March 15, 2009

Denise Kelsall

Lent 3     Exodus 20:1-17     John 2: 13-22

Great stuff I thought on reading today’s gospel – how absolutely appropriate it appears in light of the devastating rapacious and tragic economic meltdown that is occurring worldwide right now.

I must also admit to personally really liking this angry and indignantly righteous Jesus.

Such a human response to blatant avarice, to unprincipled people on the make, to structures that render crass what should be holy is very understandable and admirable.

I like this Jesus because he is so very human - unlike the holy man of wisdom, the messiah, the saviour, the prophet, the healer, the son of God, this is a Jesus that everyone can identify with and admire. Haven’t we all secretly wanted to overturn the tables or rage against injustice and yet mostly we just slink away fuming inside. Perhaps we write a letter or complain bitterly to friends or just take a deep breath and think ‘it’s not worth it’ and get on with life, unlike the courageous and physical fulminating of Jesus.

As we hear this narrative takes place around the time of the Passover which is a major annual festival celebrating the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. It was important, particularly for males, to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem at this time. The place would have been crowded with thousands of people from far and wide. In the outer court of the Gentiles booths were set up by moneychangers and merchants. The moneychangers exchanged Roman and Greek coins with the images of the emperor or of gods for Jewish shekels. Unsurprisingly, as this was a captive market, the people were commonly charged exorbitant exchange rates. The people were required to make a sacrifice and commonly they bought the animals from the merchants as they had to be pure and unblemished. As a result animal merchants did great business in the temple courtyard – and of course – the price of sacrificial animals was highly inflated.

The bustle and the noise, the cacophony with throngs of people moving everywhere, cages upon cages of doves, cattle mooing and sheep baaing – imagine it - it would have been impossible for anyone to worship there. And in strides this Jesus who overturns the tables and the money is spilling everywhere and he drives out the traders and the animals with a whip telling them all to ‘get your commerce and greed out of this holy place.’ It’s a great and vivid scene. To give you an idea of the magnitude, the Scottish author William Barclay quotes a report by Josephus, a 1st century historian, and hypothesizes that 250,000 sheep were sacrificed in one Passover. [1]

There are many reasons given for Jesus’ actions but a common one is the extortionate profit that these moneychangers and merchants were making. And this brings me back to our current world economic crisis. Different time, different place, different scale, different stakes, different loss, but the same desire to get more than is due, the same profligate greed, the same disrespect, the same captive access, the same manipulation of structures and systems that undergirds the current economic meltdown.

It’s all wrong – we all know. As usual the innocent, the weak, the poor, the dependent, the trusting, are those who suffer. The money remains elusively unaccounted for or disappears from the ledger as markets fail, and those who have made rank amounts of money melt as quietly as possible into the background. In this vein I found it a very sick joke when I read an article a few months ago wondering why the super-rich had taken to hanging out in old jeans, T-shirts and trainer’s. It is obviously not the time to flaunt one’s wealth.

Mystified I ask myself why does this happen. Is it about power – yes, is it the desire for accumulation – yes, is it just plain greed – yes, and on another tack - is it heartless – yes, is it unethical – yes, is it a sick disease of our culture – yes. And even though these characteristics are nothing new it is still shocking. Everywhere we look – everywhere we go – we see what money can buy – our consumer society has bred a rottenness, capitalism which spawned deregulation of money and markets, a move which the discredited economist Alan Greenspan said would be self regulating through self-interest, has all proved to be a hollow sham that has taken millions of innocent hardworking people down, and directly and indirectly is causing death and destruction on a global scale.

I inwardly fume and cry when I read of people who have lost jobs, are ill and cannot afford medical treatment, and therefore will certainly die. So it is cold comfort but worthwhile to read a recent lecture titled Ethics Economics and Global Justice by Rowan Williams.[2] He says that the current crisis goes deeper than greed and asserts that in the west society has repeatedly voted in governments over the last couple of decades that have been committed to the neoliberal agenda of deregulated markets. He argues that a change of heart must accompany structural reform to address the crisis and offers five principles for adjusting the current system based on practices of mutuality, realism and trust, and three grounds for religiously re-conceiving human possibilities. It is an informative lecture with questions and answers at the end which are illuminating. However, an overriding principle as a human being, a Christian, a citizen of this world is to be informed by the following quote - “Our ethical seriousness is tested by how we behave towards those whose goodwill or influence is of ‘no use’ to us. Hence, the frequently repeated claim that the moral depth of a society can be assessed by how it treats its children – or, one might add, it’s disabled, its elderly or it’s terminally ill. Ethical behaviour is behaviour that respects what is at risk in the life of another and works on behalf of the other’s need.”

Well, after reading his lecture which I urge you to look at, I felt a bit deflated in my righteous anger as I had to admit what I knew all along – that it is so much more complex than just sheer greed. However, I am not about to drop the point. At a very simple level, as illustrated by our gospel today, it is about unethical behaviour and greed is somewhere very near the top of the list.

As I mentioned before I like this Jesus because he got angry and obviously I can identify with that. I also like this Jesus because he is not the ‘wimpy Jesus’ dressed in white with long chestnut hair that people, particularly secular people, identify him as. He is not just about salvation and sin as in popular perception but about justice and righteous indignation that leads to good strong political actions that shock and awe.

The Temple authorities, the priests no less, in this story were part of a racket to extort money from people – they took their cut from the moneychangers. If someone brought their own animal to be sacrificed it had to be inspected by the Temple priests. Predictably the animal was nearly always rejected and the person had to buy another. Righteous anger in the face of extortion and injustice is healthy. It is not the opposite of love – it is a cry for truth and goodness and ethical behaviour. It is a shift from passive acceptance of things as they are towards active and positive resistance and change.

As Augustine so aptly wrote “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage: Anger at the way things are, and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”

Endnotes:

[1] William Barclay, The Mind of Jesus. (Harper, 1960).

[2] http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2323