The Cleansing of the Temple?

Why do Christians who seek to justify violence always seem to turn to the Cleansing of the Temple narrative? Is it a psychological need to believe that Jesus was like us in every way? No doubt there might be some of that in the argument but I think it goes much deeper than that. In a recent argument with a well known charismatic Christian personality over Jesus’ nonviolence, I noticed a disturbing trend in the comments on his FB post. Inevitably they all turned on identifying Jesus with the ‘God of Israel.’

Commentators all seemed to move within the orbit of a flat reading of Scripture whereby all texts from the Old Testament that referred to God also meant that Jesus could replace the noun ‘God.’ Thus when ‘God’ commanded Israel into battle, one could say ‘Jesus’ commanded Israel into battle. This simple displacement of nouns has the most devastating effects, for it assumes that when reading the Old Testament the noun ‘God’ must always refer to the God who is revealed in Jesus.

We enter here into murky waters. It is all too easy to dismiss this line of questioning as Marcionism. Marcion believed that the ‘God’ of the Old Testament was an inferior deity who created the physical universe, but above that god (known as the demiurge), there existed the true God, of pure spirit. It was this latter god that was revealed in the ministry of Jesus (and expounded upon by Paul). I reject this solution as the church has always rejected this solution.

However, another solution has been proposed in The Jesus Driven Life. I argue that there are two perspectives to be found in the Old Testament, the perspective of religion and the perspective of revelation, and the dividing line between the two is the role one plays in the relationships established by sacred violence. One is either persecutor or persecuted.

Texts written from the perspective of the persecutor are always going to justify violence done to the other. Thus when ‘God’ is invoked in these texts, ‘God’ is brought in on the side of the persecutors and the story of a conquest, a fight, a battle or a moral/honor killing is always justified by the presence or command of the deity. When this occurs, God is called a ‘warrior.’

There occur other texts in the Old Testament however that challenge this rendering of God’s relation to violence. Raymund Schwager in his book Must There Be Scapegoats? has shown that as the arc of the Old Testament moves from creation to Exile (and beyond), ‘God’ becomes less and less associated with violence. So for example, in Genesis it is ‘God’ who directly causes the flood or destroys Sodom, but by the time we get to the Prophets, ‘God’s’ direct involvement becomes that of a puppet master who moves a figure like Cyrus to intervene.

On the other hand this trajectory of dissociating God from violence has as its concomitant trajectory that of ‘God’ taking the side of the victim more and more. One sees this especially in the juxtaposition of the religious and the secular critique of sacrifice. The anti-sacrificial texts of Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah and others (like Psalm 40) almost always contain a social critique of those who abuse the marginalized of society. That is, both social and religious sacrifices reinforce the other. One cannot critique one without critiquing the other.

This trajectory of dissociation of God from violence is so easily missed by those who insist that all texts about ‘God’ are to be flattened out and so the referent of any text that uses the noun ‘God’ has as its referent…God.  When this occurs, the two distinct perspectives, that of the persecutor and that of the victim become mixed. In this hermeneutic approach then, Jesus becomes the revelation of the Janus-faced ‘God.’

People who seek to justify human violence with an appeal to divine violence have to read Jesus back into both sides of the equation in their mixed perspective (persecutor and persecuted), then turn to the Jesus of the Gospel tradition and read this mixed perspective back into the ministry of Jesus (thus vitiating or dispensationalizing all of Jesus’ teaching on nonviolence or the non-retributive character of God). They might claim to have a Jesus centered hermeneutic, but it isn’t. Rather than begin with the revelation of God in Christ, particularly focused on God’s relation to violence on Calvary (i.e., God’s own experience of human violence), and the response of non-retaliation and forgiveness, these misinterpreters of Scripture have already presupposed a Janus-faced ‘God.’ So it is that they must involve God in constructs of human violence and sacrifice, which include theories of atonement where God requires sacrifice and blood or eschatologies where God requires blood and death (or torture).

The fact is that far from justifying violence, the Cleansing of the Temple narrative is a story that strikes at the heart of the problem of human violence. Recalling the prophetic denunciation of sacrifice, both social and religious, the Temple narrative brings both to light for the very place which should have been a place of inclusion (“a house of prayer for all people”) had become a place of exclusion (“a den of ‘lestes’”). The term used here, ‘lestes’, refers to those who in their zeal for holiness had become freedom fighters for God (or terrorists if you will). The very ones who insisted on the purity of the sacrificial rituals were also the ones who insisted on the purity of the priesthood and the community engaging in those sacrificial practices. Thus all impure or unclean Jews and all gentiles were forbidden access to God. Social exclusion and sacrificial ritual are mirror sides of a coin and the theology necessary for such will always invoke a Janus-faced ‘God.’

