So the disciples went off and did what Jesus had ordered; they brought the ass and the colt and laid their cloaks on them, and he mounted. The huge crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while some began to cut branches from trees and lay them along his path. The groups preceding him as well as those following kept crying out: "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!" As he entered Jerusalem the whole city was stirred to its depths, demanding, "Who is this?" And the crowd kept answering, "This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee."
Jesus entered the temple precincts and drove out all those engaged there in buying and selling. He overturned the money-changers' tables and the stalls of the dove-sellers, saying to them, "Scripture has it, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you are turning it into a den of thieves" (Matthew 21:6-13).
The events of the gospels concerning Jesus in Jerusalem are the most political in all the Bible. Yet growing up in American Christendom, you would hardly know it. The church's habitual ways of reading and responding to the Bible have all but stripped these passages of political content.
These gospel events are rendered innocuous not only by the piecemeal and disconnected fashion with which we read scripture but by the narrowness of our political understanding. My first seminary paper in New Testament was on the triumphal entry. Having devoured the commentaries, I concurred with the conventional scholarly opinion that Jesus was an apolitical messiah. After all, he rejected the Zealot option of violent revolution. After all, he wasn't interested in Caesar's job, or Pilate's. Therefore we conclude: apolitical. The problem with this conclusion is that the varieties of political action are wider than we are taught to imagine.
I contend that Jesus' primary political method was dramatic symbolic action. He was, by all accounts, a walking public drama, not in the sense of fabricated or cheap theatrics, but in the manner of visible and acted truth. He offered signs which revealed and pointed and unmasked; actions which seeded the imagination and staked out the presence of the kingdom.
The Triumphal Entry
Joachim Jerimias, in a well-known book on the parables, describes the Jerusalem walk and the temple cleansing as an "acted parable." That could be said of many of Jesus' doings, from healings to feedings to raisings. They are more than simply incidents recounted through the eyes of this or that gospel poet. They are Jesus' way of being in the world, and the method he chose to encounter death and its power.
The triumphal entry into Jerusalem might best be conceived as an inspired bit of street theater. Time and place and person come together in a dramatic and revealing way. Jesus walks into a militarily occupied city on the eve of a liberation festival during which images of freedom and faithful history are at the surface of public consciousness. He taps those symbols by beginning this walk at the Mount of Olives, the traditional site of judgment for Israel's enemies, and ending up at the temple: Today that's called "making a connection."
One can't help but think of connectional walks in more recent nonviolent history: Gandhi's march to the sea, the San Francisco to Moscow disarmament walk, or Selma to Montgomery.
Jesus rides into town on the colt of an ass, an ironic and self-consciously messianic act, in line with the prophetic words from Zechariah:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on an ass,
on a colt the foal of an ass (Zechariah 9:9).
Jesus is explicitly intentional in his planning. His careful instructions to his disciples concerning the donkey and his foreknowledge of their conversation with the owner may have more to do with preparation than with clairvoyance.
John's gospel makes it clear that the disciples did not understand either the entry or the temple cleansing (John 2:22; 12:16). It was only in retrospect, after the resurrection, that they fully comprehended the meaning and truth of these events. This is often the case with symbolic actions; they may not be received at the time, or may even be grossly misunderstood. Those who take part in them must trust in the transcendent character of truth, resting in the hope that in time the meaning and power of events will be released.
Entering the city on the back of a donkey may be as much for Jesus' own sake as for the crowd or the authorities. The day may have been one of temptation for Jesus. The gospels make clear that following the early temptations to power in the wilderness, the tempter leaves Jesus to await a more opportune time. Here, the tempter's time and opportunity may well be ripe. If the march built as we imagine in bandwagon fashion, with a surging and cheering crowd, the option of a sudden Zealot-style revolt may have been quite tempting. I wager that Jesus struggled to keep his spiritual and political balance. And the colt helped.
Riding a donkey is a preeminently nonviolent posture, an act of humility, and a contemplative reminder of spirit and intent. The gospels link it with the drastic and confrontational action at the temple, for which it is preparation. The two actions complement and illuminate one another: nonviolence, humility, and bold, strong action.
Economic Oppression, Political Complicity
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it is the temple-cleansing which finally precipitates the arrest of Jesus. While the charges at the trial (inciting revolt, advocating tax resistance, and claiming authority to establish an alternative government) do not explicitly mention the action, Jesus' ironic words about "destruction of the temple" are brought to bear as evidence. Herod the Great had refurbished and expanded the temple. It stood out on the Jerusalem skyline like the World Trade Center. The temple was truly the economic mainstay of a city whose primary business was religious tourism.
Passover was the commercial equivalent of the Christmas rush. At Passover time, Jerusalem's population of 30,000 could be doubled or even quadrupled. That's a lot of rooms at the inn. As many as 18,000 lambs would be slaughtered as sacrifices. We're talking about powerful economic interests.
The temple had received special permission from Rome to collect its own tax. This half-shekel tax may have a modern equivalent in the tax-exemption of the churches, by which their silence and complicity with the state is effectively purchased. Pilate was able to dip into that half-shekel treasury on occasion without objection from the temple bigwigs. He built his aqueduct in part with such funds.
