This Week: Lent 3B
Gospel: John 2:13-22
This week’s gospel invites us to return to a familiar story. Often called “the cleansing of the Temple,” we encounter Jesus in a most uncharacteristic posture: throwing over tables and driving people out with a whip. A vision that is more than a little unsettling.
This passage invites us to confront our own vision of Jesus and his views on confrontation. To interrogate a Jesus we call “prince of peace” and who commands us to love even our enemies.
Jesus’s posture is not just confrontational, however. It is alarming and ultimately confusing. People of faith continue to struggle with what to take from the behavior, not just the words and teachings.
Is Jesus advocating violence?
Few people go so far as to suggest advocacy, but some occasionally do. And a few more joke about it. Of course, the story certainly doesn’t seem to support such a conclusion.
Reading it as alluding to livestock dealers being treated like livestock themselves seems like a delicious irony. And makes for a more interesting reading.
Remember that the threat of violence here seems to be specific to John’s version of the story because it includes a whip. Versions in the Synoptic gospels don’t include this detail.
The question of violence actually obscures the more important question of why Jesus is disrupting the commerce in the Temple in the first place.
Civil Disobedience and Temple Commerce
I would never suggest that I am an expert in first-century Hebrew economics, but there is clearly an issue here about Jesus’s disruption of commerce. And that is at the fore of the story: disruption. Jesus condemns the Temple sacrifice scheme and physically slows it down. There are few acts in the gospels that feel so closely aligned with modern acts of civil disobedience as this.
Jesus can’t assume this will end anything. But that is never the first aim of disobedience. The first aim is communication.
Jesus communicates his displeasure with word and with action. While not calling them robbers (or hiders of robbers—that’s other versions), he does say that they are “making my Father’s house a market-place”.
This is about money.
Which is always a troubling part of Jesus’s teaching for most preachers. Jesus talks about money. And we’d almost rather deal with violence.
The other versions of this story take place during Holy Week (as I describe here), which precedes the confrontations with the Temple leaders. Confrontations that deal with authority, property, and money.
Regardless of the version, there is no question that Jesus makes a statement about money in all of them.
Honestly, most of us would rather pretend this is about behavior, authority, or…ice cream. Anything else. Because money is problematic, it reminds us that humanity’s greatest and most predictable idolatry involves loving money. And the modern church is hardly immune.
And worse, we place our survival on keeping people happy and never thinking about what Jesus really thinks of this.
While it is easy enough to snag the safety line of talking about Jesus’s higher purpose, it isn’t terribly satisfying. He compares the Temple building to the Temple as his body. But if we don’t deal with the economics of the Temple defiling the body, we are left offering little of anything of consequence.
Let us name the injustice of the system. Then we might see what it is that Jesus is ultimately freeing us from.