrontation
In this sense, it is neither inconsistent, nor problematic that Jesus would confront the Temple authorities.
- Jesus consistently communicates a vision of God’s love and mercy that brings out the love and mercy in the masses.
- He confronts those who willfully obstruct the equality and justice of God. Some of whom change their hearts.
- The mission is always central—it is never personal (the people themselves aren’t “bad”, but the sin of maintaining unjust systems makes them unworthy of trust).
And perhaps most importantly, Jesus does not confront the authorities as a vehicle for his own crucifixion. This isn’t just bad theology, but the exact excuse white supremacists used to coverup the 1965 murder of James Reeb in Selma, Alabama. It is crazy how easily we excuse murder.
Jesus confronted injustice because it is not just. Because it is God’s purpose that we make a just world. And people who feared the truth killed him. It doesn’t require any greater explanation than that.