The story of Jesus driving out the money sellers in the temple is always an option for the gospel reading on Holy Tuesday, the week-long journey through the cross to Easter. With that overlay, hearing the story four weeks before Easter gives us a taste of what lies ahead not just in the gospel narrative but also in our own faith journey. It also is a peculiar story because it is one of the very few gospel stories where we see a truly ripped Jesus. It seems uncharacteristic, especially coming from the gospel according to John, which starts off with such an elegant and mystical description of Christ’s coming into the world, with words we hear every Christmas Day, ‘In the beginning was the Word….’
This gospel story holds the potential of hitting very close to our hearts since we live in a culture whose lifeline, air and water is money. Our entire life is defined by how much of the stuff we have. Less is our life defined by the good that we do with it. Even less of our life seems to be defined by who we are, rather than what we are.
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Unless you’ve been on retreat or walking the Camino de Santiago where you’ve chosen not to read newspapers, watch television or go online, you have surely heard about the collapse of the stock market and, even more problematic, the collapse of the Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff. He bilked billions of dollars from investors (something like $65B), including my hometown’s police department, notables such as Elie Weisel, Stephen Spielberg (many, many Jewish clients), and countless non-profits. The hospital where my brother works lost $5.7M. He says, ‘There is a new verb around here: getting “Madoffed”!’ I can’t even begin to imagine what a person can do with all that money. Madoff may say he is embarrassed and sorry but the fact remains that his greed has left many people without their nest egg and some are actually facing homelessness. Not all these people were the super wealthy either and many didn’t even know their money was with Madoff’s firm until the scheme blew apart. What is this mess really all about? The idol of money, of course.
How many times have we heard stories of some church person bilking the church, of all places? The church where I was baptised, woke up to the realisation twenty-five years ago that their treasurer had skimmed off some $125.000 during his tenure. My mother even was affected by the crime because the money she gave in memory of her mother for a garden statue of Saint Francis disappeared and the statue was never bought. What was it all about? The idol of money, of course.
Today El Salvador will elect a new president and vice-president. The campaign has been vicious, physically violent at times, and filled with half-truths and outright lies. It is hard to know who will win and regardless which party wins, they will be faced with a country riddled by gangs and poverty. A friend lamented that Salvadorans used to complain about fourteen families running the entire country. Now it’s down to about four or five. There may be an emerging middle class but the poor are getting poorer and poorer by the day. The well-to-do can afford to drive around in $45000 cars while others can’t even afford the tin roof over their heads. What’s it all about? The idol of money, of course.
What’s wrong with these pictures? Do I really need to say so or don’t we already know? And, if we do know, then where do we go from here? Do I need to say that our culture has a really confused relationship with money? What do we make of Jesus’ rage at the money changers in the temple?
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Jean Vanier, the French founder of the Arche communities for persons living with mental and physical handicaps, sometimes the most broken and forgotten people around the world, knows another way of living that is not contingent upon one’s worth predicated in monetary value but in spiritual goodness and humanity. He comments on this passage from John:
The first place Jesus visits when he goes to Jerusalem is the Temple, the ‘house of his Father.’ For the Jewish people, the Temple is the sign of the presence of God: God’s ‘dwelling place’ among them.
But what does Jesus find in the Temple?
People selling cattle, sheep and doves and money changers sitting at their tables. People had changed his Father’s house into a place of commerce!
Jesus was enraged and he drove the people out of the Temple. Instead of worshipping God, people were making an idol of money. They were selling animals for sacrifice at an unjust price. The money changers were taking a big commission, impoverishing those who were already quite poor because of the Temple tax they had to pay with Temple money, not Roman money. …
We can imagine the commotion, the screaming, the noise of the animals, the sound of money falling to the ground as Jesus chases the animals out of the Temple. The money changers and those trying to hold on to their animals shout in fury. The whole place is in chaos! Jesus, with a whip, filled with the ‘zeal of his Father’s house’ cannot bear to see this holy place—where the Jewish people were called to listen to God and be faithful to God’s covenant of love—turned into a place of commerce. (1)
Vanier reads into this passage that, as Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers, he is also overturning people’s understanding of themselves. As Jesus speaks of the sanctuary of the Temple, he is also speaking of the sanctuary of the body. He shifts the conversation from the sacredness of the Temple to the sacredness of his body. Vanier then goes on to say:
Jesus, hurt and angered by the desecration of the Temple of Jerusalem, ‘his Father’s house,’ is also crying out against the desecration of the temple of our own bodies. We human beings are also called to be the home, the dwelling place, of God.
He cites Etty Hillesum, ‘a young Jewish woman in Holland, who was later gassed by the Nazis in Auschwitz, who had a deep sense of the value of each person as the “home” of God. At one time, when she was in Westerbork, waiting with other Jews for their final hour of deportation to Auschwitz, she wrote that her only desire was to help people discover the treasure of their personhood, that each person is called to be the ‘home of God’: And I promise you, yes I promise you, my God, that I shall try to find a ‘home’ and a roof for you in as many houses as possible. There are so many empty houses where I will bring you in as a guest of honor’ (69).
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What if you and I truly were to encourage one another to find the sense of our value as people and not as consumers (because in some ways, we also are money changers)?
What if we were to help others find their treasure as a human being? What if we were to help each other discover how we each are the home of God? And what does being the home of God mean?
A few things, for starters…
• finding our value, not in money, or what we have, or what our vocation or profession is;
• reminding ourselves that we are God’s beloved and always have been regardless of whatever we have done that might have injured our neighbours and ourselves, though we do need to turn our lives around and seek forgiveness;
• setting aside time for God through prayer, service and delight and wonder in God’s creation;
• becoming what we already are and have been through baptism (in the words of Saint Augustine);
• using righteous anger in unjust situations that take away another person’s sense of being God’s beloved.
What other ways can you think of encouraging others and yourself to be God’s home?
An article in a recent publication by the Anglican Episcopal Church of El Salvador suggests, ‘We are invited to live in a simple way, ready to give and receive. We shouldn’t excuse poverty. Poverty kills people, physically and spiritually. But to live with gratitude for what we have, and hold onto that which gives us life is to live in God’s economy. Being rich is not a sign that God blesses us. Neither is being poor a sign that God punishes us. Living with joy and care with all of God’s creation within our communal relationships is a sign of God’s blessing.’
If we live into all these suggestions and encourage one another and ourselves, we will (in the words of Saint Augustine) become what we already are and have been, marked as God’s own for ever through baptism. Then, too, shall we better know God, for the ‘glory of God is the human being fully alive’ (Iranaeus). Finally, we will find a new economy — God’s — that will change our lives.
END NOTE
(!) Jean Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004, 64, 66).
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