What Kind of Triumph? -- Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday

Mark 11:1-11 (Mark 14:1-11)

March 24, 2024

 

As many times as I have heard the story of Palm Sunday, as many times as I have read the story in the gospels, and as many times as I have preached on this particular Sunday, I have never considered the meaning of a Triumph. The “triumphal procession” of Jesus into Jerusalem at the beginning of what we now know as Holy Week was merely a description in my mind. Jesus would process into Jerusalem, and even though his death won’t seem like a triumph to anyone who witnessed it, it would be because he would be resurrected. And in Jesus’ resurrection, he would have ultimate victory over death. A triumph! But a Triumph has an historical meaning that I knew nothing about until this past week. So, I thank my friend and colleague, Blake Hawthorne, for giving me some historical background on a Triumph.

In the Roman empire a Triumph was much more than a victory parade into the city. When a Roman military leader decisively conquered an enemy in battle, the Senate could approve a Triumph. This was more than just the town council approving a tickertape parade. A triumph was a spectacle that could last several days. The conquering hero must be heralded by his soldiers. He would be dressed in purple and gold, royal colors. He would process into the city and finally to the temple in a chariot. He would wear a laurel wreath. The procession would include slaves taken from the fallen enemy, sometimes the conquered king, war riches, etc. There would be speeches and feasts and it was a big deal. But to qualify for a triumph, the conquest had to be mighty. More than 5,000 enemies must have been killed. And the enemy must have been a difficult one to overcome. If that qualification was not met, then it might be considered an Ovation rather than a Triumph. An Ovation, as I understand it from the account I read online, involved the killing of less than 5,000 people or the defeat of enemies that were not considered honorable like pirates. If a conqueror received an Ovation, he road into the city on a horse, and the celebration was more subdued.

With this newly acquired history in mind, I began to look at Jesus’s triumphal entry in a new way. If the Roman Triumph was the standard for a conqueror to enter a city, then Jesus’ entry seems as far from a Triumph as possible. If I’m being honest, Mark’s telling is rather anti-climactic. Jesus and the disciples were approaching Jerusalem, and they were at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives. Jesus sent two of the disciples ahead of him into the village. He told them that the minute they entered the village they would find an unridden colt tied there. They were to untie that colt and bring it back to Jesus. Jesus warned them that if anyone should ask why they were taking the colt, they were to respond, “The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.”

The disciples did what Jesus told them to do. They were questioned just as Jesus told them they might be. They responded the way they were instructed to, and they brought the colt back to Jesus. They threw their cloaks across the back of the colt, and Jesus rode it into Jerusalem. It is true that people gathered to welcome him into the city. They cut leafy branches and spread their own cloaks on the ground before him. People encircled him, before and behind, shouting,

“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

This sounds like a sort-of spectacle. Although, as triumphs go, it was still not even close to the triumph a conquering Roman would have experienced. But there were no speeches. There were no feasts. Once the procession is over, Jesus doesn’t do anything that you might expect him to do. He performs no miracles or healings. He doesn’t offer his followers even a rousing sermon. Instead, he goes to the temple, looks around at everything, realizes it is late, and goes back to Bethany for the night. Jesus does not even stay in the city. He returns the way he came. Anticlimactic is an understatement.

Mark puts a great deal more emphasis on the telling of how the disciples managed to get the colt than he does on Jesus’ actual entry into Jerusalem. The procession seems more like an afterthought than a plan. Although Jesus does seem to have clairvoyance about the challenge that might be involved in getting that colt, and I suspect that Jesus also knew that the people who heralded his advent into Jerusalem would have seen the grand arrival of others before him.. The people, who whether they knew of imperial triumphs or not, would have witnessed grand parades and processions of important figures riding into the city in chariots or on a mighty steed.

Writer and theologian, Debie Thomas, described two processionals that happened that day. One came from the west, and it was a full-blown royally regaled romp, dripping with both pomp and circumstance. This parade answers the question, why was Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem at the same time as Jesus? Pilate did not normally reside in that city. Pilate was in Jerusalem because of Passover. Passover was a Jewish festival that remembered, celebrated, and elevated the miraculous and divine exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and oppression. If ever there was a festival that could get folks riled up at the occupying Romans, it was Passover.

