Devotion for March 21, 2016

            The four Gospels don’t give us an exact historical timeline of the events of Holy Week. They each give us a few clues, but in general they each have a story to tell and they emphasize the things that help them tell that story. For example, Luke’s telling of the Palm Sunday story brings Jesus directly into the temple, because the temple is important for Luke’s story—since Luke 2 and on. Mark, though, is a little more clear on chronology and tells us that Jesus went to the temple but that he left for Bethany almost immediately because it was late and returned the next day. The evangelists don’t contradict each other; they tell the same story from different points of view and for different purposes, so they highlight or minimize certain details in their presentations.

            Be that as it may, here’s my point: we don’t’ know exactly what happened on what days during the first Holy Week. On the other hand, the events that did happen are consistently told by the evangelists.

            So, this Monday of Holy Week, let us focus for a moment on Jesus’ action in the temple.  We typically call it the cleansing of the temple, but it’s a harder question than we usually admit what exactly Jesus is up to. Jesus’ criticism quotes both Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 7. In the first, the Lord declares that His temple shall be a house of prayer for all nations. Although the Gospels don’t’ quote the part of the verse about ‘for all nations,’ I think it’s an important part of the critique. The temple was meant to be a place where Israel (and through Israel all humanity) could be in the gracious presence of God. By Jesus’ day, though, the temple had become a means of exclusion from God’s presence. Certainly part of the Jesus’ action was a critique of that loss of mission. Second, the Jeremiah passage uses the Greek word lestes, which might be better translated brigand or terrorist. The idea was not simply that there was unjust buying and selling going on but that Israel’s national ideology too often resorted to violence, and part of Jesus’ action was a warning that ‘those who live by the sword will die by the sword.’

            What does that mean for us? It means that the church must retain and nurture its sense of mission to the world. If we lose that we lose a significant portion of what we are called to be. It also means that we are to embrace the virtues of the kingdom—humility, peace-making, gentleness, and so on. Jesus is clear: if he wanted his followers to fight, he could call down all kinds of legions of angels. No, our call is to bear the cross, just as He did.