Principle and Sacrifice
An Invitation to all Americans to Reflect on Our Nation's Christian Past
If I have understood the story of Jesus correctly, his arrival in Jerusalem shortly before his betrayal and crucifixion was met with great celebration on the part of the local population, but with important skepticism within the city's religious and political establishment who were troubled by the "heretic's" challenge to the established religious order. Jesus arrived on the day after the weekly celebration of the Jewish Shabbat that begins and ends with the setting of the sun on Friday and Saturday evenings, respectively. In other words, Jesus entered Jerusalem on Sunday, one week before he would, as we are told, arise from his grave, as if unscathed from his horrific torture and execution.
After his reception among the common folk upon entry into the city Jesus visited the Jewish temple built by King Herod several decades before and complained
"My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves!" (Matthew 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-19, Luke 19:45-48).
Whereupon, he overturned the tables of the money changers and those who sold animals of sacrifice within the temple's walls. This action, Jesus’s insistence that he was the incarnation of God, and his enormous popularity among the Jewish common folk for whom he is reported to have performed many a miracle, so angered the established religious order that they conspired with the authority of Rome to have Jesus executed.
If we do not dig too deeply and accept the narrative at its face value, the villain is money whose acquisition can corrupt the human spirit. If we dig more deeply, however, it is not the money that is evil; rather, it is the nature of the activity being conducted in a place of holy worship and the motivation for the activity. In other words money can no more corrupt the individual, than a gun can pull its own trigger.
What Jesus promised was paradise in another world and a moral path in this world to open the door to paradise in the next. That moral path was the teachings of Jesus and eventually the Holy Gospel that is the written record of what Jesus taught. What made Jesus so different from the established order of his day was that he offered a path to paradise that did not depend on the established, worldly, religious order. One had only to believe in Jesus, trust in God, and the Holy Spirit would live within you and provide you with the light necessary to find your way through this world into the next.
In effect, Jesus did not reject this world; rather, he provided his followers with a moral path to succeed in it in such a way that it would open the door to paradise in the next world — what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven.
Another important part of Jesus’s teaching was that one could shed one’s past and be born again. In other words, one need not be burdened by the guilt of a wrongful past provided that one sought a divine future. These two things — the promise of paradise in the afterlife and a means to achieve that promise through one’s behavior in this life — provided the common folk with hope, guidance and a way around their current misery. One had only to honor his parents, forever seek the righteous path, trust in God to provide the light necessary to find the path, and one could pass through this life with a sense of fulfillment that no man of power, wealth, and influence who did not believe as did you could ever know.
Important in all of this is not whether Jesus was a prophet, God, or ordinary man with a deep conviction; rather, it is the hope, guidance, and inner freedom from the established social order and life’s ordinary tribulations that these provided each and every human being during his brief life on earth. Jesus did not claim that you could not aspire to worldly greatness, so long as that greatness was achieved in the service of God and your fellow human beings. In this sense, Jesus’s teaching were liberating in their design. No one was obliged to follow anyone, but his own heart and the teachings of Jesus that were a basic lesson in how to get along with one another as equals before God no matter one’s social rank or group affiliation — in short, the essence of the American spirit.
It was not only the teachings of Jesus that his disciples were told to follow, but also his behavior.
Jesus both embraced and challenged the social order of his day. He embraced the established order when it contributed to the good of the people and rejected it when it veered away from its proper role. He also resisted authority , but not with violence, rather with non-compliance. He also showed that such resistance would likely be met with pain and suffering.
Turning the tables in the Jewish temple built by Herod was an act of anger that revealed Jesus for the man that he was — a man of principle who was not afraid to act in its defense. He caused neither personal injury, nor destruction of property. The coin that was scattered on the temple floor could be gathered up, and the tables could be reassembled outside the temple walls for further business. He drew a line between what is profane and what is sacred, what is wrong and what is right, what is bad and what is good, what is improper and what is proper in God’s house as in one’s own. The result was severe punishment.
Jesus did not teach his disciples to run away from oppression; rather, he taught them to stand up for principle. And, he warned them that such behavior would be punished by those less principled. A risk, if not an inevitability, that all good leaders must be willing to take.
Now, I no more believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, than I believe that God is something more than our own creation. This said, it should be clear to everyone that these notions are not idle, and that they should be treated with great respect. What angers me are those who reject these notions, but leave nothing to replace them, that is not still another established order that will force us to relive what Jesus’s message once helped us to overcome.
It is often said that those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. America was founded on a set of principles that all Americans should seek to uphold. In practice we have abandoned these principles, and it is up to us, as Americans, to revive them. Let us work with the Christians of our communities to revive the American spirit and win back the freedoms for which our founding fathers risked their property, life, and reputation.
In liberty,
Roddy A. Stegemann, First Hill, Seattle 98104
Author of Mount Cambitas - The Story of Real Money