Home Missioner Kevin M. Nelson and Rev. Sara E. BaronFirst United Methodist Church of Schenectady603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305http://fumcschenectady.org/For
us, the primary question is, “Why did Jesus overturn the tables in
the Temple?”  We were both raised with one explanation, and have
come to believe another one entirely!

A
man named Rabbi Hillel was said to live an extraordinarily long life,
born around 110 BCE, about a century before Jesus’ birth, and lived
into Jesus’ early years, around 10-20 CE. His primary rival
in thought was Shammai.  Once, they say, a Gentile approached Hillel
and Shammai and challenged them to explain the Torah to him while he
stood on one foot. Shammai dismissed the man. Hillel accepted the
question but gently chastised the man by responding, “What is
hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole of the
Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”¹
If this brings to
mind anything Jesus said, I don’t think it is a coincidence.  

The
Gospel of Mark records an episode that rings similar to that
experienced by Shammai and Hillel. This happens during the testing of
Jesus’ teachings and authority in the days that followed the Temple
episode that my mother-in-law, Joan, read a few minutes ago. In it,
Jesus was asked which commandment is the greatest. Jesus answered
that the Shema ( this
morning’s Deuteronomy passage—love God with all your heart, soul,
mind and strength) is the
greatest, and loving our neighbor as ourselves
(this morning’s Leviticus passage read by my mother, Elizabeth)
is the second greatest.

These
commands are at the heart of how Jesus understood God’s nature; one
of love, justice and compassion, and they are central to the
individual and collective ways in which we are to live out our lives.
They are also going to be central to why Jesus was at the Temple on
the last Monday of his life. In order to explain this, let us provide
some more context.

Jesus
lived from around 4 BCE to around 30 CE.  He was raised in Galilee,
an area that had been re-colonized by faithful Jews and was an
impoverished backwater of the Roman Empire.  In particular, he grew
up in Nazareth, a tiny village that was 4 miles from the CITY of
Sepphoris.  Sepphoris had been part of a revolt against the Roman
Empire in 4 BCE, in response to the death of Herod who had brutally
oppressed everyone under his reign.  In response, the Empire had sent
in legions of troops to reconquer the city, leveling much of it, and
selling those who had led the revolt into slavery.²

Did
you hear that?  Approximately the year Jesus was born, the city under
whose shadow he was raised, was leveled by the Empire.  It is even
likely that his father’s work was in rebuilding the city.  The
revolt, and its aftermath, would have infiltrated his consciousness
in ways similar to kids born in 2001 in New York City.

The
Roman Empire was an empire in all of the traditional ways that
empires are empires.  It existed to extract wealth from the people it
conquered in order to give the wealth to powerful elites.  In his
book, “Jesus:
Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary,” which
was chosen by the Intersectional Justice Committee for the January
book discussion, Marcus
Borg refers to the Roman Empire as a preindustrial agricultural
domination system.  Domination systems emerged about 5000 years ago
when humans figured out how to produce metal and domesticate animals
(at roughly the same time).  Domesticating animals enabled larger
scale agriculture and thus agricultural surplus and larger scale
societies. Surplus also meant enabling the existence of wealth,
which, when combined with larger societies, led to motivation for
domination, at a larger scale.³

Preindustrial
agricultural domination looked something like devising systems
through which taxation enabled wealth to flow upward, thus causing
people to live on the edge of subsistence and not just poverty, but
indentured servitude and slavery. In other words, virtually everyone
who wasn’t part of the elite, was a peasant. Agriculture, and thus
land, was a family’s primary source of productivity. A bad year for
crops could lead to debt, and in a subsistence world, it was all but
impossible to produce enough to pay off debt
once a family fell into debt. As little as one
bad year for crops could lead to debt, potentially loss of your land
and indentured servitude in which you were working the same land but
now someone else owned it and gained the productivity from the
land and your labor.
As
little as two or three
bad years could lead to loss of land and slavery.⁴

In
the system Jesus lived under, wealth was thus derived from farming
and the wealth flowed up to the ruler and his aristocrats.  In fact,
between ½ and 2/3 of all
production ended up in the hands of the elite 1-2% of the society,
making them VERY wealthy.  They used some of this wealth to maintain
armies in order to keep the wealth, and the role of religion was to
legitimate the concentration of wealth by claiming the ruler as
ruling by Divine will.⁵
Some of this should sound familiar from either history class or the
newspaper. 😉

In
this system, the poor, who comprised at least 90% of the population,
worked very hard and died very young.  Those who survived childhood
lived to an average age of 30.  The production they engaged in
benefited the elites who tended to live to an average age of 70.  
Now, the Roman Empire wasn’t unique at all.  This was exactly the
same domination system that the proto-Israelites had encountered in
Egypt and from which they had experienced God leading them into
freedom. This was also the same domination system that their own
kings had often attempted to implement, although their kings were
kept a bit in check by the prophets CONSTANTLY calling them out.  

