There’s a thing that politicians do, and while it is clearly something modern, it’s clearly something ancient too. The thing is this: not fixing a problem because railing against the problem is more likely to keep them in power than bringing some kind of resolution. Maybe the most recent example is President Trump’s denunciation of a bi-partisan immigration bill in 2024 because it would have taken away a major issue in the presidential election later that year. It could be argued that the failure of the Democratic Party to bring about effective reforms in healthcare or more impactful environmental policies has as much to do with their desire to hold on to those as election issues as it does with the opposition they encounter from special interests.
There’s nothing new about this. The “bread and circuses” policies of Roman emperors kept the masses just fed and entertained enough to prevent their revolution while enabling the emperor to claim he was the solution rather that the cause of the systemic injustice that produced food insecurity in the first place. And it is not an exaggeration to say that the society of Judea was even more politically polarized than our own, except that there were more than two poles in Jerusalem. You might could lump the various parties into four or five categories, but only one or two of them actually exercised any political authority.
So whether you caucused with the Herodians and collaborated with the empire or provided the most visible yet respectable opposition as a member the Pharisees , you would have had a stake in preserving the status quo in some form in order to preserve your place within it. This makes the appearance of a charismatic Galilean a real problem for everyone. It is easy to hear echoes of the Herodians and Pharisees in the “moderate” voices of the South during the Movement for Civil Rights. Of course there were various motivations for advocating a “gradual” approach to desegregation and calling for “respectable” protest, but many of us1 who used those words also knew the threat to our own position in society.
In his “I Have A Dream” speech, Dr. King talked about reminding the country of “the fierce urgency of now” and called the nation to avoid taking the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” Congress was locked in a fierce debate over a new civil rights bill, and many of its erstwhile proponents cautioned against “going too fast” for fear of derailing the whole process. The point of the March on Washington, however, was to demonstrate that the moment to act had not just arrived but that we may have already passed it. “Now is the time,” he proclaimed, “to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”
The same might have been said about Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. There was an immediacy to his actions. According to the Gospel of Matthew, he had just the day before turned over the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple.2 These tables could be seen as symbols of the way some benefitted from the status quo, even as they voiced opposition to it. Jesus’ action had put the issue front and center, and on the day of his entrance into Jerusalem, he said that what was going to happen would happen “immediately.”
You can imagine the Herodians urging calm, encouraging Jesus’ followers to “go slow” and “wait and see” what the empire will do. You can see the Pharisees clutch their pearls as Jesus makes a scene so close to Passover. They might argue that respectable people do not behave like this, but throughout the ages “respectability” has been the last bastion of the legions of centrists who have grown accustom to their prerogatives. Jesus has come to call them on their lack of integrity, to expose the hypocrisy of their repeated claims to be advocates of change when they fail to act for reform. Do they really want to hear his view? Do we?
- I am always conscious that the “moderate” bishops and clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama were among those being addressed in Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” ↩︎
- I believe Jesus represents the epitome of non-violent resistance to injustice. That belief might seem to be in contradiction to the cleansing of the Temple, but I’m not so sure. Consider, for instance, the actions of the Catonsville Nine who removed draft cards from a Selective Service office and burned them in the parking lot as an act of non-violent protest to the war in Vietnam. Was Jesus’ act – one which likely damaged property but did not harm living things – any more violent? It is only because of John Locke that we put property on the same plane as life and liberty, but that does not mean it is so. ↩︎