Monkey Wrench

Palm Sunday 2026

The problem with latter-day saints, as in saints of the last century, not Mormons, is that we often learn things about them we’d rather not know.

This is certainly the case when it comes to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s marital infidelity, which qualifies as emotional abuse of his wife Coretta, though we have no evidence that there was any sexual abuse or exploitation in those adulterous relationships.

It is the case when we consider the evidence that Thomas Merton fathered a child out of wedlock as a young man, abandoning his responsibility to the mother and child and entering the monastery.

It is the case with the recent revelations that Cesar Chavez, an esteemed labor leader, was a rapist and child molester.

At least the sins of ancient saints have been buried in the sands of time, even if their lives are so unlike ours that it is difficult to use them as role models.

There is no context in which I would describe the late Edward Abbey as a saint. A novelist and a nature writer though he refused that title, Abbey inspired an environmental movement. He was also married five times, was an anarchist, and loved rifles in a MAGA sort of way. He had enough hubris to anger every side of the political spectrum and just didn’t care, filling his non-fiction with aphorism like “Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and powerful.”

He is best known today for the novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” published in 1975. In it, a group of four misfits come together as a loose gang to resist the pollution and destruction of the environment, in this case the Desert Southwest. They attack bulldozers and train cars, particularly objecting to the Glen Canyon Damn, as the law closes in.

Many believe the novel radicalized a generation of environmental activists, individuals who engaged in direct action to protect the environment. Their destruction of equipment and tree-spiking in the Pacific Northwest came to be known as “monkey wrenching.”

One of the groups that came out of this direct action movement was Earth First!, with an exclamation point, which took the monkey wrench and a hammer for its logo. When even Earth First! proved too tame for some, a splinter group called the Earth Liberation Front was formed.

Today, there are dozens of direct action environmental groups worldwide, like the UK-based group Extinction Rebellion. Corporations continue to fund efforts to classify these groups as terrorist organizations.

The granddaddy of all environmental direct action groups is Greenpeace, founded in Canada four years before “The Monkey Wrench Gang” was published. It has taken on many environmental causes, beginning with opposition to nuclear testing. They were so effective that in 1985, the French government bombed and sank the group’s flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, killing Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira.

Who exactly are the terrorists here? The environmental activists placing their boat between whalers and their prey or disrupting nuclear weapon testing on a French atoll, or the governments and corporations that arrest, brutalize, and even murder to protect their own power and wealth? The patriotic anti-fascists like me who fight for a restoration of our democracy, or the masked thugs who murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis?

At Passover, the Jewish people tell the story of their liberation from oppression, from slavery in Egypt. During the life of Jesus, the Jewish people were again under an oppressive foreign power.

The Roman governor of the colonial occupation would order a troop surge in Jerusalem every year. Pontius Pilate did not live in Jerusalem year round, something you would not know from the gospels. He despised the city and the people he governed. He lived in Caesarea Maritima, on the coast. He would enter Jerusalem from the west, riding a horse, the animal of war, surrounded by his legions and their chariots.

All four gospels have Jesus entering the city from Bethany, where he has recently visited the household of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in John. Jesus would have entered through the Eastern Gate, traditionally believed to be the gate through which the Messiah would one day enter, a belief so persistent that Suleiman the Magnificent had it sealed in 1541, a cemetery placed in front to prevent its use by the ritually clean. It remains sealed today.

And Jesus came riding a donkey, a symbol of peace.

We lose a lot of this because we read the events of the week through the lens of later theology, theology endorsed by the rich and powerful that makes the message of Jesus about some other world, some other time, because heavenly Jesus is no threat to their riches or their power. But their Jesus is not the real Jesus. Their Christ enthroned is an endorsement of their status. Jesus on a donkey is a challenge to their status, a challenge to the colonial occupation, and to the Jewish elite that collaborated with it for personal gain.

Jesus believed in direct action. He was not the wimp that so many pastors preach. He didn’t have a one-day-a-week God, only worthy of attention on the Sabbath. And he didn’t stay in Galilee. He went to Jerusalem, to the seat of power. And then, he did a courageous and crazy thing. He flipped tables.

Scholars almost all agree that this story, called the “cleansing of the Temple” and found in all three synoptic gospels and the gospel attributed to John, represents historic memory, though John places it earlier in Christ’s ministry. The Romans, aware of the sensitivities of the Jewish people and knowing the history of the Maccabean revolt, deferred to the Temple authorities on matters related to that holy site, and considered acts of desecration a capital offense. Early Christians seem unlikely to have fabricated a story that justified a state execution unless it really happened.

As is often the case, we are still missing some context, for the authors of the gospels are writing decades later, after the Temple has been destroyed. They assume their audience knows some things, while there are other things they no longer know themselves.

The courtyard where Jesus flips tables is occupied by merchants who sell animals to those who no longer have their own herds and flocks, may have lost their family small hold altogether. It is likely that Jesus himself had no small hold, and it is not entirely clear that it was the sacrificial practice to which Jesus objected. He never specifically denounces the Mosaic Law which mandates those sacrifices. In fact, he claims to support and fulfill it.

The courtyard also contained moneychangers, and it is this group that receives the most attention from preachers. There had been a Jewish diaspora for centuries, so long that many Jews had forgotten Hebrew, the language of the religion, necessitating a translation into Koine Greek. It seems that many don’t know Aramaic, the language of daily life in Judea and Galilee, either, as we are reminded by the litany of nationalities and languages on Pentecost Sunday.

These travelers would have arrived with foreign currency, but still be expected to pay the Temple tax. Those foreign coins would need to be converted to shekels. The assumption is that the moneychangers are cheating their customers, pretty likely given how often the prophets denounce things like false weights.

But there is a third option, that the civil disobedience of Jesus was focused on neither the sale of sacrificial livestock nor the exchange of currency.

Temple taxes were high, Roman extractions higher. A growing number of people were being forced to take out loans to pay their taxes, and the one place with plenty of cash on hand was the Temple. This was the lender of last resort, usually the last desperate act before losing your family land.

And who had the money to buy up that land when the debtors defaulted? The elite who collaborated with Rome, had control of the Sanhedrin, and conspired with the priests to see Jesus executed.

The Temple was part of a system that exploited those falling into poverty. It was every payday loan company that exploits the poor today, whether in a shopping plaza or backed by a hedge fund and operating with an unregulated “financial services” app on your phone.

Thirty-six years after the execution of Jesus, when things finally exploded into open warfare, one of the first acts in the Jewish War was to burn the debt records in the Temple archives.

Jesus says he does not object to the Law of Moses. The early church, increasingly Gentile and not observing the Law still writes this down. There is no reason to doubt its historicity.

The Law of Moses calls for sacrifices, including sacrificing animals, at the Temple. Cleansing the Temple was an ancient form of monkey wrenching before there were actual monkey wrenches. And whether it was cheating by the money changers or the Temple’s corruption and complicity with Rome, the bottom line is that it was an economic protest by an advocate for the poor, for the “least among us.”

I love the folks who say the church should not be political. Politics literally just means how we organize ourselves as a society. Even anarchists like Edward Abbey live in society. Who do you think was buying his books?

How do you organize society without reference to your values?

Jesus didn’t end up on a cross because the health insurance industry objected to his healing ministry, though that would certainly be the case today. He ended up on the cross because he threatened the wealth and power of the Jewish elite, so they drummed up false charges against him, and got Rome to do their dirty work. We will tell that story later this week.

But first we have this entry into Jerusalem, countering the power of Rome and its might with a demonstration of peace and love, with cries of Hosanna!, which means “Save us!”

During his ministry, traditionally believed to have been three years, Jesus engaged in three forms of social justice work. He did direct mission, healing the sick and feeding the hungry. He engaged in prophetic speech, announcing a kingdom reversal where the oppressed would be lifted up, the exploiters brought down. And he engaged in direct action, quietly challenging the murderous mob of men, not so quietly flipping tables in the Temple.

Of course, that really doesn’t have anything to do with us. Times were wildly different then. Tiberius, the man on the throne spent most of his time at his resort. Some suspected him of immorality including molestation. His closest advisor was really running the show, and he was truly evil. And the rich, from Rome to Jerusalem, chose whichever side they thought would keep them rich. So, you know, not like today.

Hosanna! God save us.

Amen.

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray.

Most Amazing God,
we thank you for this creation,
for the wild places that explode with beauty,
where diversity spills over into exuberance,
where chaos becomes complexity becomes life.

We thank you for the wildness that disorders,
for dandelions and bears
that remind us that we share the land,
that not everything is about us.

We pray for creation,
and for the prophets who speak and act
on her behalf,

on your behalf,
who write and sing,
teach and chain themselves to trees.

Jesus prepared for his active ministry
by going out into the wild places,
the thin places
liminal and lonely,
so we pray as he taught us, saying:

Our Father…