Flipping the Scales
John 2:13-22
13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” 18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
Nature has brought certain combinations together, like two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom in a water molecule or chocolate and peanut butter, that we can confidently assert that they were meant to be soul mates. On the other hand, there are also things in this world that simply do not and should not go together, like: Pineapples on pizza or work on a Monday morning. I think today’s passage places the marriage of wealth and faith in the latter category. Jesus’ dramatic outrage in the temple is in direct response to the economic activity being carried out in the name of God. Perhaps the most volatile and dangerous of combinations, even more so than pineapple pizza, is when the unlimited power of our divine imaginings reacts with the greed of exploitive economics. Such a compound is capable of producing a vicious machine that spirals beyond our control until it begins to exploit its very creators. It was this kind of machine that we find Jesus confronting in the temple, for profiteering machines are an unholy affront to the communal love of the Triune God. In the words of Mario Savio, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Jesus enters the temple not as the crucified one we are often inclined to imagine but rather as the revolutionary who must stop the machine. It’s probably worth noting here that there isn’t a crucified Christ without Christ the revolutionary. While John places the scene earlier in Jesus’ ministry, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have placed the scene right before Jesus’ journey into Jerusalem, the place where he is arrested, flogged, and crucified for subversion. John adds the provocative detail of Jesus making the claim that He would rebuild the temple in three days after it is destroyed. For all the reasons that Jesus may have been crucified, we should remember, at the very least, that he hangs on a Roman cross because he drove the religious establishment from the seat of their power: the Jerusalem temple.
There are a couple possible explanations for Jesus’ disruptive action in the temple. The first explanation is the idolatrous exchange of foreign currency. For those paying for the sacrifice of Passover, the currency was to be paid in silver or its value. As Jews were only permitted to mint coins in bronze or copper, it was more convenient to use a different type of currency. Rather than use Roman coins, which were used to pay taxes to the empire, Jews of this time opted to use the silver shekel of Tyre, which was an autonomous mint. However, although the Tyrian coinage was more expedient, it also bore the head of the god Melkart on one side and the Tyrian eagle on the other. Thus, devout Jews had no choice but to use the silver shekel of Tyre, a symbol of pagan religion, to pay for their Passover sacrifice. In other words, a foreign god had been introduced into the temple, the Jewish holy place.
Further, it is also possible that Jesus’ actions can be viewed as a response to new Temple practices that were inherently exploitive. It is possible that the Temple authorities had introduced the new practice of selling animals in the Temple in order to generate more revenue. The additional revenues would have been directed towards the costs of running the Temple or the completion of its construction. Thus, we see that pious Jews, who were no doubt predominantly among the impoverished of their society, were being taken advantage of in order to complete Herod’s building of the Temple.
Whether it is idolatry or exploitation, Jesus charges the vendors and money changers of turning God’s house into a marketplace of impersonal transaction. Elsewhere, Jesus accuses them of turning God’s house into a “den of thieves.” Amy-Jill Levine notes that this slight is to indicate that the Temple has become a place where thieves and robbers feel comfortable. She writes, “A den of thieves is not where robbers rob; it is a place where robbers go after their crimes to count and stash their loot. The modern analogy would be a thief who enters church on a Sunday morning, puts stolen money into the collection plate, and feels reconciled to God and community.” Jesus is enraged that the house of God, the place where God’s abundance and mercy are celebrated, has been turned into a shopping cart full of commodities and capital.
If Jesus was enraged then, I wonder how he would react today if he happened to slip in the back door of one of a church’s eight satellite campuses or a football stadium of young Christians summoning the name of God through heavy smoke and blinding lights. While I can’t say for sure, it is certainly possible that the alliance of faith and wealth has only gotten stronger since the days Jesus flipped tables in the temple. We find ourselves subjected to the exploitation and economic power of churches who are often more concerned with Financial Peace University than they are the Prince of Peace. In our American economy, it isn’t always easy to discern whether any given Christian institution has arranged its life for the accumulation of more assets and capital or whether it has arranged its life for the adoration of the crucified Christ. But this is the reality of the imperial economics that have almost always directed the American empire’s domestic and foreign policy.