Pilate surely processed into Jerusalem with all the might and majesty he could muster. His processions must have been a vivid reminder of what the people would face if they tried to rebel or riot. Let the people see the splendor and the strength of the Roman empire on full display. It might not have been an actual Roman Triumph, but it would have gotten the message across all the same.

But from the East came another procession, another parade. In the light of a Roman Triumph, this parade was nothing. It would have been considered laughable by the Roman leadership – although the Jewish religious leaders were certainly not laughing. While Pilate may have been heralded with trumpets, Jesus was heralded with Hosannas. When I was a kid I thought that Hosanna was an old-fashioned way of yelling, “Hip, hip hurray!” But it means, “Save us. Save us now.”

And for a minute, the people thought that their salvation had come. But what kind of triumph ends with crucifixion? What kind of triumph ends with death and the defeat of all their hopes and dreams?

You see, that’s the challenge of this day. Growing up in another denomination, we always observed both Palm Sunday and Easter. But we never observed Holy Week. And that’s what this day marks – the beginning of the Holiest and hardest weeks in our church calendar. We begin the week on a day of procession and celebration and hopes and dreams, with hosannas and maybe a hallelujah thrown in for good measure. But in this week Jesus will be betrayed and denied. The hosannas will fade and the shouts to “crucify him, crucify him” will rise. He will be tried, convicted, and executed for sedition and incitement. He will require anointment for burial before he dies, because it will not be allowed upon his actual death.

What kind of triumph is this? Unlike a Roman conqueror, Jesus conquered no one. He killed no one. He enslaved no one. He stole the riches of no one. Instead he healed, he set free, he made all things new. Still, this week ends with the cross.

What kind of triumph is this? We know that Easter will come, that resurrection will once more make the world new. But we cannot skip this week. We cannot jump from procession to resurrection. We must walk through the valley of death before we can climb the hill of new life.

            So, on this Palm Sunday, let us remember that it is also Passion Sunday and that we are beginning the holiest of weeks and the hardest of weeks because the powers and principalities still try to extinguish the Light of the World. We still think that Triumph comes from conquering and subduing and defeating. But what this week will teach us, if we allow it to, is that the real triumph comes from Love and Love alone. So, even as we walk into this week of growing darkness, we also walk into it hope, trusting that the Light still shines and that God is still making all things new.

            Let all of God’s children say, “Amen.”

            Amen.

On Our Hearts -- Fifth Sunday in Lent

Jeremiah 31:31-34

March 17, 2024

 

The movie, Return to Me, is a sweet story about a new heart; literally. Bob and Elizabeth, a young couple very much in love, are on their way home from an award gala when they are involved in a terrible car crash. Elizabeth is killed, and the decision is made to donate her organs. Her heart is given to a young woman named Grace, who without Elizabeth’s heart would have surely died herself.

            Grace’s transplant is successful. She lives. Not only does she manage to keep breathing, but she also rides a bike, sings at her grandfather’s restaurant, and does many other things she wasn’t able to before this new heart began to beat within her. With this new heart, Grace lives more fully than she had ever been able to in the past. But she cannot forget that the life she is now living so completely came at a cost to someone else. It was because of someone else’s death that she now lives. Her family’s rejoicing over her new heart and her newly found life walks hand-in-hand with another family’s grief and tragedy. Grace wants to somehow thank the family of her donor. She wants to honor their loss, so she writes the woman’s family a letter. The donor and donor family were anonymous, so she had no names or personal information beyond an address. But she writes the letter regardless. The letter reaches Bob, the widower in the story. However in his grief he is unable to open it, so the letter sits on his desk, unread, and is eventually covered by other mail.

            To make a long story short, Bob and Grace eventually meet and fall in love; Elizabeth’s heart beating in Grace’s body connects them in an unexpected way. They find their own happy ending, complete with the twists and turns that make for good cinema. But it was this gift of a new heart that created a new life for them both.

            A new heart.  A new life.

            Although the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah is not exactly about a heart transplant, it is about something new – a new covenant. The Law, which was once written on tablets of stone, will now be written on the hearts of the people.

