No Catfish Messiah!
Listening to the wild and wooly Rondo-Burleske of the Mahler Ninth Symphony while pondering this episode of Jesus driving out the animals for the Passover sacrifices and overturning the tables of the currency exchange in the Temple, [i] three things suddenly came to mind: 1) when I make my epic movie about Jesus, Mahler’s Rondo-Burleske will be the soundtrack for this violent scene in the outer Temple precincts; and 2) Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s Fable of the catfish. Catfish patrol fishtanks to clean up the mess all the other fish make, literally consuming their excrement. One day, however, the catfish goes on strike. The water in the tank gets cloudy, messy and disgusting. All the fish complain. “Do something about all this, Catfish!” “I’ve had it with cleaning up your messes! Clean up your own messes!” the catfish says. [ii]
And finally, 3) it seems that Jesus, in this violent prophetic
gesture, makes the same point as to what a messiah’s job really is: to lead all
of us in ways to clean up our own messes! His action is similar to Ezekiel’s
public demonstration, some 700 years before Jesus, eating ritually impure, and
disgusting, barley cakes baked on human dung to get the people’s
attention to the impending destruction of Jerusalem and Exile to Babylon as a
result of their continuing inattention to God’s true desires. [iii]
Desires which were expressed at least eight centuries before Christ by Hosea, “For
I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than
burnt offerings;” [iv]
and Isaiah, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I
do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.” [v]
God’s appetites evidently had changed significantly, as that other eighth
century prophet Micah sums it up:
“With what shall I come before
the Lord and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with
burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with
thousands of rams, with ten thousands of
rivers of oil? Shall I give my
firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the
sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord
require of you but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God? [vi]
Suffice it to say, Jesus takes it upon himself to make the point that the Lord God of the Exodus, the Exile and the current Roman Occupation has had enough ritual bar-b-que to last for all eternity, and would rather have us simply be kind to one another, fight for justice for those who are oppressed, and to humble ourselves walking in God’s way instead of our own way believing that we know everything there is to know about God, Jesus and Life itself. Living, as we do, in what will one day be looked back upon as the most hubris-ridden period in human history, we can honestly say that after 2000 more years of ignoring what God really desires, we still need to learn the lessons this outburst by Jesus has tried to place squarely in front of us. No catfish messiah, he! Time to stop thinking someone besides us will do the heavy lifting!
Although Peter, at Caesarea Philippi, seemed to correctly identified Jesus as the Christos, the Christ, God’s anointed messiah, he still believed that that meant that Jesus, on his own, would turn the world right-side-up again dispensing with all of our sinfulness, and remaking the world as God dreamed it to be: devoid our perverted understandings of “free will” as human arrogance that wants everything “go my way, which everyone must accept as their way, or take the highway;” rather, God dreams of “a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky,” as was so often expressed by the African-American mystic, Howard Thurman. [vii]
Like Ezekiel before him, Jesus knows the Roman occupation, and the Zealots’s attempts at insurrection against the Empire, will not end well. And like Ezekiel before him, it will not be long before once again there will be no Temple where God’s name can dwell and sacrifices made. The lessons of Isaiah, Hosea and Micah will come to pass, but not without greater violence than shooing some animals away and turning over the currency exchange where one changes coins of the Empire for coins acceptable for offering in the Temple – coins with the emperor’s face declaring that “Caesar is God” cannot be used. The time is now, Jesus seems to be saying in this prophetic outburst, to honor God’s true desire of shalom, peace and justice, for all people, respecting the dignity of every human being as God’s beloved. Seeking and Serving Christ in all persons; loving our neighbor as ourselves. The hardest work of all, of course, is loving one’s self.
All four gospels recount a version of this episode. Mark, Matthew and Luke, however, place near the end of the story just before the showdown with Pilate. This would suggest that this outburst, which interrupts the commerce of the week-long Passover festival, would displease the folks back in Rome are skimming the cash offerings for themselves! As trues as this may be, John instead places this at the outset of the story to make sure the listener understands: Jesus is God’s Beloved Son; The Temple is God’s House; once The Temple is gone (which it was as John’s community was writing this down), God’s presence will heretofore reside in person of Christ. Therefore, it is important to follow this Jesus who walks humbly with God, seeking justice for all people, and exemplifying what it means to be kind to one another; to be friendly people beneath a friendly sky! And to clean up our own messes!
This seems to be why he is talking about rebuilding the “temple”. “But he was speaking of the temple of his body.” [viii] He looks forward to Good Friday and Easter, as we do in Lent. And back to the world as envisioned by the prophets nearly 3,000 years ago, where there is no place and no need for animal, grain, oil and wine sacrifices, but a never-ending need for justice, peace and humility; for kindness; for shalom, peace, understood as all of us working together to meet the very real human needs of all people, all creatures, and creation itself. No messiah, no single figure, no one anointed by God, will ever be the catfish for our fish-tank. Every time Jesus says, “Follow me,” he invites us to clean up our own messes with justice, kindness and humility. This is God’s Dream for us all: A friendly world, of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky! We are given “free will” so that working together we might one day make God’s dream come true.
[i]
John 2:13-22
[ii]
Friedman, Edwin, Friedman’s Fables, (Guilford Press, NYC: 1991)
[iii]
Ezekiel 4:9-15 “12 You shall eat it as a barley cake, baking it in their sight
on human dung.”
[iv]
Hosea 6:6
[v]
Isaiah 1:11
[vi]
Micah 6:6-8
[vii]
Dozier, Verna, The Dream of God, (Cowley Publications, Boston: 1991) p.31
[viii]
John 2:22
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