Show, Don’t Tell

When I started traveling in the developing world, the thing I found most challenging was not the time change, or the safety precautions about food and water, or the language barrier; it was the haggling. By haggling I mean negotiating a price for something with the owner of a shop or a stall. Here in the United States, we don’t do much haggling.

We do for some big ticket items like cars or houses, but rarely for other things. In the traditional marketplaces that can be found throughout the developing world, however, almost everything there can and must be haggled over. The seller never advertises their prices, because it would never occur to them that there’s such a thing as a singular price.

A price isn’t something that is set, it is something that is determined based on the seller’s appraisal of your buying capacity, which they are very good at doing through what seems like polite small talk: “welcome, my friend, welcome! Where are you from?” The answer to that alone is a big influence on the price, both because of what they assume you have in terms of resources and your willingness to haggle. “How long have you been traveling?” and “where have you visited?” are also big clues; the longer you’ve been traveling, the less money you probably have, and if you rattle off a list of expensive tourist sites you’ve visited in a short time, then you might as well start peeling off the big bills.

The tricky part is that, in many places, you can’t just walk into the market and say, how much is this? There is an expectation of a show of relationship, exchanging greetings and news, getting to know one another, etc., so it’s difficult to avoid showing your cards in conversation without either being rude or outright lying. Because in the midst of those pleasantries, which are usually authentic, there is a shrewd transaction is taking place, which cannot be separated or extracted from the relationship itself.

If you want to have a sense of what a marketplace would have been like in 1st century Judea, then these are the kinds of experiences you need to have: going to the marketplaces in Peru or Senegal or Indonesia and haggling for what you want. The Greek word for “marketplace” is emporion, which is where the Latin word emporium comes from, which we still use today sometimes. Even today, if you go to a store calling itself an “emporium,” it’s usually a store with a lot of unrrelated odds and ends, and sometimes a place where you can still haggle over the items. Several antique stores in the Lehigh Valley have the word “Emporium” in their name, for example.

And they are doing so, in part, to connect the brand of their store back to that ancient understanding of a marketplace where you went to haggle for all kinds of different things that you needed. In ancient days, the marketplace was at the very center of any human settlement. In the Greco-Roman era, it was located in the agora, the open space in the middle of town that was the center of economic, political, and social life. People gathered there not only to either make a living or buy the necessities of life, but to exchange news, debate ideas, catch up with friends, and so on.

The point of all this is that a marketplace is not only not something bad, it is a necessity of any civilization that have evolved beyond the phases of hunter-gatherers or subsistence farming. If you’re going to have any kind of division of labor in the provision of goods and services, you have to have a marketplace to facilitate and regulate those exchanges. And beyond that, it is historically a place that is essential to the well-being of communal life, both in the actual purchasing exchange and well beyond it, going far beyond the impersonal kinds of economic transactions that we have today in monolithic box stores. The ancient style of a marketplace is both relational and transactional; the two are utterly intertwined.

So: what’s Jesus’ problem with what’s happening in the Temple? This is an unusual passage in several ways. First and most obviously, it doesn’t fit with how we typically think of Jesus. Jesus is usually depicted as kind, humble, and gentle when he is portrayed in art or on stage or screen, smiling down on children and the people whom he is teaching or healing.

But here we have something else entirely, to the point that there’s a meme that circulates with artwork depicting Jesus looming over merchants and moneychangers cowering on the ground, with their tables upended all around them, holding their hands up to shield themselves from the blow that Jesus is preparing to deliver with a whip, and which says, “When people ask you, ‘What would Jesus do?’ remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibilities.”

Now, it’s not clear that Jesus is actually chasing the people themselves with a whip. When he walks in, it says that he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the moneychangers seated at their tables; then it says that he made a whip and drove all of them out of the temple, which sounds like the people and the animals, but then it specifies “both sheep and cattle,” which sounds like we’re talking about him just herding the animals out. Added to that is the fact that he then turns to the people selling doves and tells them to “take these things out of here!”, which makes sense, because you can’t herd a flock of doves with a whip the way you can sheep or cattle.

Even so, though, this is a shocking scene in and of itself, with Jesus leading a violent protest against the typical operations of the Temple. It would have felt to them the same way it would feel to us if some random dude came in during this service, kicked over the drums and keyboards, and threw the guitars outside while screaming something about not turning his father’s house into a concert venue.

Well, that’s different, you might say; Jesus was protesting the corruption of the Temple, not just being a jerk in trashing a holy space in the middle of its normal worship life. Except that’s exactly what he was doing. Well, we might debate whether he’s being a jerk or exhibiting righteous anger or maybe a little of both, but he’s definitely trashing a holy space in the middle of its normal worship life. Those cattle and sheep and doves aren’t there for people who are shopping for dinner, they are there so people can buy the animals they need for the required sacrifices they need to make as part of the worship life of the Temple.

