"Is it time for Christians to turn the other cheek? Or is it time to drive out the moneychangers?"What a loaded question this seems! Maybe I'm bringing my own experience into it, but it seems to me that there's an underlying bias in it, that there's a "correct" answer and it isn't the "do nothing" option of turning the other cheek. Christians are being tortured and killed! We can't stand by silently while it happens.
My first response to the question is to question its validity. It gives us two mutually-exclusive responses. Either we let the persecution continue without protest or we wade in and do our best to make it stop, even if it means resorting to violence.
Do those two choices really exhaust our full range of possible responses to persecution of Christians around the world? Am I alone in perceiving the first choice as representing the option of non-engagement? Does it, for others, bring up, as it ought to, scenes of those who returned to minister to the Auca Indians in Ecuador following the death of Jim Elliot and three other missionaries?
Driving out the moneychangers is a curious scenario to bring into the discussion. The moneychangers in the Gospels were turning the worship of God into a commercial enterprise and as a result making worship difficult for those entering the temple courts. Who in the current story of the persecuted church fits that role? Is it possible to find "moneychangers" outside the walls of the church?
Another nagging aspect of bringing up the encounter between Jesus and the moneychangers is that it was one more step toward the cross. It happened at the beginning of his last week in Jerusalem. By the end of the week he was dead and we can presume that all those tables were back in place. While Jesus' action certainly wasn't pointless, one has to take the long view to see any benefit from it. In the short term, it simply gave the religious leaders one more reason to kill him without resolving anything about Jewish worship in Jerusalem.
Let's look at our options again. Is it time to minister to those who persecute us without retaliation? Is it time to focus on tearing down the barriers to worship erected by those seeking personal profit through religious enterprise even if it costs us everything? Is it time to try to overturn the activities of our persecutors with a whip, realizing that the attempt will likely cost us our lives? Is this a call to embrace martyrdom on behalf of the persecuted church? Will those who choose that option act alone or will they stir up others to fight and die with them -- or maybe on their behalf?
One of the presumptions behind the question is that it is time to do something to stop persecution of Christians around the world. Will we also seek to stop persecution of people from other religions? Would it be best to stop all violence in the world that occurs to any person for any reason? (If that were our goal, wouldn't it be intuitively obvious that it couldn't be done by means of violence?) Why are we primarily concerned about persecution against Christians? Is it because we fear it might someday be us?
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