            “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

            Verse 31 begins, “The days are surely coming …” and then we hear these powerful words of hope and assurance that come with this new covenant, this new promise God will make with his people. God has forgotten the promise breaking of the past. God has forgotten how the people have forgotten him in the past. Now is the time for the new – a new covenant, new life, new hope.

Forgetting is a dominant theme in these verses in Jeremiah. As I understand the larger context of this passage and this prophet, the people have been paying for the sins of their ancestors. Their complaint has been that God never forgets the sins of the past – even the sins committed by others. New generations continue to pay for the transgressions of the old. When will they stop being punished for the sins of their parents? When will God finally forget?

            In the verses immediately preceding our passage, God assures the people that, indeed,  he has forgotten. No more will the people be judged for the sins of those who went before them. No more will a child’s teeth be set on edge because a parent ate sour grapes. From now on, God tells them, there will be new life in your midst. Humans and animals will once again multiply. Judgment was brought on them for wrongdoing, but blessings will be bestowed as well. God tells them that he has plucked up, but he will also plant. One commentator wrote that God is reversing the previous relationship with Judah and Israel. No longer will their relationship with God be based on disobedience; instead it will be based on a new covenant, a new promise, a new heart.

Jeremiah is not known for being a joyful book. Jeremiah puts into words the heartbreak of the people’s broken promises to God, the heartbreak of their time in exile. Yet these verses before us are filled with joy and hope, beauty and comfort. That is probably why these are some of the most recognized verses from Jeremiah. Some scholars see this as the gospel before the gospel. This covenant that God promises will not be like the old one. Before, God took them by the hand and led them out of Egypt. Before, God led them like a parent leads a small child. Before, God carefully showed them the way they were supposed to live. Before, God gave them the Law, but the people broke the Law over and over, and broke their relationship with God over and over.

            But now, in this new covenant, the Law will be more than words that can be too easily forgotten or overlooked. The Law was once written on stone tablets, but now the Law will be written on their hearts. The Law will live within them. They will no longer need to teach or instruct one another on the Law. It will no longer be a course of study. Instead the people will fully and absolutely know the Lord. They will finally and completely be God’s people, and he will be their God. All people – learned and unlearned, rich and poor, strong and weak – will know God in both heart and mind. In the days that are surely coming, they will know the Lord, and the Lord will forgive their iniquity, remembering their sins no more. With this new covenant, God is giving the people a new promise, a new life, and a new heart.

            The language of these verses in Jeremiah is so beautiful, so poetic, that it is easy for me to get caught up in the sound and the emotion of them, without really understanding in a practical way what they mean. But what do they mean? God promises the people that he will make a new covenant with them. It will be unlike the covenant of the past. It will not only be words on paper – or stone – it will be something that lives within them. When God tells them that they will know him, it seems to me that this will be an innate knowledge; instinctive, intuitive. The estrangement between God and God’s people, the connective cord between them that sin severs, will be restored and refashioned. The people will know the Lord in a new way because they have been given a new covenant.

            What is a covenant? A covenant is a promise rather than a contract. A contract specifies failure. If I fail to pay my car payment, which is a contract that I signed with the financing company, then I will be in breach of contract. A contract specifies failure. But a covenant does not specify failure, it specifies faithfulness. God promises again and again to be faithful to his people. God promises that despite our failure to be faithful, God will not fail. God will remain faithful to us, even when we have not been faithful to God. In these words of covenant, God promises to forgive our sins and forget them as well. But this is not one-sided. We have our side of the covenant to uphold. Our side of the covenant calls us to love. We are called to love God, to love neighbor, to give our whole lives to living out the love God has for us. We are called to trust that God is faithful and to be faithful to God in return by loving others and all creation.

            While contracts have a time limit, covenants do not. The covenant God made with Abraham did not end with the covenant God made with David. The Davidic covenant did not end with the covenant we find in our passage from Jeremiah. The covenants of God flow one into another, finding their final fulfillment with the coming of Jesus -- God’s promise made flesh – into our midst.

