What We Get Wrong About Jesus Cracking the Whip

On the Destruction of Property, Delineating Between Positive & Negative Aggression, and Why People Probably Flip Tables More Often Because of Jesus

As debates about masculinity soar to new heights with the rise of the Manosphere, the Broligarchs, and Trump’s 2nd election, Christians continue to turn to the Bible for answers. Of course, an undisciplined and non-Christological search through the Bible on this topic can yield some wild results. But most Christians have enough sense to turn to Jesus.

Progressive-leaning Christians such as myself have been steadily reminding our inflamed culture that the self-proclaimed meek and mild Jesus was a non-violent champion of peacemaking, enemy love, and self-sacrifice. Lest we seek to domesticate Jesus, we might add that he was also ¹, offensive to the imperial and religious powers of his day, and generally a man willing to take some risks. His capture and crucifixion were preceded by stoning, nearly being thrown over a cliff, and escaping arrest on one or more occasions.

Still, a debate about Jesus’ character and masculinity wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that time he destroyed commercial property in the Temple courts. You know the one. It’s where we get the phrase turning over tables and all the resulting gifs it has produced.

Obviously, people flipped tables before Jesus, but do you think people flip tables more often because of the popularization of the phrase?

Let’s review John’s most detailed account:

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. (John 2:13-22)

You’ve doubtless heard this passage cited as an example of righteous anger. It certainly is that. I fear the quiet part that isn’t being stated aloud (because it’s a textually unwarranted leap) is that Jesus is sometimes aggressively violent and Christians will need to be at times too.

Thank you for tolerating this cringey image. I made it and I hate it too.

Within the temple court existed a lively market where one could purchase ritually pure animals for sacrifice, change out Roman currency for Tyrian shekels, and pay the temple tax, among other things. The tax could be steep for poor Jewish men. The money-changing fees could also be absorbent. For the animal merchants less inclined toward greed, these fees could conceivably incentivize them to hike up their prices in order to feed the mouths at home. However you slice it, the greed of a minority facilitated a corrupt system for the majority. Though the people languished under other Roman and Jewish fees and taxes, it was nowhere more visible than in the House of God where, of all places, justice should reign.

People can become resigned to this kind of evil over a long period, but it should be expected that when the Son of God shows up, he might be more than a little peeved. I chose John’s account because it’s the only version where we hear Jesus braided together a whip. This gives the impression that his anger was stirred upon entering the court, but that he took some time to craft the whip. Perhaps he returned a later day after completing it, and John took the narrative liberty of making it appear seamless, but at the very least, Jesus seemed to have sat down for 30 minutes to a few hours to complete his craft.

As for Jesus’ aggressive action, it is clear that John primarily portrays them as an act of ritual purification — especially of His own Body — but I don’t think it’s a stretch to see it as a protest as well. In all other confrontations, Jesus only uses his words, but in this scenario, he knew the most effective means of protesting economic injustice was to strike at the heart of the religious elite’s profits. By turning over the money-changing tables and driving out cattle, he was disrupting the instruments of commerce. That certainly got their attention.

It is important to note that none of the Gospels mention Jesus using the whip to strike any people. Whether he simply used the whip to startle the animals out of the market or actually struck them is unclear, but it would be a drastic leap to suggest Jesus struck any merchants or priests, given how out of character that would be for Jesus, according to the remainder of the Gospels.

While one may face some pushback calling Jesus’ actions a “peaceful protest,” they cannot designate it as violent because we don’t have a plausible reason to believe that he physically harmed people. Those who insinuate this are often the same people who extol the virtue of aggression supposedly inherent in masculinity. This is problematic, to say the least.

As someone who is learning to regulate and manage anger, I’ve learned there is an important distinction between anger and aggression.

Anger is an emotion. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s a neutral energy alerting us to unfairness, injustice, or a betrayal of our values. Aggression, on the other hand, is anger in action. When the mere feeling is manifested in some measurable way, most commonly through words or movements, it is aggression and is a destructive force. Where there is physical abuse, arson, war, and the like, there is aggression. However, as Hindus know well, destruction does not have to be a negative force. A worshipper of Shiva or Kali, deities of destruction, may invoke them in mantra or prayer for the destruction of such things as ego or illusion.

