Jesus Turned Over Tables. He Would Have Interrupted That Minneapolis Church Service, Too.

Photo by Mitchell Leach on Unsplash

What Would Jesus Do?

Conservative Christians love to ask this question.

They adorn their Sunday school rooms with it. They wrap it around their wrists. They saturate their social media accounts with it. They punctuate their sermons with it.

The only thing they don’t want to do is actually answer it, at least not using Jesus as a measuring stick.

We’ve seen that with breathtaking clarity again this week.

Recently, a group of anti-ICE protestors interrupted a Minneapolis church service over one of its pastors’ leadership of a local ICE field office. The activists entered the sanctuary mid-service, and without physical violence of any kind, loudly confronted Easterwood and those gathered, with the hypocrisy of a professed Christian minister’s partnering with a violent and lawless Government-sanctioned assault on human beings made in the image of God. They disrupted comfort for the sake of those in profound discomfort.

And in the wake of the incident, celebrity pastors, Conservative denominations, Evangelical seminaries, and Right-Wing media outlets have predictably fallen all over themselves in performative histrionics, condemning the protestors for supposedly violating the sanctity of the sanctuary and the peace of the pew sitters.

As reported by the Associated Press, the Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention called the event “an unacceptable trauma,” lamenting that the service was ”forced to end prematurely” as protesters shouted “insults and accusations at youth, children, and families.”

So, now, these sanctimonious, self-righteous charlatans are suddenly concerned about youth, children, and families?

Not the youth, children, and families in Ukraine and Palestine who are being starved and bombed to death by the Administration they’ve passionately supported.
Not the youth, children, and families who’ve had healthcare and food supports ripped from them by the party they claim upholds and defends their faith tradition.
Not the youth, children, and families irreparably scarred by the pedophiles and rapists their political leaders tirelessly protect.

And certainly not the youth, children, and families who are being terrorized in their homes and workplaces and schools and hospital rooms (and yes, churches), by one of the single most vile abuses of power in our lifetimes, one they continue to applaud.

I can’t imagine a more tone deaf, hypocritical, and anti-Christian position than chastising people who have eloquently answered the question What Would Jesus Do? by literally following in his footsteps.

All four of the New Testament Gospel accounts describe Jesus, overcome with anger at the perversion of the Temple, entering its courts and violently overturning the tables of the money changers and merchants. There and throughout the scriptures, we see a Jesus whose ferocity for humanity and zeal for the temple compelled him to do the audacious, the reckless, the inappropriate; a Jesus who never allowed decorum, conventions, or shame-hurling religious people to silence his voice or soften his convictions.

This is the call to all followers of Jesus: to upend the evil that this world has normalized.

If his feet were on American soil, Jesus would be interrupting church services to condemn leaders who create hell on earth for others, and to confront those who call those churches home with the unpleasant reality of their faith’s namesake.

Conservative Christians love to invoke Jesus’ turning over the temple tables when it suits them (when they want to terrorize families at a PRIDE event, take away body autonomy from women, or brutalize people of color without cause), yet, when faced with a living embodiment of the redemptive spirit of Jesus’ disruption at the Temple, they want to close the book, clutch their pearls, and play the victim.

Supposed followers of Jesus feigning outrage at people of conscience disrupting a worship gathering to call out hypocrisy and vile abuses of power remind us again that they have no interest in emulating Christ or reading the Gospels. They want a Jesus-free Christianity that doesn’t inconvenience them with the annoyances of living with empathy or loving their neighbors.

What would Jesus actually do right now?
Jesus would stand in the street between ICE and those it seeks to terrorize.
Jesus would defy the politicians openly preying upon God’s people.
Jesus would cut off family and friends who collaborate with this unrepentant evil.
Jesus would interrupt the cloistered privilege and ceremonial religion of churches partnering in ethnic cleansing.

There is the law of the land, and there is the law of Love, and sometimes, those are not compatible.

There have always been days for people of faith, morality, and conscience, when manifesting the latter meant overstepping the former.

ICE is a corrupt table.
The Trump Administration is a corrupt table.
White Christian Nationalism is a corrupt table.
Conservative Evangelicalism is a corrupt table.

Jesus would flip over tables in the cause of driving out wickedness and defending the least of these.

And that’s what more Christians should be doing.