Holy Week Monday

April 6

Matthew 21: 12-17

12 Then Jesus entered the temple 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. ¹³He 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. ¹⁵But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’, they became angry ¹⁶and 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”?’

¹⁷He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

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Only in Matthew’s gospel are there ‘children crying out in the temple…’; and what are they crying? “Hosanna (to the) Son of David!” Hosanna - a Greek rendering of a Hebrew phrase which means ‘Save us!’ Save us, while shouted in the streets at a teacher riding a donkey might be easily dismissed as a satire; how can such a one save otherwise reasonable adults who are resourceful enough to form a crowd and present strength of numbers? But within the temple precincts, among the guardians of religious propriety…? Save us from what? From the suffocating confines of religious control? From ‘religious nuts?’ From ‘whatever might happen next…’

Hosanna is the cry of those who are vulnerable but hopeful. Offered in the temple, it is a direct accusation (to the religious authorities) that they are NOT able/willing to do the saving (or they are willingly participating in the harm) And so the chief priests and scribes became angry at what they were hearing…and Jesus affirms those hopeful cries.

When we think of Jesus ‘cleansing the temple’ - clearing out the profiteers and those who preyed upon the vulnerable - we tend to put a particular spin on the story. We’ve turned it into a ‘no shopping on Sunday’ rant (which it is not), or a ‘no gambling in the parish hall (which it may be…) Primarily, it is about the ways that people had been profiting by the misfortunes of others.

To buy the right animal for sacrifice, you needed to use ‘temple money’, so the money-changers set the exchange rates (to their benefit) and the temple markets set the going rate for sacrificial animals, which were required of everyone who wanted to worship/sacrifice…the system was no longer benefiting the people of God but only the merchants of religion - and Jesus act of overturning tables and setting animals free becomes an act of reformation (and potential revolution)

IT’s not the thing that got him arrested - more like the ‘last straw’ in a wagonload of things that Jesus did to aggravate the religious (and civic) leadership of the day.

Now, our ‘temples’ have been cleared - by violence too - and I wonder if this is not the start of another reformation - perhaps it is revolutionary - that we must consider in new and radical ways that age old question ‘what good is the Church?’

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Let us pray:

Hosanna, Son of David - Save us.

Save us from false hope.

Save us from ignorant assumptions.

Save us from ourselves.

Let this time of radical change intrude upon the Holiest of weeks.

Let our minds be opened that they may be fertile ground for the seeds of change

Let our hearts be opened that we might work and live and worship and pray

from a place of deep love and compassion.

Let the Spirit of Christ overturn our lives

that we might find the grace of God in the ruins