And even the moneychangers are there to provide a necessary service: to allow worshippers to pay the Temple tax required of them to help defray the costs of upkeep for the Temple by exchanging Roman coins, which were only about 80% silver, for Tyrian shekels, which were 94% silver and thus pure enough to fulfill the Torah commandment regarding the Temple tax.

In other gospel accounts, Jesus appears to be doing this to protest the corruption of the Temple practices. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all quote him as saying the Temple is supposed to be a house of prayer, but they have turned it into a “den of robbers,” which is an obvious critique of extortionate practices by the sellers and the moneychangers to take advantage of the monopoly they had on the economy of the Temple. But that’s not Jesus’ complaint according to John.

Now, that doesn’t mean that complaint isn’t embedded in Jesus’ actions; I have yet to change money somewhere in the world when I didn’t feel like I was getting ripped off by commissions and exchange rates, and I doubt much has changed since the 1^st century on that one. But that’s not what Jesus is focused on in this scene; that is only part of a larger problem that he thinks is so important that it needs to be driven out of the Temple by force.

Here Jesus yells at his opponents, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” He’s actually talking about something much, much bigger than corruption in the Temple hierarchy; he’s challenging the entire marketplace approach to religion that he feels the Temple now embodies.

As we’ve already established, the marketplaces is not a bad place; on the contrary, it is a place of real goodness, materially and communally. The problem is that not every place should be a marketplace. We live in a society where that basic idea is not a given anymore, where almost anything can be bought, where almost any sector can be turned into a market-based exchange. Generally, this is done in the name of efficiency, and it is often true that a market-based approach yields greater financial efficiency, because that is what it is designed to do.

But it can also have catastrophic results, creating profit incentives where there shouldn’t be one, such as the for-profit prison industry that sprang up after the 1994 Crime Bill, which together have been the main reason the United States now has 25% of the world’s prison population while only having about 4% of the world’s people. No, not everything should be a marketplace; not everything should have a profit incentive; not everything should have a price. There are things that should not and even cannot be sold in the marketplace, and ironically that is because they are the most precious things there are.

It should be clear at this point that our relationship with God should top the list of things that should not be bought and sold in the marketplace. And that is what Jesus is protesting here, more than anything else. Yes, the sellers and moneychangers may be taking advantage of people in providing their services to the pilgrims and worshippers at the Temple, but Jesus is rejecting the services themselves, rejecting the commingling of being in communion with God and the transactional exchanges necessary under this system to do so.

But how are people supposed to offer sacrifices to God if they can’t get the right animals or pay the tax required by the Torah, people might have objected. Exactly, Jesus would have replied; the whole point is that we neither should be doing all this, nor do we need to.

The whole idea of grounding our relationship with God in the practice of offering burnt animal sacrifices in a Temple seems very hard to get our minds around. But if we get past the methodology, the comingling of a relational approach with a transactional approach in our relationship to God is hardly unfamiliar to us. It is very easy to fall into a transactional dynamic in our faith, to assume that if we or others are diligent in giving God what God wants, then God will give us what we want.

We attend worship regularly, we give generously of our time and our money, we try to be good people in our personal and professional and family life, and then God gives us what we want: stability, happiness, comfort, whatever it might be. But that is not and never was the arrangement. We don’t worship or give or serve faithfully in order to receive the benefits of God’s love. We receive the benefits of God’s love through the free gift of God’s grace, and then we decide how we are going to live in response to that. But whether we live faithfully or not does not determine what we receive, good or bad; it simply determines how closely we are connected to and aware of God’s loving presence with us no matter what happens.

Jesus doesn’t explain any of this here in this passage, I think, because in the end, there isn’t an explanation that is convincing enough on its own, given how transactional we are conditioned to believe and act, in any century. Even the onlookers don’t ask for an explanation; they ask for a sign that would justify his authority to literally and figuratively overturn the entire worship life of the Temple. They know the truth of the old rule about how to write convincingly even if they don’t know the saying, which is, quite simply: “show, don’t tell.”

And just as his dramatic actions in this scene are showing his rejection of a transactional, market-based relationship with God rather than telling them about it, Jesus replies that he will show them a sign that justifies that rejection, the ultimate sign of God’s refusal to deal with humanity on a transactional basis: Jesus’ death and resurrection, taking humanity’s best attempt at pushing God out of the world and using it to conquer the power of death once and for all.

As we journey towards that sign in Holy Week, from the bitterness of the crucifixion to the joy of Easter, let us remember that all of that and all of this, our faith and our relationship to God, is nothing that we can buy or sell or secure, but only embrace in gratitude through Jesus Christ and what he has shown and done, not simply told us about.

That kind of intentional gratitude is the purpose of our lives and our worship and our discipleship: not to get what we want from God or get on God’s good side, but simply to show, not just tell, God our thanks for the life we have in Christ, in all its ordinariness and wonder, in its uncertainties and its absolutes, in its almost limitless possibilities, including the chance to begin again as many times as we need it and more; including this very day, this very moment. Thanks be to God.