"Cleansing" the Temple

Reflections on the Lectionary for March 3rd

Jesus driving out the money changers, Giotto. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia.

The story of Jesus “cleansing” the temple—which is in the lectionary for the third Sunday of Lent—is one of the most well-known stories from the gospels. It’s one of the few stories that appears in all four gospels, which already makes it more likely to be well-known, but it’s also a story that gets interpreted and reinterpreted in many different ways. Here are just a few:

·      Christians often (or I would even say usually) have an anti-Jewish or even anti-Semitic reading of this passage, in which they see the temple of Jesus’ day as a decadent and polluted place, and Jesus as making a righteous intervention into the avarice and greed that had infiltrated religion. Even if they aren’t necessarily intending to make their readings to be anti-Semitic, Christians who read the passage this way end up pitting Jesus against Judaism in a way that goes against the grain of history and the ways Jesus is described in the gospels.

·      The souped-up version of that anti-Semitic reading focuses on money-changing as a characteristically Jewish activity, and as a characteristically bad religious expression. Christians tend to linger, suspiciously in my mind, on the ways economics were entangled with temple activities, as if that were not true of their own religious institutions and practices.

·      Liberal Christians tend to read this passage as depicting a protesting Jesus, and they use “overturning tables” as a shorthand for opposing established systems of religious practice. I find this interpretation somewhat satisfying, but I also think it can fall easily into that old Protestant trap of describing one’s religious opponents as being like the Jewish opponents of Jesus’ day—a form of religious reasoning that perpetuates bigotry against Jews. I have heard people with whom I agree describe their religious opponents in this way, which slides very easily into anti-Semitism.

·      Others read this passage as a defense of orthodoxy and orthopraxy—that Jesus is standing up for, and restoring, a correct way of doing religion. Rather than reading the overturning of tables as a move against the status quo, as many liberal Christians do, people with this interpretation read the overturning as a kind of restoration of a lost pure practice.

·      People often cite this story as a paradigmatic example of Jesus’ humanity, and especially Jesus’ capacity for anger and indignation.

·      The Synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) put this story near the end of Jesus’ life, and by doing so they make it clear that this incident was one of the things that led Jesus to the attention of the Jewish and Roman authorities, and therefore led to his arrest, trial, and execution. Jesus’ actions in the temple become a climactic moment of Jesus’ opposition to the religious and political systems of his day.

·      The Gospel of John (from which the reading is pulled for this Sundays’ lectionary readings) instead puts the incident near the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Instead of signifying a decisive moment of oppositional drama, the story in John works like an announcement—a notice that Jesus has arrived and has begun (not completed) an intervention into the forms of religious life of his place and time.

·      But the Gospel of John also makes another interpretation explicitly: that this “cleansing” of the temple also prefigures Jesus’ own death and resurrection. This is the way Jesus often speaks in John—in riddles and obfuscations—and it’s only because the narrator of John tells us that Jesus was actually talking about his body as a temple that we as readers can make much sense of it. (Compare, for example, to the “born from above” discourse with Nicodemus in the next chapter of John, or the “living water” discourse in the chapter after that, which both depend on Jesus saying cryptic things).

·      The Revised Common Lectionary (the table of readings that this Substack tracks) puts this story in the season of Lent, which tends to endorse the Synoptic view that it was a decisive moment in the last days of Jesus’ life. That’s true even in years, like this one, when the text of the story is drawn from John, and therefore from Jesus’ early days, and not from his last days.

As you can see, there are a lot of possible interpretations of this passage, and there are likely many others that I have not listed here. It’s a pivotal moment in Jesus’ life (whether it’s placed at the beginning of his ministry or near the end), and this story does a lot of meaning-making work in most ways of understanding Jesus’ life and work. It’s one of those stories about Jesus that just seem…Jesus-y. No matter who you think Jesus is, this story tends to back up your perception.

