Theological Journal - April 6: Toward the 8th Day (Monday)

Jesus Judges the Temple

On Sunday Jesus enters and claims kingship over the holy city. On Monday he enters the temple and claims rule over it. In both cases, his coming as king means judgment for a largely faithless city and religious institution. We don’t see this clearly when we call the former his “triumphal entry” and the latter his “cleansing of the temple. These well-established names for these events obscure more than they reveal. Only in the most ironical and paradoxical sense are either of them like their usual names. “But what we often call Jesus’s triumphal entry was actually an anti-imperial, anti-triumphal one, a deliberate lampoon of the conquering emperor entering a city on horseback through gates opened in abject submission” (Borg, The Last Week: 574-576). We saw that yesterday with regard to the entry into the city and the power struggle initiated with Roman and Jewish authorities. And by the end of the week that conflict sweeps up the cheering crowds and even his disciples as well. And only if “cleansing” means total erasure can Jesus’ temple action be considered that.

Mark tells the story of Jesus’ Holy Monday actions using his famous “sandwich” technique. That’s when he begins a story, then tells another before the first one is finished and then finishes the first one after completing the second one. The two halves of the first story are the slices of bread while the story told fully in the middle is the meat of the sandwich. He intends both stories to mutually interpret each other. They are different ways of making the same point – that point being the story in the middle.

And that middle story is Jesus’ condemnation of the temple. Yes, condemnation. It is of no further use to God’s purposes because it has regularly sought to assimilate and accommodate itself to the secular powers it has to deal with throughout its history.

The fig tree Jesus and the disciples encounter on their way into town into the illustrative example. Jesus is hungry and, even though it is not the season for figs, condemns it for failing to provide them for him. Unreasonable petulance? Some think so. A fit of anger breaking out? Again, some think so. But they miss the point. The point of this episode is not the fate of the fig tree but what it points to: the fate of the temple Jesus is on his way to confront. He does not prune the tree as if he was going to cleanse the temple. No, he destroys it as a signal of the temple’s fate. It too was barren, though it never should have been “out of season” for doing the works of God assigned to it. That’s meaning of the fig tree episode.

For the temple episode itself, Jeremiah 7 and 26 are crucial texts. A major sign of the problem was Herod’s addition to the temple of the huge platform that served as the Court of the Gentiles. On top of one of its gates he affixed a large golden eagle, symbol of Rome and its supreme divinity, Jupiter Optimus Maximus. And as far as we know this was done with no Jewish resistance!

For centuries before Jesus’ time Israel’s prophets accused the temple and its leaders of rampant in justice in general and alliances with other governments and powers that either ruled over the people or threatened them. Jer.7:5-7,11 is characteristic:

^“For if you truly amend your ways and your 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 other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever . . . Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?”

For such egregious and pervasive actions God brought the only the Babylonians to destroy the city and temple and deport Israel’s best and brightest but five centuries later came himself in Jesus to shut the whole temple enterprise down.

Yes, shut it down. Pronounce it kaput. Done. Finished as far as serving his purposes went. That’s what Jesus’ “cleansing” temple action is about. Borg and Crossan explain:

“First, the action. Four parts to the action are mentioned in Mark 11:15–16. Jesus (1) began to drive out the buyers and the sellers, (2) overturned the tables of the money changers, (3) overturned the seats of the dove sellers, and (4) would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. We emphasize that the money changers and animal sellers were perfectly legitimate and absolutely necessary for the temple’s normal functioning. The buying and selling all took place in the huge Court of the Gentiles. Money changers were needed so that Jewish pilgrims could pay the temple tax in the only approved coinage. Buying animals or birds on site was the only way pilgrims could be sure the creatures were ritually adequate for sacrifice. What does it mean that Jesus has interrupted the temple’s perfectly legitimate sacrificial and fiscal activities? It means that Jesus has shut down the temple” (Borg, The Last Week (Kindle Locations 821-828).

The fig tree has been cursed and destroyed for lack of bearing fruit. Jeremiah’s “den of robbers,” which Jesus quotes in Mark 11, comes into play. It is the accusation Jesus brings against it. It to has been much misunderstood. It is not about commercialism in a holy place. The buying and selling and money-changing took place in the Court of the Gentiles. Nor is it about exploitative financial behavior of the temple’s leaders (though there was plenty of that!). This charge is not about the temple defrauding the people but rather about the temple as a place where robbers flee for safety having done their dirty work elsewhere. Borg and Crossan make an important linguistic point:

“The word translated in the Greek of Jeremiah 7:11 and Mark 11:17 as ‘robber’ is actually (a) . . . term (that) more properly means “bandit,” “brigand,” “rebel,” or any form of armed resistance to established control. It could, of course, include large-scale robbery (but not small-time thievery), since that was a calculated refusal of normal law and order. For some Jews under imperial control, (it) might designate a freedom fighter, but for all Romans it meant an insurgent. In general, then, it meant any form of violent resistance to Roman control that was neither territorial rebellion nor standard warfare” (Borg, The Last Week: 865-870).

This was fighting God’s battles the wrong way. Precisely not the way King Jesus symbolized in his entry into the city. Such a denial of God’s way of being Israel, Abrahamic Israel, is the core cause of Israel’s rebellion and demise. Jesus’ coming to Jerusalem meant the kingdom of God had arrived, a kingdom which we saw yesterday, precipitates a fundamental conflict with Roman authorities and the Jews who collaborated and supported them. That conflict, however, was not to be waged by guerilla warfare, street assassinations, and realpolitik. But rather by suffering love and the politics of the cross. The kind of insurgency that found home and shelter in the temple was not the kind of subversive activity of God’s kingdom unleashed by Jesus in the world!  

Sunday and Monday of Holy Week belong together then as complementary actions signaling the regime change that came with Jesus Messiah. “When he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.” It was late, too late now for ethnic Israel and its institutions to be the Abrahamic people God called it to be. A new Israel was in the wings. By the end of this week and the coming of the 8^th Day this new people was centerstage and everything, everything, had changed.