What happened to Jesus in his last week?

Among Christians there are special celebrations for key events. Palm Sunday celebrates the entry of Jesus into the city of Jerusalem. Maundy Thursday is a solemn replay of his last meal with his disciples. Good Friday takes us through his mock trial and his death of horror on a Roman cross. Easter is the Christians’ triumphant celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

There is a missing piece. The incident that gives sense to the week of activities is the incident in the temple. Tradition says the incident was a ceremonial cleansing of the temple of its commercial enterprises. Those in charge of the temple had turned a house of worship into a commercial enterprise. Jesus disrupted the commercial operation by upsetting the tables where the temple lackeys sold required animals for sacrifice.

Modern scholarship is putting an emphasis on understanding this historical incident in context. The first piece is the temple itself.

Herod the Great was an ambitious king who was appointed by Rome’s Caesar to rule Palestine. Herod was of mixed racial background and claimed some Jewish blood. He wanted to be known as King of the Jews, but acceptance by the Jews was difficult to attain. Herod the Great was a builder. Under his almost half century reign, he built civic buildings and ports. His greatest building project was the rebuilding, expansion and refurbishing of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. It was known as Herod’s temple, or is sometimes referenced as the Third Temple. In the process, the reign of Herod and the operation of the temple were linked and locked. It was the near inseparable joining of government and religion. To offend one was to offend both. Herod the Great died in 4 CE. During the years of Jesus’ teaching ministry, Herod’s son — Herod Antipas — was the ruler. The joining of kingdom and temple continued.

Jesus grew up and taught in a rural area 70 miles north of Jerusalem. His faith was shaped not by Jerusalem and the temple, but by weekly gatherings of the community elders as they read Torah (Jewish law) and discussed its meaning. The primary contact of Jesus and his followers was with the representatives of Herod’s Roman rule and of the Jerusalem temple. Their retainers made regular trips into the rural north primarily to collect tithes and taxes. To understand Jesus, one must realize the depth of Jesus’ contempt for both the rule of Herod and the rulers of the temple.

To further understand Jesus and the last week of his life, the student needs to realize that the Old Testament contains not one religious tradition, but two. One is called the great tradition; the other is called the small (or lesser) tradition. The great tradition is the definition of society laid down by those who rule and that is enforced by their retainers. The great tradition is centered in cities in which the controlling institutions are located. For Jesus, that place was Jerusalem. There is no evidence Jesus ever visited Jerusalem as an adult before the last week of his life.

The small tradition is a critiquing and competing interpretation of life. It almost always arises with devout believers who have escaped the burden of the great tradition and its demand for conformity.

Northern Palestine, 70 miles removed from Jerusalem, was a hotbed for the small tradition. The leaders of the small tradition found heroes in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah and other Old Testament prophets. Almost every one of the Old Testament prophets were critics of those who controlled the temple in Jerusalem. John the Baptizer was the first of the little-tradition prophets presented in the Gospel narratives. His harsh criticism of rulers led to his death. Jesus took up the mantle.

As modern New Testament scholars have reconstructed the context in which Jesus lived and taught, they have realized that Jesus was not simply a religious figure. He was a severe critic of those who controlled the temple, those who controlled the empire, and those who controlled the economic systems that starved and robbed the poor and left the orphan and the widow to fend for themselves.

Jesus was a largely unknown and harmless critic as long as he remained in his rural setting. He was clearly an apocalyptic preacher. He advocated overthrow. He believed the days of the oppressors were numbered. He believed that the overthrow could be accomplished by love, mercy and kindness.

Jesus took his apocalyptic message to Jerusalem. To call his arrival a triumphal entry is to miss the point completely. He chose to enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey as mockery of the ruler’s horse.

It was an ancient form of street theatre that Jesus and his followers used to make their point. The great tradition that was accepted by the city’s masses was being publicly taunted.

The critical point of Jesus’ visit to Jerusalem came when he visited the temple. In no sense had he come to worship and make sacrifice. He came to disrupt and to make pronouncements about the judgment of God on the whole operation. He did not go to the temple to cleanse. He came to the temple to announce the destruction of a whole way of life.

Those who operated the temple had no power to silence Jesus and put him to death. Those powers were held by the Roman retainers. The charges that were leveled against him can be summed up as insurrection. There were three specific charges: encouraging nonpayment of taxes, threatening to destroy property (the temple) and claiming to be a king.

It was the temple incident that took Jesus from being an irritating, but harmless, country rebel to a nuisance in a city that controlled the great tradition.

Rome’s retainers killed him on a cross. The theological meaning of the event remains in our own hands.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

Opinions expressed on the Faith page are the author’s and are not necessarily those of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, its staff or its parent company, Wick Communications Co. To submit a column or other news for the Faith page, send email to news@frontiersman.com, or call 352-2268.