One of my curiosities about this story is whether its oppositional structure is what makes it so compelling as a tool for people to represent Jesus as they understand him. Jesus gets into a lot of conflicts in the gospels—conflicts with people he meets, with allies among his disciples and followers, with opponents among the religious and political factions of his day—but most of those conflicts bubble under the surface instead of breaking out into the open. Certainly we don’t usually see these conflicts erupt into physical violence, the way Jesus overturns the tables in the temple precincts. So if you’re looking for a way of viewing Jesus as being opposed to something or someone vehemently, this story is probably going to be one of the only clear choices. It’s not surprising that this passage gets read in a lot of different directions, then—to support both the status quo and change, to support a human view of Jesus and to emphasize his divine resurrection, to position Jesus both as characteristically Jewish and as opposed to Jewish practice. A story like this becomes theological territory that gets squabbled over and contested—sort of like the temple itself.

When we look closely, though, some of the oppositions that we see in the story are not really oppositions at all, or at least they are not as clear-cut as we presume.

One of the core oppositions, for example, is money changers and animal sellers vs religious people. The framing of the story pits money changers and animal sellers against people who—like Jesus—were just trying to visit the temple to practice their religion. I’ve found that many interpretations of this story focus on that aspect—that they emphasize how disruptive or distracting the economic activity would have been, and how inappropriate it would have been to have them happening in the outer precincts of the temple. We interpret these money changers and animal sellers as obstacles to religion. But the opposite really was true. Historically speaking, these people represented services that were necessary for the functioning of the temple, and people going there to worship might not have been able to do so successfully without them. Money changers were there to ensure that people had the correct currencies and denominations, which was important because of the geopolitics surrounding the temple and its activities. (The temple tax required a half shekel, and it was not payable in other currencies and amounts, so you had to change your money). And animal sellers were there because one of the major things people did at the temple was to sacrifice animals. Certainly you could take your own animals to the temple for sacrifice, but depending on where you lived or what kind of occupation you had, that might not have been practical or possible. So the animal sellers were there to facilitate the use of the temple, not stand in the way. Jesus objects to their presence, but he isn’t quite clear why, or what alternatives he would have proposed. “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace,” Jesus said. But markets exist to serve demand, and in this case the demand came from pious people who relied on those changers and sellers to make their temple visits work. The opposition in the story is, at the very least, a lot more complicated than it might appear. One modern analogy might be opposition to church parking lots. There are lots of good reasons to oppose parking lots—they take up space, they look ugly, they incentivize use of cars instead of walking, etc.—but for a lot of people, there are simply not good alternatives to driving and parking. Getting rid of church parking lots sounds good until you think through the ramifications; casting out money changers and animal sellers would have worked the same way.

This leads to a related core opposition in the story and interpretations of it, which we might describe as the temple as it was vs the temple as it ought to have been. Many interpretations of this story imagine that Jesus is engaging in an act of restoration, or “cleansing,” the temple, putting it back to the way it should have been before some degradation or pollution. But that way of viewing the temple isn’t quite accurate. The temple had always been a place for various forms of commerce, and Jesus’ driving out the money changers and animal sellers didn’t represent a return to some pure ideal. It’s interesting that when asked to give an account for his actions (in verse 18), Jesus didn’t cite any scripture about the purity of the temple. Instead, Jesus changed the subject to his own death and resurrection (albeit in a cloaked kind of way), in the language of destroying the temple and rebuilding it, not renewing it or resetting it. Christian (and especially Protestant) readings of this story often place the emphasis on restoration and renewal, because those are core values and historical experiences of Christians and especially Protestants. But it’s not clear from a close reading of the text that that’s what anyone thought Jesus was doing, maybe not even Jesus himself.