            Contracts remain fixed between certain people, but covenants expand to welcome others. It is unfair to the context and nature of these words in Jeremiah to make them merely an allegory of the Christian life to come. Still we, the descendants of Gentiles, are here because we were welcomed into the expanding promise of God. We too have received a new heart.

            There are those beautiful words again – new heart – but what does that mean? Is it about seeing God’s world and God’s people with new eyes? Is it about living a life grounded in love – the love that works for peace and acts for justice? Is it just some sort of spiritual transplant?

            Or do we find that new hearts are beating within us when our old hearts are broken wide open? In the second verse of the hymn, Here I Am, Lord, there is a line that reads “I will break their hearts of stone, give them hearts for love alone.” I tried to think of one concise illustration of a heart of stone being broken so that the heart could exist for love alone. There are plenty of examples out there, thousands of them. But I realized that sometimes the best example is the one that is ours. So, rather than tell you about someone receiving a new heart, I am going to ask you to do something that feels very un-Presbyterian. I am going to ask you to close your eyes for a moment and think about a time when your heart has been broken open, when you’ve seen a person or a situation or something else in a new way with new eyes. Maybe it was a moment when someone who thinks differently from you shared something that you hadn’t considered before. Maybe it was a moment when your child asked you a difficult question that you didn’t know how to answer. Maybe it was a moment when you saw something you could not unsee. I know those moments exist for you just as they do for me. So, close your eyes and think. Close your eyes and remember.

            Maybe in that moment that we’re remembering, our old hearts were being chipped away. Maybe in that moment, God was working on our hearts, breaking hearts of stone and giving us hearts for love alone. Maybe in those moments God was writing his love on our hearts, so that we will know, intuitively, instinctively, innately, and forever, the love of God that is the true law of God. In those moments, and in many more moments to come, God is writing his love on our hearts. Thanks be to God.

            Let all God’s children say, “Amen.”

            Amen.

Lifted Up -- Fourth Sunday of Lent

Numbers 21:4-9, (John 3:14-21)

Fourth Sunday of Lent

 

            “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?”

            So said Indiana Jones in the movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. I will never forget sitting in the theatre to watch this movie for the first time, hearing that iconic John Williams music, and watching with delight and excitement as Indiana Jones, an archeologist, a professor, and an unexpected swashbuckling hero, take on the bad guys. As an archeologist, Jones finds lost treasures and rare antiquities, and the reason he must take on bad guys is to prevent them from using archeological treasure for nefarious purposes. In Raiders, the “bad guys” are the Nazi’s.  The great irony of the story is that Hitler – who wanted to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth – wants to find one of the most sacred relics of Judaism, the lost Ark of the Covenant.  The premise of the story is that Hitler would be able to use the Ark’s powers to win the war and rule the world. Indiana Jones must find it before Hitler’s minions do.   

Indy and his friend and colleague, Sallah, find the location of the ark. It is buried underground in some sort of ancient cavern. Looking down into the cavern, Sallah asks, “Indy, why does the floor move?” Indiana throws a torch down and there they are: snakes, hundreds and hundreds of snakes. 

“Snakes.  Why’d it have to be snakes?”

Indiana Jones was terrified of snakes and seeing the movie that first time and trying not to hide under my seat at the sight of all those snakes, I felt vindicated that I share a phobia with a courageous hero like Indiana Jones. Because of this phobia, it may seem strange that I chose to use this strange story from the book of Numbers as my preaching text this morning. But here we are.

            We don’t hear from the book of Numbers very often in our lectionary cycle. Just as this story is strange, Numbers as a book is also pretty strange.

It is in Numbers that we read the story of the talking donkey. Yes, there is a talking donkey in scripture. In the verses immediately preceding this one, God helped the Israelites to overcome the Canaanites. But in the next breath, the people forgot how God had helped them. In the opening verse in our story we read that the Israelites leave Mount Hor for the Red Sea, “to go around the land of Edom.” This means that they were still following Moses. They were still being fed by manna and quail. But they were getting fed up with what they were being fed. They were clearly tired of the lack of options on the menu. Once again, the Israelites whined and complained.

            “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and water, and we detest this miserable food.”

