THE DEN OF
THIEVES
(at The Temple)
He went up to the Temple where all His enemies were assembled. On the
hill-top the sacred fortress sunned its new whiteness in the magnificence of
the day. The old Ark of the nomads, drawn by oxen through sweltering deserts
and over battlefields, had halted on that height, petrified as a defense for
the royal city. The moveable cart of the fugitives had become a heavy citadel
of stone and marble, a pompous stronghold of palaces and stairways, shady with
colonnades, lighted with courts, enclosed by walls, sheer above the valley, protected
by bastions and by towers, a fortress rather than a place of worship. It was
not only the precinct of the Holy of Holies, and the sacrificial altar, it was
no longer only the Temple, the mystic sanctuary of the people. With its great
old towers, its guardrooms, its warehouses for offerings, its strong-boxes for
deposits, its open market square for trade and covered galleries for meetings
and amusement; it was anything rather than a sanctuary for meditation and
prayer. It was everything, a fortress in case of assault, a bank-vault, a
market-place in time of pilgrimage and feast-days, a marketplace on all days, a
forum for the disputes of politicians, the wrangling of doctors and the gossip
of idlers; a thoroughfare, a rendezvous, a business center. Built by a
faithless King to win over the favor of a captious and seditious people, to
satisfy the pride and avarice of the priestly class, an instrument of war and a
market-place for trade, it must have seemed to the eyes of Jesus the natural
focus for all the enemies of His truth.
Jesus
goes up to the Temple to destroy the Temple. He will leave to the Romans of
Titus the task of literally dismantling the walls, of scattering the masses of
stone, of burning down the buildings, of stealing the bronze and gold, of reducing
to a smoky and accursed ruin the great stronghold of Herod; but He will destroy
the values which the proud Temple upheld with its piled-up blocks of ordered
stone, its paved terraces and its golden doors. Jesus goes up towards the Temple:
the Man transfigured on the mountain is set against the scribes parched and
withered among their scrolls; the Messiah of the New Kingdom against the
usurper of the kingdom defiled by compromises, corrupt with infamy; the Gospel
against the Torah; the future against the past; the fire of love against the
ashes of the Letter. The day of battle is at hand. Jesus, among the songs of
His fervent band of men, goes up to the sumptuous lair of His enemies. Well
does He know the street; how many times He had gone over it as a little child
led along by the hand in the crowd of pilgrims, in the midst of noise and dust,
in the band of Galileans. Later as an unknown boy, confused by the dust and
heat of the sun, tired and dazed, He used to look toward the walls desperately
longing to arrive at the summit, hoping to find up there in the sacred
precincts a little shade for His eyes, cool water for His mouth, and a word of
consolation for His heart.
But
today everything is transformed. He is not led along. He leads along. He does
not come to adore, but to punish. He knows that there inside, behind the
beautiful facades of the sublime sepulcher; there are only ashes and
corruption: His enemies selling ashes and feeding themselves on corruption.
The first adversary who comes before Him is the demon of greed.
He enters into the Court of the Gentiles, the most
spacious and most densely crowded of all. The great, sunny, well-paved terrace
is not the atrium of a sanctuary, but a dirty market-place. An immense, roaring
commotion rises up from the vermin-like crowd of bankers, of buyers and
sellers, of moneychangers who give and take money. There are herdsmen with
their oxen and their flocks of sheep; venders of pigeons and turtle doves,
standing by the long lines of their coops; bird-sellers, with cages of chirping
sparrows; benches for moneychangers, with bowls overflowing with copper and
silver. Merchants, their feet in the fresh-dropped dung, handle the flanks of
the animals destined for sacrifice; or call with monotonous repetition women
who have come there after child-birth, pilgrims who have come to offer a rich
sacrifice, lepers who offer living birds for their cure, obtained or hoped for.
Moneychangers, with a coin hung at their ears as a mark of their trade,
gloatingly plunge their greedy talons into gleaming piles; the go-betweens run
about in the swarm of the gossiping groups; stingy, wary provincials hold
excited conferences before loosening the purse strings to change their cash
for a prescribed offering, and from time to time a restless ox drowns out with
his deep bellow the thin bleating of the lambs, the thrill voices of the women,
the clinking of drachma and shekels.
Christ was familiar with the spectacle. He knew that the
house of God had been turned into the house of Mammon, and that, instead of
silently invoking the Spirit, material-minded men trafficked there in the filth
of the Demon, with the priests as their accomplices. But this time He did not
restrain His scorn and His repugnance. To destroy the Temple, He commenced with
the destruction of the market-place. The Eternal Beggar, the poor man,
accompanied by his poor friends, flung Himself against the servants of money.
He had in His band a length of rope, which He knotted together like a whip, and
with it He opened a passage-way through the astonished people. The benches of
the money-changers crashed down at the first shock. The coins were scattered on the ground
amid yells of astonishment and wrath; the seats of the bird-sellers were
overturned beside their scattered pigeons. The herdsmen began to urge towards the
doors the oxen and the sheep. The sparrow-sellers took their cages under their
arms and disappeared. Cries rose to Heaven, some outraged, some approving; from
the other court-yards other people came running towards the disturbance. Jesus,
surrounded by the boldest of His friends, was brandishing His whip on high, and
driving the money-changers towards the door. And He repeated in a loud voice, "My house shall be called the house of
prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves!" (Matt. 21:13)
And the last money-handlers disappeared from the courts
like rubbish scattered by the wind.
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