Monday, April 2: Jim Friedrich

Mark 11:15-18. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple.

This dramatic scene, appearing in all four gospels, is a key to understanding why Jesus got in so much trouble. The Temple was the key symbol of national and religious identity for Jesus’ people, the sign of God’s protective presence among them. And its central activity was the shedding of animal blood in rituals of atonement and purification. That may seem strange to us today, but we might consider that the only difference between the Temple and McDonalds is that in the Temple the animals were sacrificed in a prayerful act of offering.

In any case, the buying and selling of animals for sacrifice was a routine activity in the Temple courtyard. You went to the Temple, bought a lamb or a bull (if you were poor, you bought a dove), and the priests would take it to make a “burnt offering” on the altar. It was a noisy, commercial scene, like an Old World bazaar, and perhaps such an unseemly atmosphere in a “house of prayer” was what set off the idealistic young rabbi visiting the big city for the first time. Or maybe Jesus was outraged at the way the temple system exploited the poor while enriching the clerical elite.

But some scholars suspect that Jesus wasn’t just reacting in the moment, but that his action was a highly symbolic, carefully considered action. By disrupting the sacred center of his culture with his embodied parable of destruction, Jesus symbolically proclaimed divine judgment on the religious and political status quo. The old system is corrupt and inadequate, he was saying, and he offered himself as the new temple. This was blasphemous to the religious authorities. Only God could make such a judgment and such a claim, so Jesus was in effect acting as if he were God.

But you don’t have to be a first century Temple priest to be outraged by Jesus. His call for radical change remains disturbing to anyone invested in the status quo. In the film The Last Temptation of Christ, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus what he is after. Jesus tells him he wants to change the world with love, not with killing. And Pilate replies, “Killing or loving, it’s all the same. No matter how you want to change things, we don’t want them changed.”

Where are the places in our own lives and interactions that are fraught with deadening complacency, or perhaps are even to some degree complicit with economic and political systems which oppress the poor, pollute the planet, and otherwise resist or distort God’s purposes and hopes for creation? Can part of our own Lenten self-examination be to let Jesus enter those places with his whip and his fervor and turn everything upside down – all those things which need to be let go of, tossed aside, cleared away, so there will be room at last for God’s new reality to take place in us?

— Jim Friedrich