            If you think about it, this is a pretty funny line. We don’t have any water. We don’t have any food. And, by the way, the food stinks! The people had complained against Moses before, but if I’m correct, this is the first time they’ve included God in their complaint. What is God’s response? Snakes. And these were clearly not harmless little garden snakes. These were poisonous, terrifying, venomous snakes. Why’d there have to be snakes?

What the NRSV translates as poisonous can also be translated as fiery. I don’t know which sounds worse. Regardless of the translation, the snakes slither through the people and bite them. People are dying left and right, and those who are still alive quickly realize the error of their ways. They go to Moses, proclaiming that they have sinned against God and against him. Please Moses, ask God to take away the snakes. Moses prayed for them, and in response to his prayer, God gave him the cure. Make a bronze image of a serpent and put it on a pole.  If someone is bitten, all they have to do is look at this image of a serpent and they will live.

Perhaps our first question about this story is why did the cure come from staring at a serpent on a stick, rather than God just making the snakes go away. A second question to ask is why are we reading this story in the first place? Let’s answer the second question first.

The reason we read this odd little story from Numbers is because Jesus refers to it in our passage from John’s gospel. Just as the serpent on the pole was lifted up and the people lived, so shall Jesus be lifted up on the cross so the people may live. Then Jesus spoke perhaps the most well-known words in all of scripture. “For God so loved the world…”

Now, let’s consider the first question. What did snakes represent in the ancient world? They were a personification of evil. Think about the serpent in the Garden of Eden. One commentator wrote that the people have been thinking poisonous thoughts and speaking poisonous words. They could not seem to remember how God was with them, even in the immediate past. The longer they wandered in the wilderness, the more poisonous those thoughts became. Perhaps snakes are as much a metaphor for the people’s own venom in thought and word, as they were literal serpents.

            The Israelites had been wandering for a long, long time. Older generations were dying, and new ones were being born. For every moment that the Israelites recognized God’s saving presence, there were many more moments when they didn’t. From their perspective, one that was colored by wilderness wandering and a minimum of food and drink, Egypt looked pretty good. Just as they forgot God’s presence, they also seemed to forget exactly what their lives in Egypt really were. They were not halcyon days of bliss; they were days of slavery and backbreaking work. God saved them from that life. God called them to new life and made a covenant with them and a promise to them to be their God and asked them to be God’s people. But in this story they can’t see that. They don’t remember that. They don’t fully trust that God is with them or that Moses knows what he is doing, until the snakes.

            And how are their terrible wounds from these terrible snakes cured? Debie Thomas states that the people are cured of their wounds not by some magical means but by facing what had bitten them. Their healing came when they faced what had made them sick. Healing came not only when they looked up at a bronze image, but at the poison that resided within them. That was the cure, that was when the healing began, by facing what had made them sick, by looking honestly at what had poisoned them.

            Jesus refers to this strange story as an analogy to what God is doing through him. Although we don’t read the beginning verses of this chapter, the setting is that Nicodemus, a pharisee, comes to Jesus by night, presumably so that no one will know he is talking to this controversial man, Jesus. And Nicodemus asks Jesus about the signs that Jesus is doing, because he recognizes that God’s presence must be with Jesus, otherwise he could not perform these signs and wonders. And in his answer to Nicodemus, Jesus references this story from Numbers and makes this analogy.

            “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

            The Israelites were healed when they faced the poison that was killing them. Perhaps that is also the healing power of the cross. What is the cross but the representation of the worst of humanity?! The cross was brutal. It was merciless. It was a terrible, terrible way to die. It was suffering. It was pain. It was inhumane. It was representative of the cruelty and the brutality that we humans show one another. And Jesus would be lifted up on one. As Debie Thomas notes, looking at the bronze serpent healed the people of the poison within them. Maybe when we look at the cross, our healing begins by facing what is the worst in us. Maybe our healing begins when we face, honestly, the consequences of our cruelty and violence. Maybe our healing begins when we see the One who shows us again and again what being truly human can be lifted up on the cross of our own inhumanity.