The most significant opposition in this story might be the most consequential one, with the longest history of harm: Jews vs Jesus. “The Jews” appear in this story three times. At the beginning in verse 13, Jesus goes to Jerusalem for “the Passover of the Jews.” In 2:18 and 2:20, Jesus and “the Jews” engage in conversation about his actions. The choice of “the Jews” as a way to describe Jesus’ conversation partners here is already unique and in many ways unfortunate. While the other gospels often use more specific terms (like “Pharisees” and “Sadducees,” or “chief priests and scribes” and “principal men of the people” in Mark and Luke’s versions of this story) to describe groups in Jesus’ world, the Gospel of John usually use the broader and less specific word “Jews.” There are complex historical reasons for this that we don’t have the space and time to go into, but suffice it to say that by the time John was written, perhaps decades later than the other three gospels, the history of Judea and the history of the group behind the Gospel of John meant that the more generic term “Jews” made sense.

Part of the problem comes from translation. The word in Greek is Ioudaioi, which means “Judeans.” Judea was a Roman province (and before that it was Yehud, a Babylonian and then a Persian province, and Judah or Yehudah, the southern kingdom of Israel). Ioudaioi referred to that political entity, and to the geography behind it, and to the nationality (or “ethnicity,” broadly construed) of the people who occupied that geographical area, and to the religious practices of those people. There isn’t a way for us to translate all of those meanings into one word in English. In verse 13, we can see some of the tension. “The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem,” it reads. Here, we can see the religious dimension of Ioudaioi, but also its ethnic and geographical dimensions. Jesus was an insider to this group; Jesus was a Ioudaios. That’s why he traveled to the geographical center of the nation, which was also the political and religious capital, for the festival. But that makes interpreting verses 18 and 20 harder, especially in English. There, Ioudaioi always gets translated “the Jews,” which makes it feel like Jesus was in opposition to “the Jews,” rather than being one of them, which he was. The choice of “the Jews” to translate Ioudaios here, while very defensible, also obscures the multiplicity of meaning, and to modern English readers it makes this whole thing look like a religious dispute. (After all, in our world, “the Jews” usually points to a religious group). It was a religious dispute, on some level, but it was an intramural one, a Jew talking to other Jews. And in the context of how and why the Gospel of John was written the way it was, it might well be that translating Ioudaioi here as “the Judeans” makes more sense, since that Gospel-of-John-writing group’s estrangement from “the Jews” was as much geographical as theological. In short, there is a deeply complicated and layered history behind this story and the way it is being told, and it’s hard to capture that in English.

What’s clear, though, is that Christians who see this as a dispute between Jesus and “the Jews” are likely to miss the point. It’s not a dispute between Jesus and “the Jews,” it’s a dispute among Jews (Judeans), and the sides and the stakes were not the same then as they are now. It doesn’t help to read our modern categories into this story. Christians often blow past these nuances, and decide that in this story Jesus was showing up to correct an entire wayward nation and religion, “the Jews,” and that he alone represented the tradition, the customs, the right practices, and the truth. That leads to dangerous assumptions about Jews in the present day, what they represent, and what relationship Jesus might have had to them. Christians make the mistake of stripping Jesus of his Jewish identity and making him an enemy of “the Jews,” not a participant among them. This is a common thread in many of the interpretations I listed at the beginning, including the ones coming from liberal Christians who celebrate “overturning tables” as an act of resistance to established religious systems. We make Jesus a hero in this story only by giving Jesus Jewish villains to oppose.

Lent arrives this year in the midst of one of the strongest surges of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in living memory. Around the world, ascendant right wing nationalist political parties make Jews their enemies and win political points by denouncing Jews. This is true in the United States, where participants in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville carried signs calling Jews “Satan’s Children,” and in the many acts of violence against Jews and synagogues that have proliferated as the American right has gained power. The war in Gaza—whatever you think of Israel’s policies—has made this problem of anti-Semitism much worse. This Lenten season, in the midst of so much swirling hatred and prejudice, Christians have a special obligation to be careful with their stories, to avoid doing theological harm that can lead to physical violence and suffering for Jews. If you find yourself preaching or teaching a story like this one in a way that makes Jews into villains, stop and ask yourself how it is that you’ve made the Jewish Jesus into his own enemy, and into the enemy of his people, and then search out a different interpretation.