Christ, the Moneychangers, and the Occupy Movement

As often happens in this Internet age, where photoshopping is rampant and the virtually immediate inundation of the world's e-mail with snarky refinished imagery based on recent events is encouraged, it is not surprising that many people stoop to the profane. Add on the fact that it can all be done anonymously and what we have is not a more enlighten world but, indeed, a cruder and less fully human one.

Making the rounds lately is a famous image of Christ throwing the moneychangers out of the Temple. Overwritten on the picture are the words, 'The Original Occupy Wall Street Protester'.

It is not a point which helps anyone understand the Occupy Movement nor Christianity. Indeed, it flowers the Occupiers to a status of glory which they do not merit, but, more critically, it slanders Christ to nothing more than a rabble rouser. What the two have in common is precisely nothing.

Christ was evicting people from the temple who did not belong there; they were defaming a holy place. So unless the Occupiers believe that Wall Street is holy and in need of something along the lines of sanctification, then the analogy is less than poor. It is downright, we will say it, blasphemous. Because, in fact, the Occupiers do not want that. They want, all those do gooders who pretend to speak for who they do not, their share, whatever that is. They are jealous of those who have without rational consideration of how they got it. They do not protect something worth protection, as Our Lord was doing, but call for what they do not of their own effort deserve.

No decent Christian would tolerate such tarnishing of the image of Christ, particularly as what He did was based on something really right while the Occupiers are a mere semi-organized rabble who do not understand history, economics, and certainly not religion. If the poster is someone's idea of the intellectual, it instead demonstrates pig ignorance. From that, we learn all we need to know about Occupy sympathizers.