            It seems to me that this is what this Lenten season calls us to do – to face not only what keeps us from God, but also what keeps us from one another, what keeps us from being truly human to one another. Maybe if we can look up and face the cross and our inhumanity with honesty, then maybe we can see that endless war solves nothing, that violence begets only more violence, that dehumanizing some dehumanizes all, and that the only real cure comes from love. That’s it. Love. For God so LOVED the world, the cosmos, the entirety of creation, that God sent his only Son, not to punish the world, but to show the world what LOVE really is and what LOVE can do, so that whoever sees the Son and believes in the Son won’t suffer the endless cycle of death and the hell we create on earth, but will have life, abundant life. It’s all about LOVE.

            Our healing begins when we face what is killing us. Our healing begins when we see, really see how God loves so that we can begin to love in return. On this day and always, look up at who is lifted up and may we all be healed.

            Let all of God’s children say, “Amen.”

            Amen.

 

 

 

Zeal -- Third Sunday of Lent

John 2:13-22

March 3, 2024

 

            Did you grow up looking at pictures of Jesus? I know that there are no actual pictures of Jesus, but there are plenty of artistic impressions of him. Did you grow up looking at any of them? There are three specific pictures of Jesus that I remember from my childhood. One was a painting that we had hanging in our living room for as long as I can remember. It was a painting of Jesus talking with two other men, and they are walking on a path, and in the distance, you can see the outline of an ancient city. Without being told this specifically as a child, I knew the one guy was Jesus. I just knew it was. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized this was a depiction of the road to Emmaus story from Luke’s gospel. When I was a little kid, it didn’t matter to me what the story was. I just liked to look at Jesus and the two men, and I would trace the path to the city with my finger and imagine the conversation they were having.

            The second picture that I remember must have been one that I saw in Sunday school. It was a picture of Jesus standing outside of a door inset into a stone wall. It looked like a door into a garden. There were vines and flowers growing around it, and Jesus was standing before it, knocking. I was told that the door represented my heart, and Jesus was knocking, asking to be allowed in. See, Jesus is knocking at the door of your heart. Let him in. Whenever I looked at that picture, I vowed that as soon as I heard Jesus knocking on the door of my heart, I would let him in.

            The third picture that I remember may be one that you all remember too. It is a painting of Jesus that is far more famous than I knew until I started doing some research for this sermon. Painted by American artist, Warner Sallman, the painting’s official name is “Head of Christ.” But it is also known as Sallman’s head. It is a picture of Jesus with very pale eyes, light skin, wavy light brown hair, staring off into the distance, looking beatific and perfect and divine. It’s a nice picture. It is a comforting picture. I don’t remember if we had a version of that picture in our home, but I know I saw it in other places. And I remember looking at it and thinking that Jesus looked nice and kind and safe. This picture represented what one commentator called, “a manageable deity.”

            Those are the images of Jesus that I grew up on. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them, other than he doesn’t look like a Middle Eastern Jew in any of them. But they were nice pictures to grow up, and clearly, they sparked my imagination as a child and stuck with me into my adulthood. But those depictions of Jesus seem very far from the Jesus that we read about this morning. This morning we read about a Jesus who gets angry, who is zealous. We read about a Jesus who goes into the temple, makes a whip of cords and begins to drive out all the animals that were gathered there for sacrifice. This is a Jesus, so filled with zeal and righteous anger, that he dumps out the coins of the moneychangers and overturns their tables. He yells at the people selling doves, saying,

            “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

            The Jesus who cleanses the temple – cleansing being a euphemism, like ethnic cleansing – this Jesus does not clean but scatters and crashes and flips and causes chaos. This Jesus seems very far from being a manageable deity, and even further from the Jesus who stood at a door and knocked. This Jesus may not be one we like to consider very often, but here he is. So, this is the Jesus we deal with today.

            Just as we may not quite know how to deal with the Jesus before us today, I can imagine the disciples didn’t know how to deal with him either. I can imagine that they were as shocked by Jesus’ behavior at first like everyone else who witnessed this. They must have looked at each other in alarm, eyes wide, maybe silently mouthing to one another,

“What’s happening?” “Where did this come from?” “Why don’t you try and calm him down?             “Why don’t you try and calm him down?” “I asked you to do it first.”

