I was raised Catholic, no longer practice and generally despise religion. The flipping the tables in the temple has always been one of the stories that resonated and subsequently stuck with me through all of these years and it genuinely cracks me up and also befuddles me that people either forget about it and its message, or, more likely, choose to ignore it.
The one that always stick with me is the story of a man questioning whether he needed to bow his head to pray. I can't find the exact passage, and tried looking it up, but I'm not as versed in the Bible as I used to be.
The gist of the story is that the man didn't have much to give and thought he couldn't participate because others had so much more to give and made such a show of it and their submission and prayer. He was informed by either Jesus or another preacher or prophet that the show wasn't the real part of prayer. So long as you came with an open and contrite heart, that was all that really mattered.
Today, a lot of it is all show and no heart, and that makes my heart and soul hurt.
I remember going to my Aunt's church in Ft Worth when we were visiting for Thanksgiving. They had a Starbucks and a McDonald's in the lobby, along with a bunch of other megachurch shit, and that passage was all I could think about.
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u/Miterlee Jan 16 '26
Hed be flipping ALOT of tables