Thanks to the BBC/Public Catalogue Foundation Your Paintings project for Stanley Spencer's painting Christ overturning the Money Changers' tables (1921). This episode is recorded at the start of John's gospel: Jesus goes to Jerusalem in time for the Jewish festival of Passover. Angered by the sale of animals for sacrifice, and the bureaux de change of those trading Roman (and therefore 'idolotrous') coinage for temple-money, Jesus drives out the animals with a whip, and overturns the tables of the money changers (John 2:13-25). A similar/the same episode* is recorded much later in Jesus' life in other Gospels.
Now I don't know whether Spencer's painting was specifically intended to depict this episode as recorded in John's gospel but given that it was originally intended as a panel for a triptych, perhaps this picture does demand interpreting symbolically. John's commentary on this episode is that Jesus justifies his behaviour in terms of his own death and resurrection. And perhaps there are echoes of this in Spencer's painting: the picture flattens out the figure of Jesus and the overturning table and in doing so strips this of the physical action from the story; it become formal and stylised, and so becomes more of an icon, an image of religious devotion. The table is blood-red, after all. Does the size of the table, and the darkening archway beyond create a shadow of a garden tomb blocked by a heavy stone across the doorway, and does Jesus' plain white robe demand something of a shroud in our eyes?
So I'm left with an image that owes most to John's telling of the story - with its symbolic interpretation as a sign of Jesus' death and resurrection, and an delicious ambiguity as an object of devotion: here is an image challenging the systems and traditions which can cluster around religious belief and practice whilst at the same time (as an altarpiece) being one too.
* a debate for discussion elsewhere!
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