destroy this temple (on John 2)

Yesterday, a 25 year old active duty member of the U.S. Air Force set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. In messages on his social media, in a livestream video of his actions, and in his own voice, shouting before he ignited himself, he declared what he was doing an “extreme act of protest” against the United States’ support of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine.

"I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,” Aaron Bushnell said.

Aaron died last night from the injuries he sustained in his self-immolation protest.

It would be easy to dismiss this young man’s death as a tragic result of mental instability. Maybe you, yourself, have already done that. But there are at least two reasons to pause, here. First, as the writer Hanif Abdurraqib said on Instagram (in his stories, which disappear after 24 hours and which are some of the most cogent, compassionate and accessible cultural commentary I read, these days), millions of people who struggle with their mental health are making well-informed, well-considered decisions about the state of the world every minute of every day.

And, second, Bushnell’s explanation that his own self-immolation is not at all extreme compared to what the people of Palestine are and have been enduring is…accurate. It is true. Maybe you don’t see the same media coverage that I see. Maybe you have not witnessed starving infants and children missing limbs, people stuck in rubble of bombed buildings, siblings clinging to the body of their murdered mother, Israeli soldiers taunting Palestinians and laughing about their deaths. Maybe you are not seeing the headlines about people in the North of Gaza eating animal feed mixed with grass to survive, or Netanyahu’s utter, murderous commitment to driving an entire people off the face of the earth.

Maybe you don't see what I see. But after nearly 150 days, even our American media’s stubborn war propaganda machine is starting to falter in its mission to hide the horrific realities of genocide. It is getting harder to ignore the horrors.

Aaron Bushnell’s protest - and that’s what it was, defined in his own clear, written and shouted declaration - is a form of resistance intended to make it impossible for people to continue looking away. He used his body, his life, to point out our cruelty, our inability to witness, our refusal to stand up against the kind of horrors that would be unimaginable if we weren’t seeing them in real time, from real people, every single hour of every single day.

I am not going to set myself on fire. But living these months with my government, the media, friends, family and institutional leaders consistently gaslighting me and millions of others about what we are watching with our own eyes certainly opens a space in my heart for understanding why that particular action might feel warranted.

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In this week’s gospel lesson, Jesus turns over the tables in the temple. We get John’s perspective, here, instead of Mark, Matthew or Luke’s, and John’s take is always just a little different than the others.

For John, this scene in the temple takes place early on - the second scene of Jesus’ public ministry; the other writers put this scene at the end, making it the final straw for what the religious authorities could tolerate from Jesus. And, unlike the other gospel writers, John doesn’t cast the whole thing as “Jesus is upset because this whole selling of sacrifices has just gotten out of hand.” Jesus isn’t protesting an excess of temple marketplace practices; here, he is angry that the temple has become a marketplace at all.

“Take these things out of here,” Jesus yells. “Stop making my Father’s house into a marketplace!” And then, he fashions himself a whip and drives every last seller of sheep and peddler of pigeons out of the building. The people in the temple are, as you might imagine, indignant.

Driving of the Merchants From the Temple by Scarsellino

“What right do you have to do this?!” They ask. And Jesus answers, kind of cryptically, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The temple people are, obviously, confused. “We’ve been working on this building for 46 years, man, how in the world are you going to do it in 3 days?”

John throws us readers a rope, here, and explains that Jesus wasn’t talking about the building; he was talking about his own body, the brain he had just used to fashion a whip, the muscled forearms he used to sweep every coin purse off its table, the expanded lungs and chafing vocal chords he used to declare his purpose and his anger.

There are lots of ways to read this story; indeed, there are at least four nearly-original ways to TELL it, as evidenced by the preponderance of gospels in our Bible. But one way to tell this story is to understand Jesus as prioritizing a living, breathing, feeling, angering, resisting human body over a monetized and mythologized institution.

What is more valuable than a living, breathing, human being? What is more important than the unique, irreplaceable, unutterable mystery of one single human life?

A sacrificial system? A religious building? A hierarchy of power? An ancient tradition?

What is more important than the lives of precious human people?

A military alliance? Access to oil? The right to have what we want? The facade of ethical standing? Avoiding admitting we were wrong? White supremacy? Myths of purity?

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A human life is precious. It’s why Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection are so powerful. It’s why self-immolation protests, like Aaron Bushnell’s, disturb us so much. We should consider - really consider - what it is that we are willing to sacrifice so many precious, beloved, unique and irreplaceable human lives for the sake of…and why.

“Destroy THIS temple,” Jesus says, referring to his own body, his own vehicle for existing in this world, his own sack of skin enlivened and inspired by God’s own presence, God’s own breath.

Aaron Bushnell’s death was a destruction of a temple. It was an insistence that we pay attention to the tens of thousands of precious temples being destroyed in Gaza, that we in the United States admit that we are funding, shielding, enabling, abetting, allowing that destruction to happen. Every day, every hour.