In his book The Enchantments of Mammon, Eugene McCarraher argues, “…neoliberals seek to remake the state – and everything else – into the image and likeness of the market. Aiming to refashion not only the state but also the moral and metaphysical imagination as well, neoliberals elevated the market to a position of absolute ontological sovereignty. At the same time, if evangelicals called on the Christian God to sustain ontological legitimacy of capitalism, American neoliberals represented an elusive repudiation of the jeremiad tradition. Neoliberals realized that a beloved community could not be built on capitalist property; but rather than reject the property relations, they renounced and maligned the hope of community…In the neoliberal theology of the market, the world is a business and money is the measure of all things” (591).
If this is our reality and the water we all swim in, then we have to realize that flipping tables and driving out our corporate money changers will be much harder than we had imagined. It should come as no surprise that our churches have remade themselves in the image of neoliberal economics. It’s hard to imagine that our life together is in anyway salvific for the life of the world if the economics we condone and champion are extracting and exploiting every corner of the globe as we speak. This realization was one of the toughest to accept as I began to consider what it means to be a follower of Christ. In my experience, Christian discipleship is often defined by how we can be nicer and more respectable consumers. For example, at one point my Sophomore year of high school, I remember wearing a “Christian” t-shirt every day of the week in order to prove that I was unashamed of the Gospel, completely on par with my 116 Clique car decal that publicized my admiration for Lecrae and Trip Lee. While it’s easy for me to look back now and chuckle at my “Jesus Freak” phase, I believe this is exactly the kind of moral and ethical imagination that most American Christians possess. The House of God has become nothing more than another place of business for us to buy and sell our social capital. But our consumeristic practices turned Christian isn’t the worst of our problems. Rather, we must deal with the fact that our desecration of God’s House with our commodities and performances has given divine legitimacy to an economic order that literally must crush our bodies and communities in order to survive.
In the words of Katie Geneva Cannon, “The form of Christianity shaped by obeisance to economic interests of a capitalist system is a new form of Christianity, one that legitimates exploitation. This type of exploitive religious rationale accommodates to all sorts of social ruthlessness so long as profits increase. Christianity conflated to the dominant system invariably rejects the claim that the essence of the gospel mandate is liberation of the oppressed. Instead, a form of capitalist Christianity combines defense of the sanctity of the economic system with racial and theological conformity. Such Christianity separates the spiritual person from the bodily person and calls on people to be spiritual and avoid politics. The freedom and radical human equality professed in early Christian proclamations are assimilated into the propagation of a capitalist worldview…Thereby the church sanctions and stabilizes the mundane interests of the ruling class.”
Although we may be the working class whose labor is appropriated against our wills, our unwillingness to see the capitalist class, and its mechanisms of control and exploitation, in the light of God’s good news to the poor is an indictment of our own tendencies to reduce God’s kingdom to a nonprofit dispensing charity and band aids. While it may not be less than, the Kingdom of God is certainly more than merely supporting the poor with the profits of our tables. The Kingdom of God is about the reversal of this world’s practices and values until we recognize the House of God as a house of prayer and communion once again. The One who turned over tables and drove out money changers continues to call the people of God towards justice, equity, and mutuality. Thus, there is no cause for celebration if the poor finally get a drip of assistance in trickle-down economics, especially while the rich and powerful still feast on the misappropriation of God’s name.
The American empire may attempt to atone for its sins by placing “In God We Trust” on its sacrificial offering to Mammon, but we resist this idolatry and exploitation by confessing that God has become flesh in the life and person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the temple of God where God has come to dwell with us. No longer can God’s name be put on the inequality, hoarding, and greed of this nation. God’s very being has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, who enacts the revolution of flipping social hierarchies and cleansing our own temples for their proper use: Love.
Friends, we are those who confess Jesus as Lord. We are those apostles commissioned to bring good news to the mission fields of church and world alike. Our political leaders, both blue and red, as well as our corporate plutocracy seems content living in a “One Market Under God” kind of society. Yet they have failed to realize that capitalism creates its own gravediggers. Our vocation as those called to flip unjust tables is to assist capital, and its brutalities, into the grave where God may resurrect a new world from its ashes. In this work, we bring the good news that salvation can be found, even in this country, if we tear down the marketplaces of profiteering and follow Christ into the House of God where love and compassion are the only currency. Amen.
BENEDICTION
In a world where there are tables needing to be flipped and graves needing to be dug, may God grant us the courage to do the work of justice and love as if a different world were possible.