The story of Jesus driving out the money changers, as with many passages in John, runs the risk of anti-Semitic interpretations. In many English translations we see “the Jews” pitted against Jesus, and the subheading affixed to the story often reads “The Cleansing of the Temple.” Because of how often many Christians have conflated “the Jews” in passages like this with all Jewish people across history, and because of Nazi rhetoric about “cleansing” the world of Jews, we must first and foremost avoid interpretations that imply the Jewish temple needed to be cleansed of Jews or that because whoever wrote this gospel spoke disparagingly against Jews as a group, Christians today must be suspicious of contemporary Jews. Such disclaimers are sadly needed in a context of persistent anti-Semitism.

This story appears not just in John but in all four gospels, and Ched Myers’s exegesis on how it appears in Mark is laid out in his landmark political reading called Binding the Strong Man.  Myers calls the scene “the centerpiece in Mark’s unrelenting criticism of the political economy of the temple” in which Jesus attacks because of how the temple’s institutions exploit the poor. Though Mark’s Jesus does not hold a whip, as John’s does, he drives out people in a way that is not fully revealed by the text but does raise questions about violence. He overturns the tables, and Myers notes that the Greek word for “overturn” can imply destruction of property. We are left to imagine what Jesus did with his body to drive out the people. 

Myers has more specific things to say about why Jesus attacked property, temple institutions, and perhaps people too. Mark’s version has Jesus driving out money changers and those selling doves. Money changers were “street-level bankers” who turned pilgrims’ Roman or Greek currency to the Temple’s, making a profit in the process. And doves were needed to purify women and lepers, who were both considered unclean. People needed them for a cultic ritual of cleansing, which affected the poor disproportionately on what was expected to be an annual process. 

Jesus is not calling for lower prices, Myers notes. He is calling for the ceasing of the entire system in overturning – and possibly destroying – the tables of these bankers and dove sellers. “They represented the concrete mechanisms of oppression within a political economy that double exploited the poor and unclean,” particularly women and lepers. These people were already marginalized and considered lower-class citizens, and the ritual system “obligated them to make reparation, through sacrifices, for their inferior status – from which the marketers profited.”

Further, in what Myers likens to a direct-action campaign, Jesus forbids anyone to carry vessels for ritual through the Temple. Myers calls it a “guerrilla ban,” enacted by a single person against a system that shut down proceedings for the day. Jesus did not hold a sign or pass out pamphlets. He did not write a letter to his governmental representative. He took matters into his own hands and physically disrupted the religious, political, and economic status quo with his body. 

Jesus then teaches the people, quoting from Isaiah 56:7, which tells of God’s promise to the social outsiders that God’s house of prayer will be a place of joy for them. “By citing this,” Myers argues, “Mark has indicated what the temple is supposed to embody: inclusivity and community, especially accessible to ‘outsiders.’” Yet instead Jesus names it “a den of robbers,” a quote from Jeremiah 7:11, where God gives Israel a temple “only insofar as justice toward the alien, the fatherless, the widow, and the innocent is maintained (7:5-7). These references embedded in the story establish Jesus as in line with the prophets, a group both chosen by God and confrontational against people enacting or accepting of injustice. 

The people are spellbound. The powerful are, tellingly, murderous. They understand well that Jesus’s message and action is hostile to their practices and aims. Rather than trying to placate all sides or protest within the bounds of civility, Jesus chose a method so offensive that people wanted to kill him afterwards. 

In 1970 Harlem, a Puerto Rican liberationist group called the Young Lords occupied a church that refused to serve the neighborhood, with the story of Jesus driving out the money changers on their lips. New York State Chairman Felipe Luciano gave a speech to the church’s congregants who remained after the Young Lords interrupted the service, responding to their frustrations with how the church conducted itself by saying, “Man, [Jesus] didn’t have as much patience as the Young Lords are having. He actually went into a church and beat them! And you talk about us being violent! He told them, get out of here you moneylenders, you are filth! All you are thinking of is filthy lucre, you are not thinking about the spirit of the Law.”

The group wasn’t an overtly religious body. (Though they did claim that “if Christ were alive today, he’d be a Young Lord.”) But their choice of scripture is hard to argue with. In response to people refusing to address the needs of the exploited, both Jesus and the Young Lords disrupted the system and caused great anger. But at least the Young Lords weren’t pulling out whips! 

The group knew that Jesus stories had been weaponized against the oppressed. That’s why their minister of information, Pablo Yoruba Guzman, said, “They teach only the parts of the Bible that will mollify the people, keep them down, you know, turn the other cheek, be cool, be humble, slow up, wait. They don’t show you the parts like when things were going bad in the temple, Christ went in and threw them out and he wasn’t nonviolent – he was a pretty violent cat when he had to be.”

Image description: “My House is a House of Prayer” by Ade Bethune. The image shows a the outline of Jesus holding a whip over his head, directed at two men scrambling away. In the background, the arches of the temple read: My House is a House of Prayer. You have made it a den of thieves.”

Ade Bethune’s rendition of Jesus driving out the moneylenders with a whip fascinates me, as someone committed to nonviolence. Here we have one of the main artists of the Catholic Worker, a community of communities witnessing to nonviolence, depicting a Christ attacking people with a weapon. The capitalists flee in fear while he chases them with anger in his face. I look at Bethune’s creation and ask: How does this push and enrich our understanding of what gospel nonviolence means, especially in light of why Jesus is attacking? What does it mean that even those committed to nonviolence find this story edifying? And what does Jesus’s action suggest about the kind of prayer that is needed amid systemic evil?