Violence always requires an enemy other. So does reconciliation. The difference between the two is the approach one takes in relation to the enemy other. We can either follow the ‘God’ of the persecution texts of the Old Testament, or like Jesus, we can follow the God who is revealed in the ‘persecuted’ texts of the Old Testament. Both are not possible at the same time, for one cannot serve two masters.

I conclude with an analysis from my book The Jesus Driven Life. From it one can see that far from justifying violence, the episode is a critique of violence, both social and religious.

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We have become accustomed to reading the story of the ‘Cleansing of the Temple’ as though Jesus came in with his moral Pine-Sol, took his broom and mop and tried to make the place more presentable for guests.  But Jesus did not ‘cleanse’ the Temple.  No, there was something decidedly wrong with the entire system that could not be fixed.  Jesus goal was to shut it down.  Now, in reality that would have been impossible without starting a major riot and bringing the Roman guard down from the Fortress Antonia to quell the angry mob.  This had been done before, many times; Jesus even alludes to one of them (Luke 13:1).  No, what Jesus was engaged in was a prophetic action, an action that was small in scale but had powerful consequences.

Recalling that Jesus quotes Jeremiah 7:11 it is crucial to observe that for both Jesus and Jeremiah the Temple had become the symbol of zealous resistance.  We need to remember that any time a foreign occupier destroyed the Temple of the occupied it was considered a victory for the occupier’s god.

The question that haunts scholars concerns Jesus’ motivation: was he prophesying the destruction of the Temple, engaging in purity issues with regard to sacrifice, fomenting social unrest?  These and other motivations have been attributed to Jesus.  I do not think we will ever be certain as to why he did what he did that fateful day but I do believe that his use of his Bible that day (at least his use recorded in the Gospels) relates specifically to the problem of zeal.  The Fourth Gospel certainly remembers the story with this in mind (John 2:17) and the text from Jeremiah lends support to this hypothesis.

As we noted earlier it was zeal for holiness that brought about the origins of the various religious groups several hundred years before Jesus.  Following in the footsteps of the ‘zealous’ Maccabees, these various groups sought to keep the Temple and the Land pure, and thus the people pure, so that God would redeem them from their exile and bring them into the great and promised jubilee. The prototype of zeal in the Jewish Scriptures was Phineas (Numbers 25:1-16), who as a result of his zeal in killing an Israelite and his Midianite lover brought a plague to an end.  As a result it could be said of him that this act was ‘credited to him as righteousness’ (Psalm 106:30-31).  It is this type of zeal that Jesus forswore and replaced with the mercy code.

Jesus was doing more than just ‘cleansing’ the Temple of greedy merchants, although that may have been an aspect of his intention.  Two other actions are prominent that help us understand that, for Jesus, the entire sacrificial system was problematic.  The first action is that according to Mark 11:16 he would not let anyone carry a ‘vessel’ (skeuos) through the Temple courts.  The NIV translates this term as ‘merchandise’ as though he were stopping shoppers in a modern mall, but the term refers to vessels used in the sacrificial process.  The second action comes from the Fourth Gospel where Jesus braids a whip and uses it to disperse the sheep and the cattle (John 2:15).  By prohibiting sacrificial animals from being purchased and possibly rendering them unclean, and by stopping the use of sacred vessels, Jesus is saying a great big NO! to the system of sacrifice, much like the prophets before him (Ps 40.6, 50.8-15, 51.16f, 69.30, Isa 1.11, Jer. 6.20, Hos. 6.6, Amos 5.21, Mic. 6.6).  Nowhere is it suggested that he engaged in violence against human beings, nor is the term for anger (orge) used in this story.  This is not a story about Jesus getting mad, it is the great prophetic act that the end of all sacrifice had come, that something new, mercy and compassion, replaced sacrifice, which were far more pleasing to God than the blood of bulls and goats.

The interconnecting themes of holiness-zeal-sacrifice-Temple all converge in the narrative of Jesus at the Temple.  It is no accident that twice in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” And in Mark (12:32-34) when the teacher of the law comments to Jesus that he agrees regarding the dual nature of the great commandment to love God and neighbor that these “are more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices”, Jesus replies that he “is not far from the kingdom of God.”  So how far are you from the kin(g)dom of God?