The Last Week: Monday
Turning the Tables
Mark 11:12-25
Walking up the steps that lead to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is one of the most spiritually powerful experiences I’ve ever had. While there are just ruins and remnants there now, the stones still stand out—the very stones on which Jesus and his disciples would have walked on Monday as they entered the Temple, going up the stairs through the Hulda gate and up another flight of stairs to the platform on which the Temple was built. It had to be one of the most magnificent experiences in the lives of these Galilean disciples. I know it was in mine.
Imagine their surprise, then, when Jesus did not look about with awe but instead marched straight to the portico and without warning started flipping over the tables of the moneychangers. To say the least, this was unexpected—at least for them. Jesus, however, knew exactly what he was doing.
I’ve heard this passage read in many different contexts. One popular interpretation is that Jesus is upset that there are moneychangers in the Temple in the first place—that there must always be a distinct separation between religion and money. I remember in one church I served there was a major blow-up at a council meeting because the missions committee wanted to sell some crafts made by children in a Third World country—the proceeds would benefit a ministry that served them. A couple of people freaked out over this, saying that if that happened they might come in like Jesus that Sunday and flip the tables over because you should never, ever sell things in church for any reason. These folks were also the ones who always had to go to the bathroom whenever we took up the offering, too. In their minds, money and religion should never go together.
But here’s the thing. No one, not even Jesus, would have attacked the moneychangers for this reason. The moneychangers were, in fact, essential to the sacrificial system that drove the Temple. The changed the coins to the proper currency and sold the animals to pilgrims that were guaranteed pure for sacrifice. There was no practical way for people coming from faraway places to bring their own animals and have them survive the trip. Selling animals in the Temple wasn’t the problem. For Jesus, it was the Temple and what it had come to represent that was the problem. Indeed, in many ways it was the separation of money and religion that triggered his action.
Remember that last week, as we began our series, we said that the Jesus did not separate politics and religion. In Jesus’ day there was no such separation in the popular mind, either. That’s more of a modern phenomenon, compartmentalizing life into specific parts that should never intersect with one another. Politics, religion, money, free time, privacy; all are separate and you shouldn’t mix them together in polite conversation. In the first century Jewish world, however, and particularly in the mind of Jesus, everything was filtered through the religious worldview. Jesus understood that God was, and is, intimately interested in our politics and pocketbooks as much as he is in our worship. For God, money is always a spiritual issue.
To understand that we have to understand the role of the Temple in first century Israel. From my own Sunday school upbringing, I always had the idea that the Tabernacle and then the Temple were always reserved for purely religious ceremonies—kind of like church. The Temple was the place where God was assumed to dwell, there in the Holy of Holies. People brought pure animals to sacrifice to atone for sin and be reconciled to God. Teaching took place in the courts. The priests lived there. I remember as a kid thinking that my pastor lived at the church and I was stunned when I found out he had a house and went grocery shopping like everybody else! Some parents of children in our own congregation tell me that the kids think I live here, too. Well, they’d be partially right if you asked my family about it!
But while the Temple was the symbol of Israel’s religious devotion and worship, it was also the symbol of government and commerce. The high priests were more than just religious leaders, they were also agents of the government—appointed by the king or, by the time of the first century, the Roman emperor. The priests were usually chosen from among the wealthy aristocracy, which meant that they would remain loyal to the government because their own pockets were getting filled. To that end, the Temple (like many ancient temples) also acted as the national bank. Money flowed into the Temple as Jewish males both in Israel and around the world paid a Temple tax for its upkeep and operation. More importantly, the Temple was also the central repository for all the taxes that Rome collected. From there the tribute would be sent to the emperor, while any excess was assumed to be a bonus paid to the collecting officials. The neighborhood tax collector was hated because of this, but the truth is that it was the Temple authorities and the wealthy who were really making the big bucks.
