Holy Week Monday — Cleaning the Temple
God is love, Christ violently drove the wicked from the temple. Turn the cheek, wield the whip. Lion and lamb.
Comment:
We are doing Holy Week at the JG. There is no one accepted chronology and indeed there can’t be, so we are generally following along with the Church’s recommended reading.
Christ violently cleaning the temple is a proclamation of both secular and religious authority. See Blessed be the King that Cometh for more.
It is also an extreme thing to do, just as Christ letting himself be tortured and killed and blasphemed by the unworthy is an extreme thing to do, but at the opposite extreme. Both occurred within the same week.
A friend wrote me,
The gospels are full of contraries. “Contradictions” are because reality is hard to put into words, sometimes you have to have both thoughts in your mind at once, or know how to balance the thoughts with proper guidance.
Joseph Smith said that all truth is found in contraries. Paradoxes and contraries are one way that God communicates infinite truths to finite minds such as the ones you and I have got.
I’ve gone through and pulled some of our best stuff on the contrary between Christ’s violent power and his meek submission for you to read and think about.
All Things Denote There is a God
Update:
The other insight here is how Christ rejects our society’s rules that says that ordering other people to commit violence is high status but committing it yourself is low status. If a leader orders police to get tough on crime, or orders soldiers into a war where they will kill and be killed, we call him tough and strong. But if he were to commit violence himself even against someone who deserved it we would think he was a brute and be disgusted. It would be a shocking breach of protocol for a judge to execute a murderer that the judge had sentenced to execution. Violence is at best blue collar.
Now, I am not challenging you to go out and punch someone. ( Though there is something to be said for the spiritual benefits of martial arts or boxing or wrestling. There is wisdom in the body that way. “Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth,” – Mike Tyson.) I am not even necessarily saying that we need to overturn our culture. Cultural rules often make sense within the culture. What I am saying is that we should stop thinking that our cultural rules are eternal truths.
We are much more comfortable with Christ Jehovah ordering the slaughter of thousands of Canaanites in the Old Testament and causing hundreds of thousands of Nephites in 3 Nephi 9 to be burned, drowned, crushed, or buried alive than we are with Christ physically whipping people where no one got killed because in the second one he “got his own hands dirty.” We use getting your hands dirty as a metaphor for doing something immoral but confuse ourselves into thinking that the real problem is actually getting dirt on your hands. And so the office man who ordered a war for political gain, or just for fun, still gets invited to dinner parties. Where the police man who wrestles with drunks and wades in when a couple is fighting on a domestic callout and who punches a resisting suspect in the mouth, our art and literature and attitudes treat him as damaged by it.
Jesus on the other hand makes it clear to us in the cleaning of the temple that what he will command, he will do. He is above nothing that is righteous. It is very hard to find paintings that show Christ actually committing violence in the temple. Mostly he is holding the whip up threateningly or simply pointing as a command to leave. The painting I used here is about the best I could do.
Our culture has a gnostic tendency to think that bodily things are suspect and abstract mental and spiritual things are good. The glorious truth that God the son came to earth to have a body, that he was resurrected in his body, that the Father also has a body, and that we will be resurrected as bodies–that we, the Father and the Son and all of us, don’t just have bodies but are bodies–that is the glorious good news that the restored gospel has for the world. Do not be ashamed to be a being in the flesh. It is liberation.
And so, during Holy Week leading up to the tragedy of the death of Christ in the body and the eternal victory of his resurrection in the body, look for how Christ affirms the body. Today, the whipping. Tomorrow, Christ going to a fig tree hungry. Thursday, the passover feast. Imagine Christ picking up unleavened bread with his hands, inserting it in his mouth, chewing it, his saliva mixing with the bread, the motions of the muscles in his throat as he swallows the food down, perhaps smacking his lips, perhaps wiping a few crumbs from his face, the physical feeling of fulness in his stomach. These things are also holy.
Sute
April 3, 2023
This is an example that is tragically all too frequently used to justify aggression, “when appropriate “. Indeed, it seems to show the exact opposite.
All across Jesus’ life there are examples where he could have justified aggression or violence and he didn’t. Oppressed people by religious leaders? Call them vipers and preach. Oppressed people by tyrannical government? Tell them to submit. Violent mob ready to kill a helpless woman? Scratch something in the dirt and ask a rhetorical question.
This temple example sticks out because it’s so bizarre. He couldn’t have reverenced that particular temple so much that he couldn’t stand the thought of scheming money changers playing games with currency exchange and livestock sales. Although that’s for sure an injustice.
Remember the conversation with the woman at the well. Jerusalem was brought up as the place to worship (because of the revered presence of the temple). And Jesus dismissed it. Jesus and John before him likewise pulled people away from the temple and again and again to preach in the wilderness.
To him, this particular temple, built by Herod, was not a holy site that he needed go cleanse. I think his actions were a few things:
He wanted to provoke the powers in Jerusalem at their seat of power (the temple).
He was telling them all that their temple focus to worship had corrupted their faith. Think about, virtually nothing he did or taught wad centered around the temple.
He made the proactive statement about destroying the temple and essentially, was saying he was greater than the temple. Their focus was all wrong. And as it turns out, within a generation of his death the temple was indeed destroyed.
Marilyn
April 4, 2023
We do deep Spring Cleaning all during Holy Week and Christ cleansing the temple is one of the things we talk about 🙂 Sometimes you just need to pull everything down, clean up, re-evaluate, and start over with a fresh slate! We also talk about the need for us to really get into the dark corners and “backs of the drawers” in our own repentance so we can really be clean!
G.
April 11, 2023
Sute, I don’t think anybody takes this as a general permit to go ape. I hope not anyway. I do believe though that reading this episode and things like 3 Nephi 9 makes a lot of what is said about Christ and Christianity sound incomplete.
Marilyn, I like that a lot.