Difficult texts: Mark 11.17 – a sacrificial systems failure in the Temple?

In modern Christology, scholars have tended to fall into one of two camps identifying Jesus either as a sage-like proponent of wisdom or as an eschatological prophet. Interpretations of Jesus’ actions in the Temple have often followed these trajectories. Some have asked whether Jesus was attempting to stimulate reform of a corrupt Temple; others have claimed that he symbolically pronounced its imminent destruction. Alongside these alternative views there is also the problem of deciding whether the words Mark ascribes to Jesus are a relatively accurate record of what Jesus said. Or, alternatively, whether they reflect a later Christian interpretation of the Temple incident. ¹

Resolution of neither of these matters is the direct intention of this article. Instead, it proposes that we might gain new understanding of the Temple incident if we bring to bear a recent socio-psychological study of unintended systems failure.

As is well recognized, Mark 11.17 combines a sentence from Isaiah 56.7 with a brief phrase taken from Jeremiah 7.11: ‘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.’ In interpreting the final part of this verse, commentators have typically focused on the word ‘robbers’. Some claim to find in the term the basis of a dominical (or Markan) critique of certain forms of Temple corruption. The most common suspects are perpetrators of financial corruption (perhaps the chief priests). ² Others have sought evidence of ideological corruption (those who allowed the infiltration of pagan imagery through the prescriptive use of Tyrian coinage). ³ Corruption introduced by Herod’s rebuilding of the Temple on Greek architectural lines has been suggested. ⁴ Still others have sought to identify the alleged sources of corruption by interpreting ‘robbers’ as ‘bandits’, seeing a reference to a creeping nationalism: forerunners of the Zealots occupying the Temple during the Jewish revolt. ⁵

While any of these readings (and others) are possible, by contrast Tom Holmén has proposed that we should place the interpretative emphasis not on the word ‘robbers’ but rather on the word ‘den’. ⁶ He argues that the focus of Jesus’ complaint is that the Temple has become a place where criminals find refuge. Holmén’s suggestion builds on the wider context of Jeremiah 7. There, in verse 10, the prophet castigates those who ‘steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal … and then come and stand before [God] in this house … and say, “We are safe!” – only to go on doing all these abominations.’

Holmén’s argument is that Jesus’ disruption of the Temple was targeted at the misuse of the divinely provided mechanism afforded by the Temple for atoning sin by those who wished to avoid genuine repentance. This approach sees the Temple incident as concerned with the problematic misuse of a system, rather than with the corruption of a particular group.

Hermeneutical value, if not exegetical plausibility, may be added to Holmén’s reading if we consider a recent work by Michael Sandel. In his What Money Can’t Buy: the moral limits of markets, Sandel discusses the unintended consequences of monetizing social contracts. ⁷ He cites an experiment conducted in modern-day Israeli childcare centres that tested the assumption that penalties deter antisocial behaviour. In certain centres fines were introduced for parents picking up their children late; in others there was no fine. The study ‘A fine is a price’ demonstrated, paradoxically, that by fixing an explicit monetary value to late arrival, parents abandoned an earlier implicit moral obligation. ⁸ Rather than encouraging parents to arrive on time, the fine came to be seen as the acceptable price for arriving late. In fact, the study showed that in facilities that introduced a fine, parents were more likely to arrive late than in those that did not.

Let us imagine that we might treat animal sacrifices as a form of divinely legislated ‘fine’. Might it be possible to read Jesus’ accusation that the Temple had become a ‘den of robbers’ – i.e. a refuge for the lawless – as a critique of a system in which sacrifice had similarly (and paradoxically) come to reinforce lawlessness rather than reverse it? Had sacrifice become an acceptable price for continuing transgression? Might we, in other words, see Jesus’ action as a response to a perceived systems failure?

Before proceeding further, some caution is needed. If we do choose to read Mark 11.17 as a response to the abuse of the sacrificial system, we must nevertheless take care to avoid the trap of pitting ‘interior’ devotion against ‘external’ religiosity. We do not have to go as far as believing that Jesus (or Mark) was arguing against sacrificial ritual per se (contra the classical Protestant interpretation or more modern readings inspired by the thinking of René Girard). ⁹ After all, in Mark 1.44 Jesus appears to commend sacrifice, urging the healed leper to ‘show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded’. Instead, a more limited argument is being advanced that one possible understanding of Jesus’ words and actions in the Temple is that he (or Mark) considered that right intention and right action were both important in worship. The claim, therefore, is that Jesus was objecting to action without correct intention – or, indeed, action perverted by incorrect intention.

Such a reading obviously fits with certain Old Testament critiques of sacrificial acts (for example, Psalm 51.16–18). Similarly, later in the Temple Jesus endorses the view of the scribe who places wholehearted love of God above sacrifice (Mark 12.28–34). We might also note that Jesus’ final action in the Temple (at least as Mark records it) appears to be to single out someone who epitomizes a more appropriate combination of intention and costly action. This is the widow who puts into the treasury ‘everything she had’ (Mark 12.41–44). ¹⁰ By contrast, the wealthy ‘have contributed out of their abundance’. Their monetary ‘sacrifice’ is seen as an act of little genuine cost or, perhaps, moral consequence.

Whether the interpretation of the Temple incident as a systems-failure critique is a plausible historical reconstruction of Jesus’ beliefs, or whether it merely has secondary value in preaching on the passage today, it is noteworthy that it bears some resemblance to Paul’s thought. In Romans 8.3 Paul argues that ‘the law [has been] weakened by the flesh’ and consequently cannot remove sin. Understanding Paul’s view of the law is notoriously controverted. However, the same systems-failure approach might be pertinent: Paul believed that observance of the law (including Temple sacrifice) had somehow failed to deliver – instead, like the fines paid by late-arriving parents, it had the opposite effect. It had become the cost of business as usual.

To return to our initial historiographical comments, a systems-failure reading of the Temple incident might fit with either view of Jesus: the sage-like reformer or the eschatological prophet proclaiming the Temple beyond redemption. Equally, such a reading may merely reflect the view of the early Church. What it does emphasize instead, though, is the value of shifting attention away from specific examples of corruption and refocusing on the way in which (religious) systems can be corrupted and counterproductive. Needless to say, such a warning remains pertinent today.