This
system was well known, but it stood in marked contrast with the world
as envisioned by God, shared by Moses, articulated by the prophets,
and sought by the people.  The vision laid out in the Torah starts by
giving each family access to their own land to farm.  It is designed
carefully, intended to prevent any system where a group of people
could economically dominate any other people, and THUS intended to
prevent a situation where a peasant class could exist and be
dominated.  The vision of God in the Torah involved each family
having access to land AND being able to reap its benefits.  The
vision of God in the Torah requires making food accessible even to
widows, orphans, and foreigners – the only ones who wouldn’t have
access to land.  The vision of God in the Torah requires sharing 10%
of food production in order to BOTH feed the priests AND feed the
hungry.  The vision of God in the Torah aims to keep society level so
that no one dominates and no one is dominated.  That is the faith of
the Jews.

That
is the faith that the Temple was built to support.  The Temple stood
as a symbol of that faith, as a way to remember that faith, and as a
way to enact that faith.  The Temple stood near but APART from the
King’s palace, with an intention to keep powers separate and
accountable.  

The
Roman Empire preferred to keep local leadership in place when it took
over new areas.  However, it made the leadership accountable to the
Empire and required that the leadership do the work of gathering up
the wealth of the people to “pay its taxes.”  Furthermore, it
replaced “local” leadership as it deemed necessary to maintain
stability and keep the money flowing upward.  To be clear, this means
Rome appointed the high priest, and the appointment lasted only so
long as Rome was pleased with him. From 6 CE to 66 CE, Rome appointed
18 high priests.⁶
The Roman Empire wasn’t stupid.  It knew that the real power in
Israel by the time of Jesus was in the Temple – there hadn’t been a
monarch in centuries.  The power that the Temple derived from its
function and symbolism as the centerpiece of living out God’s vision
for a JUST society was thus co-opted for the sake of the domination
system and its insatiable hunger for greater wealth.

Thus,
the Temple that stood as an emblem and reinforcement of God’s
justice and compassion was co-opted by the preindustrial,
agricultural domination system of the Roman Empire.

The
Temple, meant to function as an equalizer, a seat of prayer, and the
home of the priests who taught about God’s vision was – by the time
of Jesus – being used to extract wealth from the peasants for
benefit of the already wealthy.  Jesus, after his upbringing as a
peasant near the aftermath of a revolt, had a particularly high
awareness of this system and its brokenness.  He was interested in
breaking the PERCIEVED power of the Temple which would decrease (or
break) its usefulness to those in the domination system who would
abuse it. And that brings us to today’s story.

Many
Christians, when they think of the seminal moment in Jesus’ life
and career, probably think of the Resurrection. In contrast, I
understand this
story, the story of the indictment of the Temple, to be the seminal
moment of Jesus’ career.

In
the version we read in Mark, Jesus and his followers enter the Temple
and begin what I would recognize as a disruptive act. They knock over
the tables and throw out the vendors
and the money changers. For most of our lives, we have probably heard
this story in a way similar to a summary provided by biblical scholar
N.T. Wright in his book, Mark
for Everyone.
“Many people have thought that Jesus was simply protesting against
commercialization. On this view, he only intended to clean up the
Temple—to stop all this non-religious activity, and leave it as a
place for pure prayer and worship.”⁷

In
Borg’s book he reminds us that the courtyard of the Temple was 40
acres!  This simple fact gives us reason to question the narrative
we’ve been taught.  To create a notable disruption within a space
that large would require intentionality, a plan, and many people!
Thus, this can’t have been a temper-tantrum response to commercial
activity.  That opens up the question even wider: why did Jesus PLAN
a disruption at the Temple?  

But
first, was this REALLY a disruption? Through Sara’s subversive
women of the Bible sermon series, we’ve been talking about
subversive actions for months, and this is classic subversive
activism 101—staging a disruption. Mark affirms this by sandwiching
this episode in between the two halves of the fig tree story, using
the fig tree as a symbol
for the Temple. In that story, the morning before the Temple
episode, as Jesus and his followers are on their way to the Temple,
Jesus notes that a fig tree has not produced any fruit and curses it,
never mind that figs were out of season.
The NRSV version of the Bible titles the concluding section, “The
Lesson From the Withered Fig Tree.”  In it, when
they pass by that fig tree
the
morning after the Temple disruption,
the tree is already dead.

N.T.
Wright explains, “But Mark makes it clear, by the placing of the
Temple incident within the two halves of the fig tree story, that he
sees Jesus’ actions as, again, a dramatic acted parable of
judgment. This was Jesus’ way of announcing God’s condemnation of
the Temple
itself and all that it had become in the national life of Israel.”
Jesus judges the tree and it dies.  Jesus judges the Temple to kill
its power, in particular its power to dominate.

