Casting Out the Caster-Outers

This Holy Week we recall how Jesus threw people out of the temple. Specifically the moneychangers and those who set up tables

Mark’s telling of this story goes like this:

Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written,
“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”?
But you have made it a den of robbers.’
And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

It is said that the chief priests and scribes were upset about this action, so much so they wanted to kill Jesus. They are so offended that Jesus would do such an action and they want to get to the bottom of this. So just a few verses later, they go to Jesus and ask him by what authority does he act?

These folks are not a fan of being thrown out of the temple and called thieves or bandits. They do not like the idea that Jesus was suggesting that these leaders did not care about the people; Jesus suggesting they were taking advantage of the poor. They did not like being tossed out of the center of their religious home.

Among the many genius things of Jesus, one of the most brilliant things of Jesus is his ability to use the very mechanism of the systems against itself. Jesus only does what the leadership of the temple had been doing - casting people out.

For instance, there were ten people with leprosy (Luke 17:11-19). If you had leprosy, you were cast out of the temple for being a sinner and unclean. There was a man born blind and when he disagreed with the leadership, he was cast out (John 9). There was a woman at a well who had been cast out of the community for having several husbands (John 4). There were children who wanted to see Jesus and the disciples tried to cast them out (Mark 10:13-16).

The temple and the leadership of the day was excellent at casting people out.

The leadership found it acceptable and perhaps even honorable when others were cast out. But when the leadership is cast out, when they get a taste of their own medicine, when they see in the mirror all that they had been doing to others - it was only then that the leadership wanted to kill Jesus.

It is brilliant that Jesus was able to use the very same system of “casting out” to expose and destroy the very system of casting out. It is not surprising that we do not like to be the ones doing the casting, but we surely are deeply offended when we are the ones cast out.

What About Those Satan Shoes?

Violence is all around us and we know this, but we do all that we can to avoid knowing that we know this. And so, when that violence is put in our faces and we are forced to see it, we are confronted with the reality that now we know, that we know that we know.

Enter the weird world of high end shoes.

I do not know who "Lil Nas X” is. From what I see he is a child of God, African American, member of the LGBTQ community who also makes music. The only reason I know this name is that he helped to create something called “Satan” shoes. Nike has no affiliation with these shoes, just like they had no affiliation with the “Jesus” shoes. Chances are you and I did not hear about the Jesus shoes, but you may have heard of the “Satan” shoes.

I am not endorsing either shoe, I think they are both idols. They are both similar in their design using the same base shoe. It is unclear to me if Nike was okay with the Jesus shoe, but they clearly want it known they are not okay with the Satan shoe (everyone is more comfortable profiting off Jesus anyways). While one has a pentagram tag, the other has a golden Jesus on a silver cross. Both has scripture on the side (we will return to that) that translates to their obscene price point. The Jesus shoe was more expensive ($1425 vs. $1018) because the scripture reference was from Matthew 14:25 (“And early in the morning he [Jesus] came walking towards them on the lake”). The Satan shoes reference Luke 10:18 (“He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.’”).

The Satan shoes have a disgust factor and that is adding to all this I am sure. The Jesus shoe has water from the River Jordan in the shoe. The Satan shoe has red ink and a drop of human blood. Let’s start with that.

The Satan shoes are not the only thing on the market with human blood. Many of us have diamonds on our hands that have blood in them. Fast fashion has blood in it. Technology has blood in it. These are not the first Nike shoes (again, Nike is not involved with these shoes) that have blood in them. What makes the Satan shoes different is that the blood is not masked or hidden. The violence is right in front of you. You cannot pretend to not know the human cost. And when we know that we know that we know, we often get upset. The blood in the shoes is not new, we just liked it better when we could not see it.

The Satan shoes are awful to us not just because of the idolatry we might associate with them. Our collective non-rage of the Jesus shoes suggests that we are okay with the idolatry of Christ in gold form. The Satan shoes are awful to us because they reveal to us that we know what we pretend to not know. We know that we know and we would rather not know that we know. We are a people addicted to violence. We are a people who believe the lie that violence can solve our conflicts. We are a people who believe that there are conditions where spilling of human blood is acceptable - war, capital punishment, abortion, gun violence, etc.

I did not think that we had a limit to where blood could be spilled. Apparently I was wrong.

We draw the line at shoes.

Why God Will Not Rid The World Of The Devil

Stanley Hauerwas (Source)

As previously stated at the end of the last post, Stanley Hauerwas wrote in his book Matthew, “That is why the devil is at once crafty but self-destructively mad, for the devil cannot help but be angry, recognizing as he must that he does not exist.”

The point being that the devil does not exist apart from other systems, structures and people. The devil does not exist outside of that which it is attached to. Like a parasite, the devil does not have the capacity to live outside of a host body. Thus, Hauerwas makes the case, this is maddening for the devil because the devil knows just how powerless the devil is.

The devil may not exist on its' own, but the presence and influence of the devil is felt. Which is why so many of us desire the end of the devil, but when we begin that work the tragic irony is revealed.

Even God will not rid the world of the devil.

The reason God will not eliminate the devil is because the force we call the devil, that does not exist without the life energy of other beings, is interwoven within humanity. It is like a tumor that has become entangled with vital organs. To remove the tumor the vital organs would be destroyed and the body would die. Given the option of killing the body or allowing the cancer to exist, God chooses not to kill the body but hold that body in God’s hands through the difficult times of life.

Because to destroy the a parasite so interwoven with creation, God would destroy the very creation God loves. The devil is crafty in so much that the devil figured out, even as a being that does not exist, how to survive.

Even Satan Knows He Does Not Exist

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Pastor Brian Zahnd was explaining Satan to those of us who do not take the Satanvery seriously. Generally those are the people who are in the west, highly educated, wealthy, “rational” and suspicious of those things that are unscientific. A decent sized group of people.

In his efforts to explain the Devil, Zahnd described the way meteorologists would describe a hurricane. Hurricanes are powerful, destructive and are even given anthropomorphic names. But even as we name a hurricane, we know that the hurricane is the result of complex systems intermingling and colliding with each other. The hurricane cannot exist on its own.

Likewise Satan is powerful, destructive and given a name. We know that Satan is the result of complex systems intermingling and colliding with each other. As such, Satan cannot exist on its own. Satan is the result of the most complicated systems interconnected with the most complex animal on the planet.

Those of us who have read Stanley Hauerwas may recall how he wrote in his book Matthew, “That is why the devil is at once crafty but self-destructively mad, for the devil cannot help but be angry, recognizing as he must that he does not exist.”