[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.’ (Gospel according to St Mark, Chapter 11)
In the 1989 film Jesus of Montreal a small group of actors is invited to reinvent the traditional Passion plays for Holy Week. The actors are not particularly devout but they engage fully with the gospel stories in order to bring them to life. In doing so, they seem to capture something of the radical nature of the gospel. By contrast, the church is portrayed as an utterly hypocritical institution, which has lost touch with the power of its own message. The actors decide to abandon the outdated tableau style of the traditional play and act out the gospel stories realistically, and, as they enter into the spirit of the stories, they begin to have parallel experiences in everyday life, almost as if engaging with the Gospels with such honesty cannot fail to have a transforming effect on them.
In one scene, one of the female actors auditions for a TV advert and finds herself on the receiving end of some of the sexist abuse that is common in that business. The actor who plays Jesus accompanies her to the audition and, when he sees her being exploited, steps in fearlessly to protect his friend. He trashes the studio, turning over the tables and tripods, smashing cameras and computers as he goes along, his anger growing with every step. This is not the calm and peaceful demonstration that a caricature of Jesus might suggest; it's clearly an act of criminal destruction.
I recently showed this film to a group of theology students in Cambridge and, when it was finished, one of them voiced what many of us must have thought - that the traditional way we think of Christianity is that you aren't allowed to get angry, feel passionate, or care so much about something that it leads to radical, unorthodox and criminal acts.
I love the Jesus of Montreal adaptation of the biblical storybecause it delivers an image of the kind of passion and commitment to the cause of righteousness that makes Jesus (or his followers)fearless against the powers that be. Acoording to Matthew, Mark and Luke, the day Jesus turned over the tables in the Temple was the day after Palm Sunday. Temple worship involved giving sacrifices--sometimes of money, which needed to be in the right currency, and sometimes of animals. Which kind of animal you were expected to sacrifice would depend on whether you were rich or poor. Consequently there were stalls lined up in the entrance to the Temple, offering currency exchange and the sale of animals and birds, not offered purely as a service to worshippers but as a means of making as much money as possible for the traders.
Jesus must have seen these stalls plenty of times on previous visits to the Temple. Why he began destroying them on this particular visit isn't explained to us, but his action is one of outrage at the sight of injustice and commercialism masquerading as religion, and he seems to have decided that a peaceful demonstration wouldn't meet the occasion. He didn't just stand there with a placard, organise a sit-in, or preach on the corner. He began to trash the stalls and scatter the merchandise.
The audition scene in the film captures the kind of scene where, for the sake of a few people making a lot of money, others are dehumanised and taken advantage of. The parallel with the money-changers is beautifully drawn, bur it demonstrates that the point Jesus made was about something bigger than just respect fora religious institution. Jesus was outraged that injustice was so blatantly on show in the temple, a place that more than anywhere else symbolized the presence of God.
It's easy to fall into the habit of caricaturing the wrathful "God of the Old Testament" in contrast with Jesus, in the New Testament, as forgiving, liberating and pleasant. (In fact, this tendency is only a short step away from the heresy of Marcion, who believed that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures was irreconcilable with, and superseded by, the Christian God.) One of the great correctives to this caricature is this story of Jesus displaying a level of anger against injustice and corruption without which love is so weak as to be almost meaningless.
While I wouldn't recommend that we all go out and commit random acts of criminal violence in the name of Jesus, I do think we should register Jesus' level of anger, and understand how unacceptable, by normal standards, his behaviour was on this occasion. We may sometimes be guilty in Holy Week of painting Jesus in pastel colours, as the lamb led to the slaughter. But the level of emotional and physical strength displayed here shows that, faced with continued injustice, he acted boldly, despite knowing his actions were illegal and shocking. However difficult it may be to define holiness, we do no favours to God if we imply that holiness is wet and wimpish, or meek and mild.
from Giving it Up: Daily Bible Readings from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day
