The Overturned Tables

The Overturned Tables--August 14, 2018

"Then they came to Jerusalem. And [Jesus] entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, 'Is it not written, My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of robbers.' And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching." [Mark 11:15-18]

You can't talk about all the tables of Jesus without including the ones that Jesus overturns.

Last fall, when I first charted out this year's worth of devotions under the overarching idea of spending a year looking at different angles of Jesus' life, teaching, ministry, death, and resurrection, I knew we would eventually have to talk about this scene.  It was inescapable when I made the choice, nine or ten months ago, eventually to spend a month of 2018 looking at "the Table of Jesus," And that's because for every miraculous feeding or holy supper at a table in an upper room, there is also a table that Jesus knocked over in the temple, in what was certainly his most provocative and symbolic act of prophetic protest in all the gospels.

And mind you, that is precisely what this scene is: it is a symbolic act of protest in the tradition of the old Hebrew prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, who were all compelled by God's Spirit to perform strange enacted parables that riled up the kings and powerful people in their day.  And just like Jeremiah publicly wearing a yoke for oxen as a symbol of the coming exile of Judah, or like Ezekiel laying on his side for over a year, Jesus knew that this intentional, deliberate, and symbolic act to shut down business-as-usual in the Temple would provoke people.  That was part of his intention--let's not patronize Jesus and pretend that he didn't know exactly what he was doing, or that he had no idea his actions would be interpreted as impious, disrespectful, out of place, unpatriotic (the Temple was as much a national symbol as it was a religious one, mind you), and maybe even blasphemous or treasonous.  Jesus knew that all of these would be the kinds of reactions he would face for this deliberate, pre-meditated act of protest.  Jesus knew that as much as the crowds loved him for his miraculous table on the hillside where bread and fish were multiplied, he would be hated and vilified for the choice to overturn the tables in the Temple.

So, just to be clear about it, because this moment seems very important to Jesus, what is really going on here?  What prompts Jesus to overturn the tables in the Temple, which was undeniably the defining national, ethnic, cultural, religious, and spiritual center of Judea in the first century?  And why is it that the scribes and the chief priests in particular are so threatened and insecure by what Jesus does that they redouble their efforts to kill Jesus and get rid of his troublemaking?

It is probably worth stating here some of what is NOT going on in this scene.  For one, when Jesus overturns the tables in the Temple, he is not protesting tables.  When he drives out the moneychangers and dove-sellers, he is protesting neither money nor doves.  And the fact that he stages this dramatic scene in the Temple, rather than, say, at his own house, does not mean that Jesus is anti-God.  No, quite the opposite: Jesus protests the system that the Temple has become entangled in, a system that most people of Jesus' day had simply gotten accustomed to, a system in which the worship of God had been turned into the opposite of everything it was supposed to be.  

Jesus overturns the tables, not because he is anti-table, but because he is calling out the brokenness of the whole sacrificial and temple system, which allowed access to God at a price like a commodity, and which kept the powerful and well-connected running the show at the expense of widows and the like who gave all they had.  Jesus overturns the tables, not because he is trying to attack God, but exactly because he believes God is incensed over this corrupt and co-opted temple-industrial complex.  Jesus overturns the tables, not because he is an overly privileged celebrity who is ungrateful to the priests and scribes for "letting him" teach in "their" Temple, but because Jesus cannot help but call out the ways the Temple became one more way of trying to control God and to manipulate the people.

These things might seem obvious to us, reading the text from the Gospels, but it's funny--you just know that those are the kinds of things the loud voices of the Respectable Religious Crowd were alleging about Jesus.  You just know they were threatened by Jesus, and that they would have looked for any possible excuse not to have to see the truth he forced out into the open.  They were looking for any reason to dismiss Jesus and his criticism of what the Temple had become--so they criticized him for not being adequately respectful to their Temple, and to their God, and to their king and all the generations before who had labored so hard to build that Temple and set up the system of sacrifices and rites and rituals.  They criticized Jesus for being ungrateful for all those who had set up the Temple.  They accused him of being disloyal to his nation and to his nation's God, and they surely all pointed out that Jesus had a pretty comfortable set-up as a rabbi, and that he must be awfully disloyal to his nation, his religion, and his leaders if he was going to criticize the Temple system.  You can hear the accusations on their lips: "If he doesn't like the way we run this Temple, maybe he shouldn't be here--maybe he just shouldn't be allowed to come in to the Temple... or maybe he shouldn't be allowed in Jerusalem... or maybe we should just kill him."