So,
why did Jesus plan a disruption at the Temple? It was so Jesus could
indict the Temple, knowing that between this action and his Palm
Sunday entrance the day before, it would likely result in his death.
Indeed,
it is within the Temple passage that
the author of
Mark notes for the first time that the chief priests and scribes
decided to kill Jesus and began plotting to this effect. The author
of Mark illustrated Jesus’ plan through the fig tree, but a
contemporaneous audience would also have recognized it through Jesus’
own reported words. “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called
a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den
of robbers.” Marcus Borg helps us to better understand these
references, explaining them as a combination of Isaiah 56:7 (the
Temple as a house of prayer for all nations) and Jeremiah 7:11. The
latter is part of what is called Jeremiah’s “temple sermon,” in
which, according to Borg, Jeremiah “warned that it would be
destroyed unless those who worshipped there began to practice
justice.”  Earlier, the text reads

,
“If you truly amend your ways and doings, if you truly act justly
one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan and the
widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go
after gods to your own hurt, then I [God] will dwell with you in this
place.” (Jeremiah 7:5-7)

Borg
goes on,

Then,
still speaking in the name of God, Jeremiah said, ‘Has this house
[the temple], which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in
your sight?’ The phrase in Hebrew suggests not just thievery, but
robbing with violence. In what sense had the temple become ‘a den
of robbers,’ a cave of violent ones? In Jeremiah, the meaning is
apparent: it was a ‘den of robbers’ precisely because it had
become the center of an oppressive system that did not practice
justice, but exploited the most vulnerable in society. It was an
indictment of the powerful and wealthy elites of his day, centered in
the monarchy and temple. Their everyday injustice made them robbers,
and they thought of the temple as their safe house and place of
security.

Thus,
when Jesus called the temple ‘a den of robbers,’ he was not
referring to the activity of the money changers and sellers of
sacrificial animals. Rather, he indicted the temple authorities as
robbers who collaborated with the robbers at the top of the imperial
domination system. They had made the temple into a den of robbing and
violence. Jesus’ action was not a cleansing of the temple, but an
indictment of the temple. The teaching explains the act. Indeed, it
was the reason for the act.”

This
was why Jesus planned a disruption of the temple.  This is why it was
worth it to him to accept the consequences of having publically
indicted the Temple and its authority.  

We
don’t live in a preindustrial, agricultural domination system
anymore.  Obviously.  Now we live in a post-industrial,
non-agricultural, domination system.  The rules are both different
and the same.  The work of the many is still used to enrich the few,
although we have new ways of blaming the many for not being wealthy
themselves.  Our domination system is dependent on racism, sexism,
transphobia, heteronormativity, xenophobia, and all kinds of other
ways of dehumanizing God’s beloved people.

The
system falls apart when we look at each other, no matter the
differences, and see another human being, a beloved person of God,
worthwhile and worth listening to.  However, it is not just that we
are called to do this individually.  Like Jesus, we need to pay
attention to how our institutions (including faith traditions) are
being systematically used as part of the domination system. Then,
like Jesus, we need to disrupt the system.  It turns out this Temple
cleansing is NOT, as many of us thought, the one counter-example to
an otherwise calm and loving Jesus.  This story is the epitome of
Jesus loving God’s people, it is Jesus loving God’s people enough to
upset the system to give them a chance, even when it would inevitably
lead to his own death.

Today,
we are similarly called to disrupt. It may or may not involve
dramatic
acts
of disruption. However, when we see actions of thievery, of
state-sanctioned robbery, of oppressive political systems
that do not practice justice and
instead
create legal structures for the exploitation of the most vulnerable
in society—we are called to indict the powers that do such things
and to seek ways to disrupt these actions. Look for the ways in which
you can step outside of your normal behaviors in order to dramatize,
shed light on, injustice
and indict the powers behind it. Look for the ways in which you can
step outside of your normal behaviors and activities in order to
advocate for the vulnerable, the marginalized and exploited. Look for
the ways in which you can work collectively and organize in order to
address the systems that marginalize and exploit the vulnerable.
Imagine these actions and others like them. Sit with whatever
discomfort these thoughts may bring. Pray over how you are called to
respond. Then, join with others to do. As Jesus did. Amen.

1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder
accessed
March 14, 2017.

2Marcus
Borg, “Jesus:
Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious
Revolutionary” (USA:
HarperOne, 2006) page 89-93.

3
Borg, 79-80.

4Borg,
79-80.

5Borg
81-82.

6
Borg, 90.

7N.T.
Wright, Mark
for Everyone,
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 151.

Home Missioner Kevin M. Nelson and Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady