This essay will draw from #OccupytheBible: What Jesus Really Said (and Did) About Money and Power by Susan Thistlethwaite (2012). First, a provocative quotation:
Gustavo Gutierrez, a pioneer of reading the Bible from the perspective of those at the street level rather than those on the eighth floor, once explained the importance of understanding theology from the most human of locations, the body. Gutierrez was being honored at a faculty reception at a school where he was a visiting professor. There was a lavish banquet, and senior professor in theology, carrying a plate piled high with food from the buffet, came over to where Gutierrez and I were chatting. He loomed over Gutierrez and intoned, "So, Professor Gutierrez, explain liberation theology to me." Gutierrez looked at him for a moment and replied, "It's a matter of the stomach." "The stomach?" the tall. portly professor said. "Yes," said Gutierrez. He looked pointedly at the professor's loaded plate. "You do theology differently when your stomach is full than when it is empty."
Those who are on the street [the least of these], who are hungry and in poor health, are the one's feeling the real effects of economic policies that have made HALF of all Americans poor or near poor, according to new Census Bureau data. Possibly those of you who are preachers should run your next sermon by the scrutiny of one of the least of these to make sure your theology is accurate and relevant.
Temple religious leaders "were using scripture to justify driving people into poverty through increased debt and low wages, and driving them out of their homes and jobs."
"temptation is always about the desire to gain power over others." "So much of American life is tied up in wrestling with the temptation to overreach, to think of ourselves as exceptional and not resist the lure of political and financial power."
"The Temple in Jerusalem was the national bank of Israel in Jesus' time; it was a powerful national treasury that did not let its great wealth sit idle. The bank lent the money it collected [huge amounts] at interest, violating Jewish tradition on lending. . . . These unjust lending practices drove many residents into extreme poverty."
"Our current economic crisis is really a credit crisis generated by the way banks decided to change their lending practices, effectively crashing the system." "Jesus' economic plan [Jubilee] is about sharing resources and celebrating community. This kind of economic model is about 'power with' not 'power over'" "Money is an enormous source of temptation; the desire for money is the hook the Devil uses to lure humanity into becoming every more greedy."
In one of the best chapters of her book entitled "Den of Thieves", Thistlethwaite refers to the national bank, a part of the Temple operation, in this way: "The whole issue of charging interest on loans and poor people falling further and further into debt is a huge biblical issue . . . the center of Jesus' teaching and actions." "The vast wealth of the 1% in Israel reached unbelievable proportions in the days of Herod."
"God is a movement God, and unless we as Christians quit mistaking our institutional forms of faith for the movement of God in history, we won't be able to see the signs even if they are written in letters a thousand feet high. "When did we see you, Lord?" Jesus is asked. But Jesus was right in front of them in the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned, and they never saw him. The trick is to actually "see," and you can't see what's happening if you don't get out of your house and out of your church and move around where people are gathering in the streets."
From the lips of a Catholic priest: "The Vatican sounded like the Pharisees of the New Testament;---legalistic, paternalistic and orthodox---while 'the good sisters' were the ones who were feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, educating the immigrant."
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