BUSINESS WAS THE GOD

BUSINESS WAS THE GOD

This action of Jesus was not only the righteous purification of the sanctuary, but also the public manifestation of His de­testation for Mammon and the servants of Mammon. Busi­ness, that modern god, was for Him a form of theft. A market­place was therefore a cave of flattering bandits, of tolerated thieves. Among all the elements of the legalized theft which is called commerce, none is more detestable and shameful than the use of money. If someone gives you a sheep in exchange for money, you can be sure that he has made you pay more money than the sheep really cost, but at least he gives you something which is not a hateful mineral symbol of wealth. He gives you a living being, which will furnish you wool in the spring time, which will bear you a lamb, and which you can eat if you like. But the exchange of money for money, of coined metal for coined metal, is something unnatural, para­doxical and demoniac. Everything that is known of banks, rates of exchange, discount and usury, is a shameful and re­pellent mystery which has always been the terror of simple souls, that is, of upright and deep souls. The peasant who sows his grain, the tailor who makes a garment, the weaver who weaves wool or linen, have up to a certain limit a real right that their wealth should increase, because they have added something which before was not in the world, in cloth, in wool. But that a mountain of money should bring forth other money without labor or effort, without production by man of any ob­ject to be seen, to be consumed, to be enjoyed, is a scandal which goes beyond, and confounds human imagination.

Money-changers, bankers, amassers of silver and gold, are slaves of the witchcraft of the Demon more than all others. And it is to those men, the men of banks and of finance, that the grateful Demon gives power on this earth: they are the ones even today who rule nations; instigate wars, who starve nations, and who, by an infernal system of their own, suck out the life of the poor, transformed into gold, dripping with sweat and blood. (John 2:14-15.) (America and Capitalism today)

Christ, who pitied the rich, but who hated and detested wealth, the great wall which cuts off from men the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, had broken up the den of thieves and had purified the Temple where He was to teach the last truths which remained to Him to expound. But with that violent ac­tion, He had antagonized all the commercial middle-class of Jerusalem. The men He had driven away demanded that their patrons should punish the man who was ruining business on the Holy Hill. These men of money found ready hearing with the men of Law, already resentful for other reasons, so much the more because Jesus in disturbing the business of the Temple had condemned and harmed the priests themselves. The most successful markets were the property of the sons of Annas, that is, close relations of the High-Priest Caiaphas. All the doves which were sold in the Court of the Gen­tiles were raised on the property of Annas, and the priests who did business in them made a good income every month out of turtle-doves alone. The money-changers, who should not have been allowed to stay in the Temple, paid the great Sadducee families of the priestly aristocracy a goodly tithe on the thou­sands of shekels brought in every year by the exchange of foreign money into Hebrew money. Had not the Temple itself perhaps become a great national bank with coffers and strong boxes in treasure chambers?

Jesus had wounded the twenty thousand priests of Jerusalem in their prestige and in their purses. He had overturned the values of the falsified and mutilated Letter, in the name of which they commanded and on which they fattened. More than this, He had driven out their associates, the traffickers and bankers. If He had His way, it would ruin them all. But the two threatened castes drew together still more closely, to make way with the dangerous intruder. It was perhaps that very evening that priests and merchants agreed on the purchase of a betrayer and a cross. The middle-class people were to give the small amount of money necessary; the clergy to find the religious pretext; the foreign government, naturally desiring to be on good terms with clergy and the middle class, would lend its soldiers.

But Jesus, having left the Temple, went His way towards Bethany, passing by the Mount of Olives.