Which tables need to be overturned?

How quickly can a person make themselves unpopular with the authorities?

Yesterday, on Palm Sunday, we reported how the crowd rejoiced and cried „Hosanna!“ when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem riding on a donkey.

Make no mistake: When people cheer for you, the powerful always get nervous. Unless, of course, you’re just a puppet the powerful use to distract from their next dirty deed.

But what do you do when the authorities become nervous because of your popularity?

Right, you really take them on! At least if you’re Jesus.

The Rest of the World

Today, on Monday of Holy Week, Jesus decides to „cleanse the temple.“

Jesus then went into the temple of God, drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves, and said to them: ‚It is written: „My house shall be called a house of prayer!“ But you are making it a den of robbers!‘

– Matthew 21:12-13

How would the overturning of the money changers‘ tables be categorized today? Activism? Terrorism? Anti-Semitism? An internal dispute that the rest of the world had better ignore?

The overturning of the tables in the temple is called the cleansing of the temple for good reason. The cleansing of everything that desecrates the temple.

From Outside, From Within

Let us not deceive ourselves: Even today many a church is desecrated, whether through blasphemy commissioned by the church itself, by heretics and provocateurs, by unknown young men or by known soldiers.

But the most dangerous desecration of the temple seems to me to be the internal desecration. Attacks from outside are comparatively easy to recognize. And they mobilize resistance even among people who otherwise have little to do with the church. (Note, for example, the global outrage when the Latin Patriarch was forbidden to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday (politico.com, 29.3.2026). Even secular people and non-believers worldwide sensed that something very unholy was happening here.)

The desecration of the temple from outside awakens resistance, quite naturally and humanly. The desecration from within, however, is much more difficult to counter. Which tables should be overturned when it is men of God in apostolic tradition who open sacred doors to unholy heresy?

And Where Do We Find Him?

What and who is the temple today that needs to be cleansed of desecration? It is first, of course, the church, in both meanings of the word.

But it is as obvious as it is instructive – inspired by 1 Corinthians 6:19 – to also understand ourselves as the temple.

What desecrates my soul? Where does this temple need decluttering?

And who should undertake the decluttering?

Exactly the one who cleansed the temple back then.

And where do we find him?

In the temple – it says so right there! (And preferably in one where things are done in a consecrated, that is: traditional manner.)