In the Bible (Matthew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-46, and John 2:15-17), Jesus made a whip of cords to drive out the people selling animals and the moneychangers from the temple courts. He scattered their coins and overturned their tables, saying, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves'”.
I’ve seen the first three episodes of the latest season of The Chosen while waiting around in here. As usual for that show, it’s great.
An interesting thing while Jesus is flipping the tables and cracking a whip where the merchants have set up–Jesus does not make excuses for the individuals trying to make the most of things in a system that’s been set up that he deems to be offensive, disrespectful, and sacrilegious.
The show portrays the merchants as real, regular people, and Jesus’s disruption of them includes damage to their wares much more expensive than anything Just Stop Oil, Declare Emergency, or the like have ever done. He hurts these regular people just trying to live in a corrupt scenario through what he does, and says ‘you are to blame’ for doing what they do when speaking to them.
He doesn’t caveat that with ‘ah, but you are pawns to your environment, bigger people than you are responsible for this,’ he says you– YOU– are responsible.
Never mind that nobody had really ever well told these people before that what they were doing was wrong, and so they wouldn’t be as likely to know. Never mind that authority figures allowed what they did to occur, that what they were doing had become tradition by then. Jesus came up and very dramatically expressed his disapproval with both *the system* these people were engaging in *and them* for keeping it going. He didn’t disrupt the authority figures as directly with that action as he did the merchants, who are, again, relatively speaking to the Pharisees, at least, just regular guys.
Imagine if Declare Emergency had blamed the drivers when it blocked the roads that it blocked, or the people at the museum or archives where they did their paint actions. Imagine if Declare Emergency had destroyed even *one year*’s worth of hard labor done by the people that it disrupted. Jesus did that and more when he disrupted the market in the way that he did.
We *all* should acknowledge and own our complicity in *any* bad scenario– and the complicity of those around us– if we are to better overcome such a scenario.
If we do not sew doubt into the existing way of doing things, even amongst our peers and those beneath us– where would the fervor and momentum be for changing them? If we ourselves and others themselves don’t take some of the blame, we and they will keep making excuses, and be much more likely to keep fueling that which is destroying us, because, after all, it’s ‘not our fault,’ supposedly.
Which would make the impression better on the merchants that what they were doing was wrong– a series of conversations that they could choose to opt out of, or one unavoidable, shocking event that they couldn’t escape?
Did Jesus have time for the former at that point in his life?
