Through the Flaming Sword

Today is Palm Sunday and the weird political vibe of our time prompts me to reflect on the first “Palm Sunday.” The first “Palm Sunday” was a radical political event, but its import has not been taught to us. In fact, a surface reading of the accounts does not even really tell us what actually happened, let alone what the event meant in the moment. 

Just a little imagination and common sense shows us something quite different than the “cleansing of the temple” summary that we usually get as a heading in our Bibles for these passages. While Jesus was vehemently opposed to the corruption of the temple, he was not much concerned with its “uncleanness”; he famously disregarded his culture’s obsession with “uncleanness” in the first place. His real concern was the temple’s thievery.

It started out with what amounted to a royal coronation procession into the gates of Jerusalem in which he and his followers proclaimed that God’s kingdom was being established right then and there. Never mind those high priests behind the curtain pretending to be in charge of Judea’s temple-state, or the Roman imperial occupiers who had the final say over all the really important stuff in Judea’s governance.

After proclaiming his alternative kingdom, what does the herald of this new kingdom do next? He raids the temple-state’s currency exchange. 

Jesus and his followers burst into the court where Jews from all over the empire, who had come to celebrate Passover in the Holy Land, have come to change their unclean foreign currency for temple-state coinage and then buy the animals they need for their guilt offerings and sin offerings and for Passover itself.

Picture the scene: Jesus and his followers drive the animals into a frenzy. He or his people pitch over the cashiers’ tables, with their record keeping scrolls and their trays of money. His people intercept the servants who are desperately trying to escape into the temple precincts with the “vessels”.

This is the scene: Animals are crashing around, the noise a raucous din, maybe the door has been left open and the animals are making a break for it. Disciples are grabbing the record scrolls off the floor and making off with them or tearing them up. Others are scrambling on the floor to scoop up the coins that are rolling around. Others seize the big clay jars with the coin reserves in them that the temple servants are trying to escape with. And all the while, Jesus is calling down an oracle of God’s judgment, quoting Jeremiah about a “den of thieves”, while his own people are themselves Robin Hood-thieving the temple-state’s money. A wonderful, even comical irony.

If the insurrectionists had left the door open and the animals are finding their way out, you can picture his followers making their escape, too, under cover of the herd’s bleating retreat out the door, much like Odysseus did with his men when escaping from the cyclops’s cave in the Odyssey.

One wonders where the security forces were in this melee. Surely the temple-state had some kind of security there to guard the money. Maybe they are the “servants” who try to make it to the doors with the “vessels.” Clearly the mayhem, the tactical genius of the action, outmaneuvers them.

Meanwhile, all this takes place in the literal shadow of the Roman fort that had been built right up against the city’s walls next to the temple precinct to prevent exactly this kind of peasant revolt from happening, as it had occurred just a few years before and would soon again. Passover is, after all, a religious holiday celebrating God liberating his people from their captivity by a foreign imperial power. Rome sent an entire extra legion to Palestine during the Passover season to deal with any insurrectionists (like Jesus) who might be too inspired by the holiday’s message, because it happened so often.

Meanwhile, the city is extremely crowded with all the pilgrims from the Jewish Roman diaspora come here for Passover, crowded in a massive tent city throughout the streets of the city because there aren’t enough rooms to let. People, tens, animals, all trying to find a place as close to the temple as possible, ‘cause that’s where all the action is, that’s where all the crowds will be going. It’s as if all the families in America that could afford it planned to go to Disney World on the same day. 

So the rioters just melt into the massive crowds with their loot and maybe some animals and their grins on their faces, while the Roman soldiers arrive too late to do anything but scoop up some leftover coins themselves. 

I imagine the high priests in charge of the temple-state calling the guys in charge of the exchange onto the carpet to answer for the loss of all that revenue and monetary reserves, maybe taking it out of their salaries, or even out of their hides. I imagine the famously cruel and erratic Pontius Pilate calling the garrison commander onto the carpet to answer for how he let this rabble raid the temple under their very noses and demanding some intel about where the insurrectionist leader might have skied off to—“He announced himself at the city gates, for Tiberius’s sake. What—were you playing lots with your officers and drinking this terrible Judean wine while a riot breaks out next door?” I wonder who lost their commission that day?

No wonder they all wanted his head. 

The Christian faith is radical in its very core, and much of the gospel message is about money, poverty, and economic oppression—“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” reads the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer. 

Ani, the Hebrew word for “poor,” can mean either poor or oppressed because, in ancient Israel, they were the same thing. Ani, as in Bethany—beth ani, house of the poor/oppressed, home of Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and Simon the Leper. Ani, the poor and oppressed, are Jesus’ constituency (Like 15-30). And “Palm Sunday” was their breakout moment, their formal declaration of their kingdom intentions and their first insurrectionist act.