And so on, and so on. John’s gospel does tell us that the disciples remember that the scripture says, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” Jesus was certainly filled with zeal.

It must be noted that this is a story found in all four gospels. When you come across a story that each of the gospel writers included in their version of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, it is a good idea to pay particular attention to the story they all share.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this story comes near the end of the gospel. This is a final act of Jesus, one that contributes mightily to the religious authorities saying,

            “That’s it! Enough with this guy! He’s gotta go!”

            But John puts this story right at the beginning of his gospel. When you read this in the other gospels, Jesus’ anger makes a little more sense. After all, he’s been in public ministry for three years at that point. He’s been preaching, teaching, healing, proclaiming, showing, modeling, and exhorting. Some people got it, but a lot of people didn’t. And part of his anger in the other gospels is that he was protesting a religious system that had become more about exploitation of its weakest members than it was about worship. But why is Jesus angry this early in John? He’s just getting started. He has just left the wedding at Cana where he turned water into wine. Why turn the temple upside down at this moment?

            Well, firstly, the question must be asked, is Jesus more zealous than angry, is his anger fueled by his zeal or is his zeal fueled by his anger? As I said earlier, the scripture that the disciples remembered was that he would be consumed with zeal for his father’s house. Certainly, Jesus is consumed with zeal in this story. And that zeal leads him to overturn the long-standing practices and systems that took place in the temple.

            The moneychangers were there, not to exploit, but to change money. The Law prohibited coins with images on them in the temple. The only coins the people would have been allowed to use outside of the temple would have been Roman. Roman coins bore the image of Caesar on them, so those Roman coins must be exchanged for coins that were lawful in the temple. The great number of animals were in the temple because sacrifices of animals were expected. It was part of  their practice of worship. In order to buy an animal for their required sacrifice, they had to purchase it with an approved coin. What was happening in the temple was what was expected and approved of by the religious authorities and the Law as they all understood it.

            But Jesus comes in and sees this and basically proclaims,

            “You have all missed the point!”

            But he proclaims this with his actions, his unexpected and scandalous actions. So, of course, Jesus is questioned by the religious leaders.

            “What sign can you show us for doing this?”

            And Jesus answers them by not answering them, not directly,

            “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

            But they don’t get it. The temple has been under construction for forty-six years, but this guy says it can be destroyed and rebuilt in three days?! Sure. Whatever you say, Jesus.

            They missed the point. They could not yet see what was right in front of them, who was right in front of them. They thought the only temple was the one of wood and stone, the place where God lived exclusively. But the temple was flesh and blood and standing in their midst. Jesus was trying to make them understand that God dwelled in him. God was not confined to a building. God had come into flesh and blood, into his flesh and blood, and was loose in the world. God had left the building. And if it took Jesus disrupting the status quo, physically as well as verbally, for them to understand and see this, to believe it, then so be it.

            Jesus was consumed with zeal, with fervor and passion. One commentator called him the Great Disrupter. But his zeal was not about destruction for destruction’s sake, but about tearing down what kept people from full and abundant life in God and building up a new way of living and being as God’s beloved children. His zeal, his anger, his passion was for all to find life, to see and believe that God had left the building but was loose and growing and creating in the world, in him and in them.

            Maybe that is something we need to focus on in this season of Lent. We need to claim the zeal of Jesus as our own. We need to see Jesus in his fullness, not just the calm, safe Jesus of art, but the Jesus who was not afraid of righteous indignation, the Jesus who loved and lived passionately, the Jesus who had zeal and fervor for doing God’s work in the world, the whole world. Maybe it’s okay that Jesus is not a manageable deity. Maybe it’s okay that safety is not what following Jesus is all about. Maybe it’s okay if our status quo is disrupted. Maybe it’s okay if Jesus tears down our expectations and our ideals about how we think things should be. Maybe it's okay because what Jesus is really doing, what God does through Jesus, is creating new life, abundant, verdant, lush life, and inviting us to be a part of it all. Jesus’ zeal is for life. May we be as zealous for life as well.

            Let all of God’s children say, “Amen.”

            Amen.