Politics and Religion at the Dinner Table Part II

Jesus Visits Wall Street

Adapted from Overturning Tables by Scott A. Bessenecker. Copyright (c) 2014 by Scott A. Bessenecker. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com

Each of the four authors of the Gospels tell the story of Jesus from their own perspective. Besides the death and resurrection narrative, there are only five events that all four writers share in common. One of those is the story of Jesus’ ejection of a marketplace that occupied the temple courts (Matthew 21:1-13; Mark 11:1-17; Luke 19:29-46; John 2:13-17; 12:12-19). What is so central to our understanding of the person of Jesus that this event is among the few shared by all four Gospels?

First, we see there is a political dimension to Jesus’ entrance into the epicenter of Judean power. As people hail him while waving palm branches, two Gospel writers recall the prophetic words, “See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey.” Jesus does not chastise the crowds because they are politicizing his ministry. The ruling class is disturbed by these politically laced cries from the crowd, so they ask Jesus to defuse the situation by correcting them. Jesus refuses, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40).

No wonder the power holders were nervous. The crowds wielding palm branches were reenacting a scene from the well-known Maccabean revolt about a century earlier when Simon marched into the temple at Jerusalem and threw off the foreign oppressors, establishing a short-lived, free Jewish state. There is no mistaking the threat that Jesus and his reign meant for existing powers.

But Jesus had not come to reform and preserve temple worship. He even predicted the destruction of the temple and said that true worship was not about the temple. No, Jesus’ first act after being inaugurated as king was to confront the economic stronghold which the temple represented.

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.” The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them.

(Matthew 21:12-13)

I don’t want to underplay the prayers of the marginalized that Jesus addressed in clearing the temple courts. Economic greed was displacing the worship of the disabled, because after dislodging the marketplace, the blind and lame (who normally occupied that section) could now enter.

But beyond making space for the disabled and excluded, Jesus was confronting another thread of power twisted together with the strands of power held by the religio-political ruling class.

The Temple Bank

Money changers served as banks, and anyone coming to Jerusalem from another part of the Roman Empire would need the services of these currency exchanges. Temple banks throughout the ancient world were the place to go for money regardless of your interest in worship. True, some traded money for the temple coinage, but the money exchange business provided opportunity for all kinds of financial dealings.

We know from Josephus that the high-priestly families earned lucrative profits from the temple marketplace, and historians claim that the temple was being “ruined by greed.”. Niell Hamilton, in his article “Temple Cleansing and Temple Bank,” suggests that the temple bank housed the equivalent millions of dollars, much of it made up of the deposits of aristocratic families. By overturning these tables, Hamilton claims that Jesus had “suspended the whole economic function of the temple. Such sovereign interference in the economic affairs of the temple must have been taken as a direct claim to be king.”

The post of temple treasurer was often filled by members of the aristocracy. Like today, economic power had coalesced into the hands of a few elite families, making access to wealth difficult for anyone else. Ched Myers in his book Binding the Strongman concludes that “It is the ruling class interests in control of the commercial enterprises in the temple market that Jesus is attacking.”

The temple clearing was not just a worship corrective, it was an economic corrective struck at the heart of first-century Wall Street and the wealthy families who ran it.

Jesus said in John 14, “whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing”. We are charged to imitate our Master, and while these blog posts are not necessarily about inserting the ethics of Jesus into a capitalist mindset, they are about addressing the capitalist mindset which has inserted itself into Christ’s church and her work.

I am unsure what Christ’s actions at the temple bank accomplished. Did it introduce lasting change to the economic lordship of ruling class families in first-century Palestine? Not likely. But it did send an unmistakable signal to the economic and political power holders that were deeply invested in the temple marketplace: The socio-political rich who bilk the poor and excluded will not be tolerated in Jesus’ kingdom.  His actions that day may well have inspired his followers to create a very different kind of “bank” just a few years later. It was an economic cooperative in which there were no needy persons among them (Acts 2:44-45; 4:32-35).

Disrupting the marketplace located in the temple revealed what his kingdom is like. Or more to the point, what his kingdom is not like. In Christ’s kingdom the poor are not preyed upon so that the rich can build their empires. It is not a kingdom where twenty-six individuals are allowed to accumulate more wealth than the poorest three billion people. And it is not a kingdom where the world of profit making is allowed to eclipse the world of prophet making.

I see the impact of corporate-styled capitalism in our churches and faith-based non-profits. I discern the shape of corporate capitalism in how they use money, run their ministries, organize their staff, and turn the gospel into a consumable.

What if we overturned those places in our churches and ministries where the ethic which works to gain the world has resulted in the forfeiting of our souls? Let’s explore how we have allowed our structures to be overly influenced by the things that work in the capitalist kingdom, but become toxic in the good-news-to-the-poor kingdom of God. Can our imaginations be released to create fresh structures and new ways of understanding money, people, church and Jesus’ message about his kingdom?

I believe so. But first we need to examine how corporate capitalism and Protestant Christianity got to be bedfellows in the first place. Stay tuned for Part III.