Holy Monday: Occupying the Temple

By Marcie Smith

According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the events of “Holy Monday” are the trigger, the moment that Judea’s elites conclude Jesus must be killed. His triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, which seemed to fulfill a prophecy from Zechariah, had made them uneasy. But today was something of an entirely different order: Jesus has stormed the Temple.

In the Judea of Jesus’s time, religious power was bound up with economic and political power, expressed as a theocratic ruling class that managed affairs for imperial Rome. Jesus would have had a tense relationship with these religious authorities since childhood. The relationship became ever more fraught as Jesus began his teaching ministry, elevating self-abandoning love over judgment, defending those condemned and brutalized by the powerful, and exposing the false religiosity of ruling powers. More threatening still, people responded to him. Jesus drew huge crowds who came to be fed, healed, comforted, forgiven – to be fortified. In very concrete, material ways, Jesus was strengthening the people.

Jesus with the masses, in the countryside, playing with children, feeding thousands with a few fish and loaves: this is “friendly Jesus.” But the Jesus of Holy Monday reveals another side of his ministry, one that has flickered in the Gospels before, but only comes into full view now: dangerous, subversive Jesus.

The Temple in Jerusalem was not just a religious center; it was a commercial center, something like Judea’s Wall Street. The Temple’s outer courts housed markets. The Gospels specifically mention the sale of animals for Temple sacrifices. Often prices were usuriously high, as was famously the case with doves, the only animal the poor could afford to offer in sacrifice. The Temple courts also housed moneychangers, who exchanged currencies for high fees, which was often necessary for paying Temple taxes. Even the Temple itself operated as a bank, lending to Jerusalem’s public for profit.

This is the context of Holy Monday. Jesus has entered the heart of Jerusalem’s commercial power, the seat of his open enemies. He is bearing a “whip of cords." He turns himself into human bulldozer, literally destroying market stalls and merchants’ private property, driving them from the courts. As they flee, he excoriates them for exploiting poor widows and turning his Father’s house into a “den of thieves.” He sends all market participants scattering, effectively shutting down all trading. (Imagine someone doing this in the New York Stock Exchange, or on Fifth Avenue. What would we call them?)

Then and there, Jesus – not a rabbi, not bearing any "formal" religious authority – establishes himself and his teaching as the new Temple authority. He begins ministering and healing from the Temple itself. Put more succinctly, Jesus occupies the Temple.

This was a stunning “crime" committed in full public view, a kind of coup that had profound symbolic and spiritual significance, but also very immediate material implications. He had unseated Jerusalem’s commercial elite in the Temple itself. If we want to see Jesus clearly, how can we avoid meditating on this extreme action, which Jesus understood very well would help seal his fate?

Maybe you’ve heard that Jesus was furious at “the desecration of the Temple.” That’s true. But how exactly had the Temple been desecrated? By “lewd” sex acts? Profane or politically incorrect language? Women in leadership? Heretical doubters raising inappropriate questions? Racial mixing? Failure to properly observe the official protocols and liturgies?

No. By the reduction of God’s very House to an auction block, where base, exploitative self-interest ruled. The logic of the market pivots on exchange for personal, selfish gain. This alienated mode of being undermines brotherhood and sisterhood, leads to a culture of generalized exploitation, and is the opposite of love, which gives without expectation. Today, market law has been systematized and globalized, operating as master code in our global social system, capitalism. But even in 1st century Judea, the virus of money-love was there. And this market logic had insinuated itself into even the most sacred of spaces, the Temple. Like a hungry ghost that will never know peace, the logic of the market will consume everything if we let it. It wants nothing short of total rule, even if it means spiritual and material destruction. It will even unseat God in God’s very House.

In liberating and occupying the Temple, Jesus was staking an unambiguous, subversive, unavoidably political claim that would define his Via Dolorosa: this impulse of selfishness, sanitized as market relations, is not the highest law. It must be subordinated, circumcised and circumscribed. Greed is not "good." Any power that testifies as much is illegitimate. Adonai is the true Sovereign, and had returned to take back its House.

This was the hill Jesus was to die on.

Marcie Smith is a lawyer teaching in the department of economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She has a JD from the University of North Carolina School of Law. Her writing has appeared in Jacobin Magazine and at Nonsite.org.

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