The Temple

Mark 11:15-19

Have you ever had to confront the discomfort of finding that something you have thought was true for a very long time might not be as clear-cut as you thought it was? This week as we explore the Passion narrative found in the gospels—the stories surrounding the time when Jesus made his way toward the cross—I have been reading and praying over the story in Christ’s Passion where he enters the temple and overturns the tables of the money changers and sellers of doves and other animals folks needed in order to make their sacrifices.

I had a pretty solid idea of how I perceived that story. I was pretty confident that this was a story about Jesus fighting against corruption in the temple and the monetization of religious practice. That makes a lot of sense! Jesus cries out in the John version of this story, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

But now I am reconsidering what I had thought, thanks to a book we are studying together during Lent. The book I am reading through for Lent this year is written by a professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University named Dr. Amy Jill-Levine (she likes to be called AJ!) called “Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week.”

AJ’s scholarly perspective on this story of Jesus overturning tables in the temple has shaken loose a lot of assumptions I had about this story. She names in this book a lot of the conventional wisdom about this story that already exists, that this is a story about corruption in the temple, or a story about inhospitality to Gentiles, or that the money changers and vendors were cheating and exploiting the poor. And she raises some pretty valid points that poke holes in that conventional wisdom.

By the way, it isn’t too late to join our book study! We meet on Tuesday nights at 7:30pm during Lent and you can sign up by clicking the button!

For most folks, the recollection of this story involves a righteously angry Jesus flipping over tables or taking a whip to money changers and vendors in the Temple in Jerusalem. A really popular way of interpreting this is to assume that the selling of animals to be sacrified, or the exchange of currency into the Tyrian coins used by the vendors was somehow exploitative or corrupt.

This is how I have interpreted what happens here as I have encountered this story year after year during Holy Week.

But that might not be altogether true. For one thing, Jesus’ parents when he was a child did this exact same practice—purchasing a dove for sacrifice at the temple at Jesus’ dedication. There isn’t a lot of scholarly consensus that this was exploitative at all—but simply an easier way to have an animal to sacrifice at the temple instead of making a journey full of risks with an animal to sacrifice that might get stolen, or eaten, or die on the way from wherever one was in Judea on their way to Jerusalem.

It wasn’t really a corruption to sell animals for sacrifice as much as it was a convenience for all of the pilgrims to have facilitated for them a way to make a sacrifice to the temple.

Somehow that feels less satisfying, and I think that might be a really important thing to reflect on. Because aren’t we all, these days, looking for something or someone to fight? An enemy to cry out against? A conspiracy to unravel? Don’t we want Jesus to be the crusader against corruption just like people in Jesus’ time wanted Jesus to be a military leader who would overthrow the yoke of Roman oppression?

There is no doubt that Jesus was angry, but what is maybe less clear is where Jesus’ anger was directed. Maybe he wasn’t as angry at the money changing or selling of animals to sacrifice as he was at the state of faith in his community. Maybe after years of healing so many who were sick and encountering so many who were starving for a real connection to their faith, being in the temple, the primary site where one’s faith was lived out, a place of pilgrimage, a holy place, Jesus got tired with how casual everything felt.

Maybe things were a little too insipid, a little too mild-mannered, a little too casual in the Temple when the world around it was so full of suffering, poverty, and despair. The Temple should have been a place for people to go who were seeking out holiness in their lives. But for all Jesus could tell, people were flocking to rabbis like himself and John the Baptist, rather than the priesthood (their positions only enabled by the consent of the occupying Roman Empire) of the Temple.

Should the temple be God’s house rather than a place where people performed empty gestures with their sacrifices and helped the Temple cut a profit off of money changing? Perhaps more of the Temple’s money was going toward enriching its own institutional presence rather than feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, visiting the imprisoned and offering drink to the thirsty.

And in all of this, I wonder if that feels in any way familiar to those of us who call ourselves Christian today when we see our churches more concerned about institutional survival than the plight of the poor who, in many cases, are sleeping on their doorsteps night after night?