Here's hoping God has a sense oif humor. :o)
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Everybody's heard about or read the yarn concerning Jesus popping his top and rousting them moneychangers from Herod's holy temple. Jesus, from all accounts, wasn't in the habit of giving the bum's rush to shylocks, or anyone else for that matter. What exactly happened that day to cause him to blow his normally-cool top and start kicking ass in that particular place of worship?
You have to understand how the faithful of the day felt about their churches. You see, the alleged ass-kicking in the temple went down on a holy day called Passover. It seems both Jewish and non-Jewish pilgrims wore off a lot of shoe leather ankling their way to Jerusalem so they could yak to God, who apparently made the same yearly trip to lay out some godly wisdom, in person.
These pilgrims would come marching over the hills on their way to Jerusalem, singing and rejoicing loudly over all the great things God had done in the past. I'm only guessing that a little vino was involved during these praise-a-thons, but I think it's a pretty safe bet to figure a lot of these revelers were under the influence while they marched to the holy shrine. Passover only comes once a year, after all. And if a group of faithful who don't really know each other are going to take the long hike through the hills, getting a little hammered by the grape spirits might just help them get in the mood for some loud God praising.
But here comes the rub. Upon arriving at the designated place of endless praying, a holy spot called the Court of the Gentiles, Jesus was confronted with the sights and noisy sounds of some rowdy players who called themselves money changers.
These boys had a lot on their tables, so to speak. They changed standard Greek, Roman and Tyian cash for Jewish coin. That saves the hassle of any local shopkeeper putting your coin up to the light and trying to spot the watermark. When you stroll up to a table to haggle over a particularly nice-looking dove, it eliminates problems when you have the coin of the realm in your hot little mitt.
You might wonder what's up with selling doves in a holy temple and swap meet. Here's the deal...Besides being a place of money changing, money lending and prayer, these temples were also places where the rich would come and slaughter the occasional fatted calf as an offering to the Almighty. Back in those days, the Almighty liked nothing better than to have some dumb beast gutted in his honor. The temple was where the faithful flocked to do the holy, if bloody, deed.
That's peachy for those with enough cash to afford a fatted calf, but what do to poor folks do without an urn to piss in? That's where the dove merchants swing into action. For a mere pittance, you can purchase a cute little dove and slit the fellow's feathered throat, right there on the same alter the well-heeled use to chop the heads off their oxen. Everybody gets in on the action. Think of it as a pay and pray as you go plan.
Back to the moneychangers...I've traveled abroad and found myself in need of the guys running money changing booths, sometimes right outside a bank. These moneychangers would rip you off a little concerning the rate of exchange, but it was worth it to us traveling U.S. navel strangers who were always in a hurry to get to our places of worship and sing the praises of the local bar girls while swilling watered-down drinks.
My point being, moneychangers aren't all villains. They're just kinda like ticket scalpers who inflate the price of the tickets they bought in order to pay the rent and get those long-overdue braces for little Tiny Tim Ishmael.
But when Jesus got an eyeful of them moneychangers and dove peddlers, smack in the middle of this place of worship, he went more than a little postal. He forgot all about turning the other cheek and started violently trashing some businesses and causing a general uproar.
What Jesus did during his tantrum was to make himself a whip of cords and proceed to physically persuade these honest businessmen that it might be in their best interests to ply their trade at some less holy locale. He also drove all the livestock out of Herod's temple as he was yelling and smacking them with his homemade whip.
What he was hollering at the fleeing merchants went something like this..."Do not make My Father's house a house of merchandise!" He was also overheard to say, "My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations! But you have made it a den of thieves!"-Jeremiah 7:11
Jesus had called the temple a "House of God" and a "House of Prayer." He didn't mean a house of prayer just for the Jews, but for all the yokels. He just didn't cotton to the idea of a bunch of merchants doing their business in the house of God, so he tore them a new one, hoping they'd get the message.
In fairness, you have to consider the moneychangers side of the story. The temple, in many aspects, functioned as sort of national bank. It was a public treasury, holding vast stores of public wealth. These deposits were never at rest, but were loaned out at a very high interest rate to the local peasants.
It would seem Al Capone was somewhat of a piker when it came to playing the old loan shark game. These boys were ahead of him by some two thousand years, and more. The poor suckers got themselves into so much debt they could never get out from under.
This is partly what prompted Jesus to make himself that whip and start flogging every moneychanger or dove peddler in sight. In his fit of rage, he toppled all the tables the money changers had been using to conduct their business, calling the temple "a den of thieves." He then scattered all the coins on the tables onto the floor. I can only imagine the mad scramble following that event. Not to point any fingers, but the place was soon a raging firestorm, with Jesus right in the middle of the action.
The Jewish historian, Josephus, wrote an account of the burning of the archives in Jerusalem. His second account gives a bleak picture of the insurmountable debts owed by the poor to the wealthy who were kicking back within the temple walls. Jesus and his cohorts managed to burn most of the cities records, thereby destroying most of the tax records.
The obvious reason for the paper-trail-burning-party was to destroy the money lenders' tallies and to put the kibosh on investigating debts. It don't take a genius to figure out how much the Jewish authorities were hated by the humble commoners.
Jesus may have been the Lamb of God and all, but that lamb had some pretty sharp teeth on that particular day.
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