Sunday/ Christ in the Temple

 

On this Day:

1620
Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sight land at Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
1799
Napoleon Bonaparte leads the Coup d'état of 18 Brumaire ending the Directory government, and becoming one of its three Consuls (Consulate Government).
1851
Kentucky marshals abduct abolitionist minister Calvin Fairbank from Jeffersonville, Indiana, and take him to Kentucky to stand trial for helping a slave escape.
1867
Tokugawa Shogunate hands power back to the Emperor of Japan, starting the Meiji Restoration.
1888
Jack the Ripper kills Mary Jane Kelly, his last known victim.

1913
The Great Lakes Storm of 1913, the most destructive natural disaster ever to hit the lakes, destroys 19 ships and kills more than 250 people.
1923
In Munich, Germany, police and government troops crush the Beer Hall Putsch in Bavaria. The failed coup is the work of the Nazis.
1938
Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath dies from the fatal gunshot wounds of Jewish resistance fighter Herschel Grynszpan, an act which the Nazis used as an excuse to instigate the 1938 national pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht.
1970
Vietnam War: The Supreme Court of the United States votes 6 to 3 against hearing a case to allow Massachusetts to enforce its law granting residents the right to refuse military service in an undeclared war.
1989
Cold War: Fall of the Berlin Wall. Communist-controlled East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany. This key event led to the eventual reunification of East and West Germany.

***

"They maintain themselves high above the fray, descending only to shoot the wounded."--S.J. Perelman on the press

***

A top public transport operator in Norway has introduced stricter security after tests found its electric buses could be remotely accessed and potentially even shut down by their manufacturer in China. The bus-maker says the remote access is —like other automakers — just for maintenance and optimisation.

But they can be trusted, right?

***

The election was not a referendum on policy; it was an intelligence test of voters. Mamdami was the explanation point.
Socialism is not an economic policy; it is a political one. Before any economic changes can be even considered, significant political changes are necessary. Socialism requires an expansion of external authority into personal areas of freedom. It cannot develop or mature; it must be imposed. The initial vote merely opens a box of control and repression that has existed since the dawn of man and has been successfully locked up for only 250 years. It is the ultimate self-inflicted wound. An "own goal."

***

At church today, the priest, a theatrical sort, did a magic trick with hidden boxes during the sermon. I was reminded of an old Harvard Crimson cartoon where a priest in vestments pulled a rabbit out of a chalice. It's probably not a good idea to do magic tricks on the altar.

And, I received my first 'wink of peace'.

***

Oddsmakers put the chance of Trump's tariffs surviving the Supreme Court at 27%.
If it goes against him, what will happen to the money collected? And all the diplomatic agreements attached to them?

***

Sunday/ Christ in the Temple

Today's gospel, Christ confronts the money changers, then obliquely prophesies his death and resurrection with his famous “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

No discussion can compete with the resurrection, yet there is a revolutionary idea in the ejection of the money changers. They are there for a purpose. There is a religious tax, the "tribute tax" of a half-shekel on all adult Jewish males to maintain the Temple, dating back to Moses. The money changers facilitate the payment. They are tradition.

Christ has no problem with taxes, as 'giving to Caesar' shows. But he does introduce a concept intrinsic to the history of Israel that echoes through the history of conflict in government: the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code that was not made by man. Here Christ throws the money changers out of the temple.

But these men are a mainstay in the temple, men who are helping the visitors fulfill the law of the tribute tax--a tax that benefits the temple and, presumably, the worship of God. Christ is calling attention to a divergence between the belief in the law and its practice. The money changers are performing a traditional function with traditional benefits. But without its original belief. it is only form, not substance.

Israel's laws are written following precepts that define man, presume a nature of man. A principle before the law. The principle Socrates died for. Caesar is a money changer.

The supports of law have always been in debate, knowingly or not. Once simple power is rejected as arbitrary, where do we turn for the alternative? What laws can be written that are in concert with the nature of man? And, once those principles are decided upon, how in a world  with changing economic and military circumstances, changes in science and populations, and gross ignorance of the populace can those laws be maintained with the protoction of those founding, universal principles?

Christ's world is spiritual, but he does offer some shocking temporal asides.