The temple functioned as a bank; it was not only a source of loans for those with proper credit but also the depository for records of indebtedness. High taxes and runaway interest rates had forced many small farmers into sharecropping and indentured slavery, making the temple instrumental in an oppressive system.
By the time of Jesus, the high priesthood had become so entangled with the Roman occupation that it was all but a political patronage job, appointed by Pilate and subject to purchase and bribe. A position once solitary and lifelong became temporary and vulnerable to whims and changes in the regime. The gospels often speak of high priests in the plural, which includes those who had been deposed; they also refer to Annas as "high priest that year."
The Sanhedrin, before whom Jesus and, eventually, the disciples were tried, was made up substantially of the Sadducean party, landed Jews whose economic interest in the status quo made them backers of the pax Romana military order.
When, therefore, Jesus goes to the front porch of the temple, where the money-changers have set up shop, he's not simply annoyed with the inflated price of doves. He has chosen the public place which is the most visible symbol of complicity between the occupying forces and the religious authorities. The temple represents the intersection of the Roman money market and the local economy, the spiritual idolatry of status quo power; it is the place of prayer which has been invaded by the clink of Roman coins changing hands. In driving the money-changers out, Jesus performs a kind of material exorcism.
Jesus' words as he overturns tables are a thoughtful combination of a phrase from a potent discourse of Isaiah's and a line from Jeremiah's fiery temple sermon. Jesus does his theological homework with his eyes open: Jeremiah was also soon thereafter arrested and imprisoned.
Jesus is not engaged in civil disobedience in the classic sense: breaking an unjust law in order to change it. He had often been taken to task for violating the Mosaic law, particularly around the Sabbath, but here he is not interested in improving the letter of law, either Roman or Jewish, one jot or tittle. He is simply doing a strong action of visible truth in a place protected by law and authority. The question posed to him is: By what authority do you do these things?
Following Jesus and Risk
Later when the disciples take to the streets after Pentecost and head for the temple portico to preach the resurrection, the scene is loaded. It is like returning to the scene of a crime. Arrested repeatedly by the authorities, the disciples are warned not to preach in Jesus' name, but they keep going back to the temple. Once again the question posed to them is one of authority; and in court the disciples respond: "We must obey God rather than human rule."
Jesus' act, like the disciples', places him in personal jeopardy and risk. That risk is not incidental to the action. Indeed it was so integral that in the early church the risk became, for some, a thing in itself, to the extent that the active pursuit of martyrdom needed to be declared a heresy. Of course, such temptations linger even today.
Still, the risk is crucial, and it hangs over not only the action but all the events in Jerusalem. Jesus has staked his life on being there. His words about Caesar's coin, the teaching in the temple, even the private contemplative symbolic acts in the upper room--everything is against the background of being in trouble. The words are therefore loaded, and the disciples listen hard. The church must acknowledge that the risk of the cross hangs over Jesus' whole life and teaching.
A friend of mine once reflected that a more concrete, modern translation of Jesus' call would be: "If you would be my disciples, face your electric chair and follow me." I have a strange picture of electric chairs replacing crosses over altars and on church walls. Such a tack would surely bring the cross home from pious sentimentalism and abstraction.
Jesus was not ignorant or naive about the risk; he freely chose it. Beginning with his announcement to the disciples that they were headed for Jerusalem, he spoke openly about the consequences. It is not surprising that Peter and friends tried to talk him out of it.
Jesus' risk is one with its consequences. His submission to death is a faithful public act which is one with the temple action. In fact, it is in the cross that Jesus' confrontation with the powers (spiritual, economic, political) is finally realized, revealed, and resolved.
Paul says that if the powers had known what they were doing, they never would have crucified Christ. Jesus drove the powers into the public arena and made a spectacle of them, unmasking and overcoming their ultimate source of authority: death. Whenever and wherever believers act today, it is under the freedom of that faith.
These reflections are offered as a contribution to the continuing, and often heated and strained, conversation within the church and biblical communities concerning resistance, symbolic action, and civil disobedience.
Some of the questions which arise whenever symbolic action and civil disobedience are contemplated could be directed toward Jesus and his action. These questions include: Why does Jesus have to be so confrontational? Won't he turn people off? Does Jesus really want to communicate? Isn't this violence against property? Couldn't Jesus stand outside the temple and get his point across just as well? Why doesn't Jesus work within the system, go through Pilate or the Sanhedrin? Or even become high priest? Wouldn't he have a greater impact from a position of public power? Why does Jesus risk his life and freedom? Think how much more good he could do staying in Galilee quietly preaching and healing. After all, you can't do ministry while sitting in jail or hanging on a cross.
These questions are put with some irony, but if they are real questions for ourselves, then let's not hesitate to ask them of Jesus as well.
My short Bible study hardly pretends to be definitive. But I do believe that Jesus' life offers some pretty basic and compelling clues to these very tough and timely questions.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann, a United Methodist pastor, was a Sojourners correspondent and an active member of the Detroit peace community when this article appeared.
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