This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that happens when a prophet is raised up--like Isaiah or Jeremiah or John the Baptizer, too--who is so fiercely committed to the living God that it is impossible to stay silent in the face of systems that corrupt or co-opt people's connection to God.  Jesus was able to see with laser-like focus what the Temple was supposed to be about, and how far it had gone as it became a pay-for-play, controlled-access business scheme that kept the nobodies away from access to God.  And so Jesus chose to protest what had gone wrong in all of Judea that the nation as a whole had become OK with, or at least numb to, that kind of system.  And he did it, knowing full well that he wasn't there to criticize God or protest doves or tables, but also knowing that that was exactly the kind of thing the Respectable Religious Crowd would say about him.... because they didn't want to face the difficult truth to which he was calling their attention.

Jesus did it anyway.  He chose his moment (see Mark 11:11, in which Jesus scopes out the scene at the Temple but chooses to come back the next day during business hours); he planned what he was going to do.  He calibrated his message, and he overturned the tables, clearly stating what his protest was all about... but also knowing full well that others would deliberately misinterpret that message, so that they could make him the villain attacking and disrespecting cherished institutions, rather than seeing him as the truth-telling prophet he was in that moment.

Jesus did it anyway.  That is an important piece of what his courage looks like.  And it is also an important piece of what his love looks like.  Jesus, after all, was motivated in this protest both by his genuine love for his Abba, the God of Israel, but also by his love for the people who were getting stepped on and scammed in the Temple system.  And because of his love for both God and neighbor, Jesus was not only willing to stir up trouble at the Temple, but to be branded as an ungrateful, disloyal, impious, and disrespectful celebrity-rabbi for doing it.  Maybe even we could dare to say it was his love even for the scribes and the priests in the Respectable Religious Crowd that tried to get their attention when they we so clearly missing the point.  After all, like Flannery O'Connor says, "...To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures."  For the leaders of the religious and national institutions of Jesus' day, less dramatic attempts would not get their attention.

You and I, we who are seeking to be followers of this Jesus, we know that Jesus is not attacking God, but rather protesting the abusive of a system that tried to control God.  And you and I can see that it is possible for someone to be critical of something or something that one deeply loves nevertheless.  We can see that, at least, when it is Jesus in the Temple overturning tables.

But the challenge for us today, some twenty centuries give or take later, is to use the same discernment today.  Ours is a day and age that doesn't deal well with subtlety, or nuance, or even with prophetic criticism.  We tend to be more comfortable with short bursts (you know, 280 characters or less seems to be our attention span) that paint everything in black and white.  We tend to think that if someone is overturning tables in the Temple, it must be because he hates God and is rejecting our cherished religious values, when in actuality, he might just be calling our attention back to the living, beating heart of truth.  We tend to look for reasons to vilify the people who call out our hypocrisy, our complacency, and our apathy, because we would rather see them as unrepentant villains than ourselves as complicit and guilty bystanders.

The difficult question for us to ask on a day like today is this: If we had been there at the Temple that day, and if we had seen Jesus take such dramatic action in the Temple, would we have let his symbolic and prophetic message hit home in our hearts, or would we have looked for rocks to kill him on the spot for what appeared to us as disrespect for our institutions and subversion of our religion?

And maybe the hardest question of all for each of us to pose on this day is simply: Where are there tables in my life, my world, my system of getting through the day, that need to be overturned?  And when the living Jesus shows up and does just that, will I recognize what he is up to... or will I start reaching for rocks?

Lord Jesus, come into our hearts and overturn our tables.  Come in to our routines and drive out all that keeps us from you.  Come into the systems of our lives and knock over the idols, the distractions, and the lies that we have bought into.  Come and turn us upside down where we need it.