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FOR THIS LAST WEEK OF LENT, HOLY WEEK, PASTOR BROOK WILL SHARE JUST WHAT EVENTS HAPPENED AS JESUS JOURNEYED TO THE CROSS
Holy Week, Day 2
On the first day of Holy Week, We Have Palm Sunday...the celebration of a different kind of power. Unlike this world’s kind of power, what we call Coercive Power, Jesus enters Jerusalem on a Donkey, a symbol of a power that come not by pushing people down, but by lifting them up...a Servant Power.
On the second day of Holy Week, often called Holy Monday, we see Jesus moving into Jerusalem with a new intensity. In this final week, Jesus seems to know exactly what he wants to do, and much of it seems to be centered around confronting the centers of Coercive Power in and around Jerusalem.
One of the key events on Monday, is the turning over of the tables at the Temple. You can read all about this in the gospel of Matthew in the 21 st Chapter.
12 Then Jesus entered the temple [c] and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 He said to them, “It is written,
‘ My house shall be called a house of prayer’;
but you are making it a den of robbers.”
14 The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard [d] the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became angry 16 and said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” Jesus said to them,
“Yes; have you never read,
‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise for yourself’?”
17 He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.
In this passage we see the passion that Jesus has for those who were left out of the religious practices of the day. Jesus was furious because the money changing system at the temple was not only insanely corrupt, but also because it prevented the poor and marginalized from receiving God’s grace and love. In Jesus day, if you were poor, or on the edges of society, the
temple practices of sacrifice prevented you from receiving the love and forgiveness of our loving God. Jesus was dead against this system, and by turning over the money-changing tables, he was calling for an end to this entire system. In this prophetic act, Jesus wasn’t doing a new
thing...he was claiming his part in a long line of Hebrew prophets who demanded justice for all and especially the poor. Prophets like Amos who proclaimed,
“When will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market wheat?”—skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales, buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat.”
Amos 8
In 1517, a feisty monk named Martin Luther, the same kind of stir in Germany, when he posted his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenburg Castle church, accusing the Catholic church of the corrupt practice of selling “indulgences” to absolve sin. This led to the Protestant Revolution. And later, in 1728, a young Anglican priest named John Wesley who later would become known
as the leader of a new religious movement called “Methodists” showed the same resolve. In the first church John Wesley was service, and Anglican church, he encountered a policeman who stood at the entrance of the church every Sunday yielding a Billy club. John Wesley, on his first Sunday, asked the policeman what he was doing with that Billy club. “Keeping the rift-raft
out, sir!” the policeman replied. The next Sunday, unbeknownst to the policeman, John Wesley had slipped the Billy club out of the policeman’s pocket, and, at the beginning of the service, Wesley took the Billy club and broke it over the altar proclaiming that this was God’s house and in God’s house every person who wants to enter would never be turned away. As followers of Christ, we come from a long line of prophets who have always believed that God’s love was for all. This Holy Monday, two questions come to my heart”
Where do you see the church and/or the world preventing folks access? What might you do about it?
Shalom, Pastor Brook
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