Daily Lesson for March 12, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from John chapter 2 verses 13 through 22:

13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. 15Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ 17His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ 18The Jews then said to him, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ 19Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ 20The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ 21But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

Eighty-nine years ago today Gandhi and his followers began their Salt March, a 240-mile march of civil disobedience against the British monopoly on the salt trade in India. This was a major event in the movement for Indian independence, and an act which inspired other forms of civil disobedience throughout the world, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. 

Jesus cleansing of the Temple was itself also an act of civil disobedience, an economically intervening act dramatized to call attention to the exploitative taxation scheme religious authorities had invented to take advantage of all the poor people coming to Jerusalem for the Passover. An example of what we today might call non-violent, direct action, Jesus harmed no one in his protest.  He did, however, significantly disrupt trade in the marketplace. The intent was to call attention to the injustices through the highly-dramatized and disruptive act of protest.

Today’s Lesson reminds us that though it was said that Jesus was “more than a prophet”, he certainly was not less. His prophetic action was creatively disruptive to the very center of the religio-economic system which was exploiting his people and a model for later creative acts of disruption including the Boston Tea Party, the Gandhi’s March to the Sea, and mass demonstration throughout the American South.

It’s also a reminder of the deeply economic and therefore this and not just other-worldly significance of Jesus’ message.