Brian McLaren describes the deep and compelling attraction of the story of purification:
There’s a scary tendency you find across nations, across cultures, religions, centuries, social classes…. It’s called coalitionary aggression. There’s this tendency of human beings who form groups to then find some minority within their in-group, whom the majority then begins to bully, pick on, or marginalize. The majority calls itself clean and they call this minority unclean. The majority is acceptable, the minority is unacceptable. The majority is normal, and the minority is queer, odd, or different. The majority eventually creates a kind of coalition aggression against the minority. And in so doing, they make themselves feel good, and they unite themselves because now they’ve created a common enemy close at hand….
We see stories of purification going on in our politics, in our churches, in our business power dynamics, in our families, even in our own psyches. When we’re feeling guilty or tense about something, it really does help to find someone else to project our anxieties upon and to make ourselves feel innocent, pure, and clean…. [But] scapegoating others does not actually create peace and security. It almost creates an addiction. Every so often we need a new victim upon which to pour out our accumulated guilt or shame or fear or anxiety or hostility.
McLaren describes how Jesus directly challenges the purification story:
All the people that Jesus hangs out with and eats with are people who are being scapegoated, people who are being used for somebody else’s purification narrative. These are the people that Jesus humanizes: people such as Zacchaeus, Matthew and his tax collector friends, a leper, or the woman caught in adultery…. If you read that story in chapter 8 of John’s Gospel, notice Jesus’ physical posture. It’s as if he’s using his body to draw attention away from the woman and becomes an interruption to a purification narrative that was heading toward a deadly end.
McLaren acknowledges the complexity that arises when we challenge these stories:
The purification story strikes me as especially dangerous to people who want to be good…. That desire to be good can then create in us this need, especially when we feel that we’re failing at being good, to find somebody who looks bad or somebody we can portray as bad to lift ourselves up.…
In a certain sense, what we’re inviting people to do [by identifying these stories at work] is not to make their lives simpler, but to give them some clarity on the complexity of life. We’re inviting people to see that there are these domination stories, revolution or revenge stories, and purification stories out there at work. It doesn’t make life simpler, but when we understand the stories that we find ourselves in, perhaps it gives us enough clarity to try to be a more moral and more peaceful agent in this world.
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Jesus was fed up with politics, too. (From He Gets US)
In Jesus’ time, communities were deeply divided by bitter differences in religious beliefs, political positions, income inequality, legal status, and ethnic differences. Sound familiar?
Jesus lived in the middle of a culture war, too. And though the political systems were different (not exactly a representative democracy), the greed, hypocrisy, and oppression different groups used to get their way were very similar.
Let’s set the scene.
Jesus was born at the height of the Roman Empire’s power. They’d conquered most of the known world, and Israel was no exception. Unlike previous empires that would try to destroy cultures by displacing conquered peoples’ leaders, the Romans didn’t force people to change their religion or customs as long as they kept their obligations to the empire. Rome would install a client king (a puppet government) and exact tribute (cash) in lots of different ways. Families were charged taxes per person—farmers on crops, fishermen on catches, and travelers were charged fees to use the roads. This was in addition to local business and religious taxes charged by priests.
In Israel, political and religious factions were one and the same. Back then, it was Pharisees and Sadducees. Today, we have conservatives and liberals.
The Pharisees were the most religiously conservative leaders. They had the most influence among the common working poor, who were the majority. They believed that a king would come one day to conquer Rome with violence and free their nation. Some preyed upon a mostly illiterate population by adding extra rules and requirements that were designed to force the working poor into a posture of subjugation.
The Sadducees were wealthy aristocrats who had a vested financial interest in Roman rule. They were in charge of the temple, and they didn’t believe any savior king was coming. They made themselves wealthy by exacting unfair taxes and fees from the labor of their own people and by contriving money-making schemes that forced the poor to pay exorbitant prices to participate in temple sacrifice—a critical part of their religion.
There were Zealot groups who hid in the hills and violently resisted Roman occupation, and then there were the Samaritans, often oppressed and marginalized because of their racial and ethnic identities.
And so, the common farmer, fisherman, or craftsman’s family lived through a highly volatile political period. Overbearing religious leaders who despised and oppressed them, wealthy elites who ripped them off, racial and ethnic tension with neighbors, and sporadic violent outbreaks between an oppressive occupying army.
So where was Jesus in all of this? Did he align with the religious elites? With the wealthy and powerful? Or did he start an uprising to overthrow them?
None of the above.
He went from town to town, offering hope, new life, and modeling a different way to live and to change the world. Instead of pursuing power, money, or religious authority, he shared a loving and sacrificially generous way of living. He chose not to go along with the schemes others used to impact the world. Instead, he championed a better way.
And so, each of these political groups saw him as a threat. The Pharisees recognized his movement as an affront to their authority—exposing the hypocrisy of their practices. The Sadducees saw Jesus as a threat to their power and wealth because he exposed their money-making schemes. The Zealots violently rejected one of the essential themes of Jesus’ movement: love your enemy.
In the end, it took all three of these groups to have him killed. A Zealot (Judas) betrayed his location to those seeking to arrest him, the Sadducees brought him before the Romans to be executed, and when the Romans couldn’t find a crime committed, the Pharisees rallied the people to force Rome’s hand.
Isn’t it funny how political foes can come together to destroy a common enemy that threatens their designs? But in spite of their best efforts, his execution was only the beginning of a movement that continues to impact the world thousands of years later. Jesus’ movement was so impactful because he actively resisted and rejected participating in culture-war politics.
Scripture References:
Matthew 9:35-38, 35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Luke 19:10; For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