Added to this was the fact that the Temple also housed all the records of debt. Think of it like a national credit bureau. When the Jewish rebels revolted against Rome in the year 66AD, around the time that Mark was likely written, the first thing they did in order to “purify” the Temple was to go in and burn all the debt records. So much for separating money from religion! The Temple was a religious center, to be sure, but it had also become the center of oppression as the wealthy used debt as leverage to take land away from peasants, subjugating them in a form of economic slavery.
So here was the ambiguity of the Temple—the symbol of worship on the one hand and the symbol of injustice on the other. It is this ambiguity that Jesus attacks.
As we said last Sunday, Jesus knew the scriptures and in this last week in Jerusalem he draws on images from the prophets and acts them out symbolically. The entry into Jerusalem on Sunday on a donkey was a planned political demonstration—an announcement that the rightful and righteous king had arrived from the east, over and against the system of imperial domination, represented by Pilate and Rome, arriving from the west. On Monday, here in the Temple, Jesus stages another act of political and religious protest—one even more scandalous that the first and the one that, more than any other, resulted in his arrest, trial, and crucifixion later that week.
The Old Testament imagery Jesus draws on comes from two different passages, but each with the same theme. Isaiah 56:7 describes the Temple as a “house of prayer for all peoples.” That was the Temple’s intent and by the time of Jesus that was at least so in theory. Herod the Great had built a “Court of the Gentiles” within the Temple complex as a place where even non-Jews could come and bask in the glory of the Temple (though, given Herod’s reputation, that was likely more about impressing outsiders than necessarily wanting them to worship God). People from all over the world come and at least get close to the Temple, one of the architectural wonders of the ancient world. The Jews considered the Temple the “navel of the earth,” where God dwelt in their midst (even though they also believed that God was everywhere).
But even during the time of the prophets the Temple had not always maintained its purity around worship. That’s where the second part of the quote comes in—from Jeremiah 7. God ordered the prophet to stand in the gate of the Temple and declare to the people that they had subverted the Temple’s intent. Just because they had a Temple didn’t mean God was always going to dwell there with them. What would be the criteria for God’s dwelling in the Temple? It’s not just that worship was performed correctly. Look again at Jeremiah 7:5-11 – 5-- "For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, 6 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 other gods to your own hurt, 7 then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. 8 Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. 9 Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, 10 and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are safe!”—only to go on doing all these abominations? 11 Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? You know, I too am watching, says the LORD."
In other words, according to God, worship without justice for the poor and the weak was no worship at all. No matter how religious or righteous you appear to be, it is how you treat the least of God’s people that determines your true colors. Notice, though, that the Temple, “this house,” is called a “den of robbers.” It’s not the place where the robbing takes place, but the place where the robbers gather after they’ve done their dirty work. For Jesus, the Temple had become such a den—the place that symbolized all the injustice, hypocrisy, and ambitions of the nation.
Here’s where word study can help us, too. The word here for “robbers” in the Greek is lestes. That meant more than a common thief. It was actually a word used by the Romans to charge people with sedition and inciting revolution. Lestes were violent revolutionaries, and first century Israel was certainly full of those. Remember that Mark was writing somewhere around the year 70AD, when the Romans were besieging and eventually destroyed the Temple when it had become a stronghold for Jewish rebels. They had tried to take over a corrupt and oppressive system through violence, becoming lestes themselves in order to cast out the original inhabitants of the robber’s den. Jesus was condemning that, too.
In short, Jesus’ turning over the tables in the Temple was a precursor to judgment. His action interrupted the work of the Temple, albeit briefly. He had, in effect, shut down the Temple by disrupting the system, but that was nothing in comparison to the final shut down that was coming. God was going to destroy this Temple and tear down the systems of oppression, violence, and empty religion it had come to represent. Notice that Mark frames this incident with the image of the withered fig tree. It doesn’t bear fruit, so Jesus condemns it. When, later, the disciples notice that it’s dead, Jesus seems to be cryptic—“If you say to this mountain (imagine him pointing to the Temple Mount), be taken up and thrown into the sea, and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you…” In other words, the present order—represented by the Temple—was going to be replaced by God’s new order; what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom would not come through violent revolution, but through a movement of peace, justice, and even suffering. The Temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed, but a new one would rise in its place—the Temple represented by Jesus himself, who dwells in and through his followers and transforms them as agents of reconciliation for the whole world.
