Turning the Tables

Helen Syski observes that the overturning of expectations during Holy Week began long before the Cross. 

One might say Jesus woke up on the wrong side of the bed when he overturned the tables in the Temple.  

He was hungry.  Despite its being “not the time for figs,” He cursed the fig tree that failed to give him a fig (Mark 11:13).  After journeying to Jerusalem from Bethany, He entered the temple.

He began to drive out those selling and buying there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. He did not permit anyone to carry anything through the temple area. (Mark 11:15-16)   

As Jesus stood in their midst, his sides heaving, the brightness of his eye piercing them with both human and divine anger, He declared:

“Is it not written: My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples? But you have made it a den of thieves.” (Mark 11:17)  

The money changers and livestock sellers were known to cheat their buyers; it was a seller’s market, for these sacrifices were ordered by God. But perhaps this Holy Week, we should consider another meaning behind his use of “thief.”  Through their obsession with rituals and minute observance of the law, were the Jews of the time attempting to steal heaven without God? 

Miracle or Manacles 

The Jewish faith of Abraham was a covenant in which the Jews “renounced entirely all natural politico-social and economic judgment and trusted that God, by His covenant, had promised that the nation as well as the individual would survive and flourish even in this world; that is, they relied upon a continued ‘miracle’” (Romano Guardini, Learning the Virtues that Lead You to God, 187). 

Like so many of their forebearers, the Pharisees lose sight of this miracle; they lose contact with God. They begin to so focus on the human half of the covenant that it becomes a contract; they begin to believe that by fulfilling the law, “man is justified before God and acquires a legal claim to the fulfillment of God’s promises. [They have] a great seriousness and constant willingness to take pains and make sacrifices, but the decisive thing, the fact that everything which comes from God is grace, moves into the background” (Learning the Virtues, 192).

They become chained to the law. The Pharisees were enslaved by the very thing they used to free themselves from reliance on God; they exchanged their miracle for manacles. 

The Man who Restored the Miracle 

Enter Christ, the babe in the hay, the New Adam.  

God enters history, seeking for His people to be His friends, not slaves. He seeks a new Covenant with each of us. Jesus moves the focus from the exterior to the interior; purity of heart is more important than the ceremonious purity of washed hands. We are to graft ourselves onto Him, His life flowing through us. Christ’s justice “is not merely a juridical adjudication, but a task and a power” (Learning the Virtues, 198). Jesus has come not merely to transact our salvation from the Father, but to live in us. We are invited to have this miracle be the foundation of our lives. 

He Turned the Tables 

When Jesus took up His cross, He turned the tables on us. That other Person in our Covenant has a face pierced by thorns; He has a back that bravely bore our sins. Through His sacrifice, death, and Resurrection, Christ gives us His moral character, His justice, that we might stand before God, in relationship once more (193). 

When we are told to take up our cross and follow Him, it “is not to be a general ethical attitude of stoic or ascetic nature, but rather the personal relation of the believer to Christ, his Savior. Here again the commandment is stripped of every abstract form and is revealed as the claim of God’s love addressed to each individual person” (Learning the Virtues, 190).  

God is here. His miracle is here. As we enter into Holy Week, remember:

I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me … if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing. (Galatians 2:20-21) 

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Copyright 2025 Helen Syski
Images: Painting: Johannes Zick, Photo: Andreas Praefcke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Canva