A GIF from Dev Patel’s spiritual action film, Monkey Man (2024)

Much of our aggressive actions, like fitness, sports, or high-intensity performative art, are necessary outlets for our anger that could very easily be channeled into negative destruction. With intention, our aggression can be channelled in the service of positive destruction, like Jesus’ premeditated and public provocation. It is my conviction, inspired by the Gospels, that positive aggression can never involve violence toward other image-bearers of God. But I digress on that point, given how tedious it is to expound on the implications of pacifism.

Originally, I was attempting to post this before The Chosen episodes featuring this scene dropped in theaters because I knew that’d draw attention back to this story for a lot of evangelicals. Well, I missed that deadline, but I did watch that episode in the theater last night, and I want to highlight something I thought it did really well.

A still from The Chosen: Last Supper (Part 1)

The series did well giving the audience a feel for how disruptive and upsetting this protest was, particularly by introducing viewers to some of the money-changers and vendors before Jesus overturns their tables. The viewer can empathize with the vendors who are pressured into complicity with a corrupt system and see how these mostly good people pay a price in Jesus’ disruption of the system, which a wicked minority are primarily responsible for. But that’s not the particular part I want to praise. That part comes when Jesus exits the courtyard after verbally chastising the religious elites, and a majority of the crowd begins to chant, “Hosanna!” and praise Jesus.²

This showed that while a few people had cause to be upset, such as the religious elites, vendors, and wealthy attendants, the overwhelming majority of people — the poor and working class — heralded this as a successful act of resistance against the reigning few misanthropes. In Jesus, they saw someone who stood up for their ability to worship Adonai without all the barriers that made their lives bitter. It showed that Jesus’ actions were good news for the poor and powerless.

My main point is to say, Jesus’ famous act of destruction is a positive example of aggression because it was non-violent, thoughtful, and singular in his life. This story is shocking precisely because it’s the only one like it. That signals that such provocative performances are to be somewhat rare in the Christian life, which ought to mirror the ratio in the Gospels, something like 1% physical aggression, 20% verbal sparring, and 80% classic Jesus stuff like loving sinners, performing miracles, and communing with his Father.

So my fellow Christians, by all means, continue to spotlight this story in conversations about righteous anger and activism, but be wary of using it to champion violence, negative destruction, or impulsivity. Why? Because God is love, Jesus is Their representative, and to alter Elie Wiesel’s quote slightly, “to degrade the image of God anywhere is to degrade it everywhere.” On a related closing note, I’d be remiss if I weren’t to mention that while speaking against systemic injustice is important, harping on sociological differentials can lead anyone, myself included, to become drunk on the wine of criticism. To gravely flatten the religious and imperial elite’s sins here, you could say they betrayed a principle the Big Book of AA states so well:

“I am no better or worse than anyone else.”

No one in that courtyard was without sin. The elite’s sins are obvious, the vendors’ slightly less so, and the affirming crowd’s even easier to miss until you zoom out chronologically and see that even they functionally abandon Jesus and therefore their own values by the end of that fated week. So, in everything, let us strive to live the greatest two commandments by honoring the equal dignity within every human, both in thought and deed. The phrase, namaste comes to mind, as it means “I honor the divine in you.” So namaste, namaste.

P.S. I anticipate any detractors to what I’ve presented may say, but “Jesus in Revelation does such & such.” True, Jesus does appear explicitly as a conquering king in some of Revelation’s imagery. That’s another post, but for brevity’s sake, all that imagery presupposes that Jesus’ victory comes through defeat and that eterna

l life comes first through entering death.

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1. Doubtless some will dispute the way I phrased this. It would be more precise to say his words and actions had politically radical implications. As to how much he intended these implications is debated, but if you’d like to hear more of my thoughts on the matter, I speak about it in the section titled Yeshua and Caeser in the below post

2. As with all the show’s biblical imagination, presenting the a large portion of the crowd verbally supporting Jesus was a choice and an example of taking liberties. However, considering the children shouting Hosanna in Matthew’s account and other little phrases like Luke’s — “the people hung on his every word” — we can see how Dallas Jenkins had warrant for reconstructing the scene in this way.