Now, admittedly, that’s a lot of stuff—and there’s a whole lot more to Monday! I think, though, that there’s a really sharp lesson for us here if we’ll learn it. If Jesus were to come into our churches I do think he would turn over some tables and not the ones for the bake sale or the crafts to help starving children. If Jesus was going to judge anything about us as his church, I think it would be about the fact that we often worship God without doing anything to challenge the systems of domination that perpetually breed injustice in the world.
Here’s an example. I learned a couple of weeks ago at the stewardship seminar I attended in Orlando that the average American is spending 110% of his or her income, is carrying $9,890 in credit card debt between 7 different credit cards, and is saving a negative percentage of their income (-0.5%). At the same time, financial institutions are raising their lending rates. Did you see that Bank of America raised its credit card rate to 28% for even people with good credit? Bankruptcy, home foreclosures, and the number of people being driven to poverty are increasing daily. Our children are learning from the media and from their friends that they have to have it all and have it now. We can’t have anything for more than 6 months before being told we have to upgrade. And our government recently voted to give us all an infusion of cash, believing that the answer to our crisis of debt and hyper-consumerism is to do what? Spend more money!
Truth is that what we are seeing in our culture is the very real emergence of economic slavery. People are being enslaved by crushing debt under which they can find no way out. My guess is that there are many people worshipping here today that find themselves in desperate situations but keep it to themselves because they fear what others might think. On the other side, there may be people worshipping in our church this morning who are profiting from this kind of economic slavery. Maybe we haven’t become a den of robbers, but I think Jesus would tell us in no uncertain terms that doing nothing is just about the same thing.
Worship without justice is empty and worthy of God’s judgment. What are we doing to bring justice to the world? How are we turning Sunday faith into Monday conviction and action? I think there are ways to do that. Take the debt crisis, for example. If money is a spiritual issue, and I really believe that it is because Jesus certainly believed it, then we as a church should be helping people find the way out of economic slavery. I am proposing today that we as a church begin offering classes on debt reduction, on wise financial planning, and on teaching our children and youth how to manage money as a spiritual issue. I think that all of us need to be challenged to live counter-culturally, to forego the hyper-consumerism of our society in favor of simplicity, generosity, and sharing our resources. What we experience in worship needs to be translated into action—not just talking about eliminating poverty but actually working for it. Not just thinking about living more simply, but cutting loose all the stuff that imprisons us. Not competing with our neighbors, but demonstrating a lifestyle of living simply so that others can simply live.
Economic justice is just one area—there are many others. The bottom line is that Jesus was never afraid to flip the status quo over on its ear. People who do that usually encounter a lot of opposition. Jesus knew that his action in the Temple would cause a stir, perhaps even resulting in his own death, yet he did it anyway. He believed he was acting on God’s behalf and, indeed, he was. Do we believe the same thing about ourselves as his followers? Are we willing to act on God’s behalf to challenge a world where domination is the norm with a message of peace, justice and hope no matter what it might cost us?
I really believe that’s where God is calling us as his church. Our vision can no longer be small—to simply be a nice worshipping community of nice people. Our mission has never been to simply reflect the culture around us. No, the more I pray about this and study the Scriptures the more I see a God who is wanting to push us beyond our boundaries and comfort zones. Whether it’s pushing back against the consumerism of a ski town, visiting a jail (I’m still working on getting that set up, I want you to know), serving sandwiches in a homeless shelter, or using our resources to help someone else, God is calling us to work for what we pray for.
Do that, and we can truly be called a house of prayer for all people.
Sources:
Borg, Marcus and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006, p. 31-53
Wright, Tom, Mark for Everyone, London: SPCK, 2001, p. 149-153.
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