By Rola Al Askar

Maybe it is hard for you to imagine that Jesus has such an angry public reaction, especially for those of you from Japanese descent, because your culture teaches you that to be dignified you should always stay calm and never lose it, no matter how angry you are. Now as a Lebanese that would kill me. Pastor Aart always jokes about me that I sometimes argue to feel alive. It is true that we can be loud and expressive people, and I think I am the only one who will like this: but if you want to know what Jesus was like, I am your closest indication! The traditional reading of this passage that Jesus got angry at the commercial activities going on in the place of worship, does not work historically.First of all, if you were a 1^st century Jewish pilgrim who had traveled many miles it was more adequate to buy animals for sacrifice from Jerusalem than to carry them all the way from home. Therefore the sellers and the money changers, who made sure the animals and the coinage were ritually adequate for sacrifice and offering, provided a necessary service for the functioning of the temple.And second, since Passover celebrated the exodus of the early Jews from Egypt, this remembrance of liberation became the occasion for riots and revolts. As a result, Rome always reinforced security around the temple around that time of the year. So, if we visualize the scene, it is not possible that Jesus and his disciples have taken control of the entire temple court and held it for hours, because that would have gotten the attention of the Roman soldiers.Therefore, we need to imagine that the disruption was brief, and in a limited area, and thus it was symbolic.As Chelsea already explained, the expression “den of robbers” is related to acts of injustice. The temple has become a den of robbers not because it is the place where the robbery occurs, but, the place the robbers go for refuge. Hence Jesus’s criticism was against those who dwelled in the holy temple, the high priest who was a Roman puppet, and of the filthy priests, scribes and elders, all of whom helped the Romans oppress 95% of the Jewish population, so that they keep the privileges given to them by Rome.A sad fact of life is that foreign powers can only exert force on indigenous people through local help and reinforcement. That is true at all eras since the time of the bible and till now. But every now and then, a character whose name is to be remembered for decades to follow, emerges and changes the face of history.

The Lebanese/Syrian Fares El Khoury was one. He was the first Syrian representative in the United Nations. During the French mandate on Syria and Lebanon, when General Gouraud declared that the French army must stay in Syria in order to defend the Syrian Christians form the Muslims, he went into the Umayyad mosque, one of the biggest and oldest mosques in the world, and he went up on the pulpit and said: “If France wants to keep occupying Syria to protect us Christians from Muslims, then as a Christian from this pulpit, I declare that there is no God but Allah. Of course in Islamic context, this declaration almost means declaring oneself as Muslim. On that day, worshipers in the mosque carried him on their shoulders and marched all over Damascus, and Christians went on the streets in a historical scene, shouting . Through his symbolic action, the Syrian prime minister awakened the Syrians from their state of numbness, and opened their eyes to their being more than just Christians OR Muslims, but to being Christian AND Muslim victims of the same oppressive system.Friends, oppressive systems are everywhere in this greedy world. But certain nations are just more privileged than others in the freedom of speech and expression they allow to their citizens; and this country is one example. But sadly, even when we don’t like certain systems, if they do not affect us directly, we accept them as “the way things are.” But as Christians, the gospel for today dares us to look up instead to “the way things should be” in the kingdom as envisioned by Jesus.Through his symbolic action of temporarily “shutting down” the temple, Jesus hints into the ineligibility of this temple. God is a God of justice and when worship substitutes for justice, God rejects that worship, God rejects God’s own temple, or for us today, God’s church.I know we all prefer the “gentle lamb” image of Jesus, and feel uncomfortable around the Jesus who flips tables and disrupt orders. Though he died as one, Jesus wasn’t necessarily a political activist, and I do not think that Jesus calls us today to be political rebels, but he is definitely inviting us to take actions, to express nonviolent resistance to injustice.Such a message often comes with a price. People like Fares El Khoury, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther king all find a model in Jesus, and it isn’t a surprise that most of them were assassinated.Being on the road with Jesus, we have to accept that the cross is an inevitable stop along that road… But let us not forget that the cross was never, nor will it ever be the end of that road. Amen.