PALM SUNDAY? SO WHAT?

Matthew 21:1-13

21 As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”

4 This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet: 5 “Say to Daughter Zion,
    ‘See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
 and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. 7 They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

10 When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?” 11 The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”

12 Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. 13 “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’[e] but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”

What I'm about to say is a sad reflection on the churches I attended earlier in my Christian life. But I have to confess that I reached my fifties - even completing my training as a Lay Minister - without having more than a vague idea of what Palm Sunday is really  about.

I knew the Bible story, of course: Jesus entering Jerusalem riding on a donkey, the crowds scattering palm fronds along the road and shouting 'Hosanna'. And I knew that by coming Jerusalem he was effectively sealing his own fate. But I never had a chance to think about what those events really meant for Jesus, for the Church, and for me.

Part of the problem was that the churches I went to wanted to safeguard a very supernatural view of OT prophecy. When we read a prophecy like Zechariah’s…

Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your King comes unto you: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon a donkey…

...we wanted to be swept off our feet by its accuracy as a prediction of the future. We were closed to the idea that Jesus might have been savvy enough to read the OT for himself and deliberately model his actions on them – and in the process we closed our ears to the message Jesus wanted people to hear.

  

Prophecy is certainly God-breathed, but its relationship to Jesus' earthly ministry was nonetheless bi-directional in nature. In other words, the Old Testament prophets were inspired to reveal something of how God's plan would unfold. But when Jesus came he understood the old writings in a unique way, and he modelled his teaching and actions on them. And what becomes clear when we look at Jesus’ words and actions is the astonishing clarity, and  the penetrating wit and intelligence, with which he communicated his agenda—by drawing on the stories and symbols and imagery in which his Hebrew listeners had been immersed since birth.

And what is startlingly clear from the story of the 'triumphal entry' to Jerusalem is that Jesus was setting up a crisis in the lives of all who saw and heard him – especially the self-styled men in authority.

First, everyone would have recognised the message wrapped up in the donkey procession: Jesus was declaring himself as a scriptural king, entering to take possession of the city that was his by right. It was a brilliant, subversive statement about the illegitimacy of the political and religious elite who governed the holy city.

But then, what was his first action after the triumphal entry? No one could fail to grasp the point of his physical and verbal assault on the corrupt Temple establishment. The overturning of the tables is an integral part of the Palm Sunday story. It’s almost always left out of our seasonal pattern of readings. But to separate the two halves of the story is to miss the meaning of the whole narrative.

Jesus is presenting the leaders and people with a stark two-way choice: Accept me or kill me. And in that ultra-sensitive political environment, we can be sure there was no third alternative. In short, he was challenging the political and religious establishment head-on. And as I’m sure he expected, the authorities clung to their rarefied, privileged status. They inevitably took what seemed the easy way out and sought his death.

In so doing, they sidelined themselves from God’s plan for humanity. But unwittingly, they also aided and abetted Jesus’ master plan. For in the years following his death, we see the Temple itself – the supreme pre-Christian symbol of God’s presence in the world – become an irrelevance. The vessel for God’s presence on earth is no longer to be seen as a building of wood, metal and stone, but a living body: initially Jesus’ own, then after Pentecost the entire spirit-filled people of Christ.

  

Stepping forward two thousand years to the present day, Jesus presents the world with the same two-way choice.  In five days’ time, on Good Friday, we mournfully reflect on the consequence for Jesus: his agonising death on the Cross. Then, two days later, we celebrate the victory and vindication of those who made and who continue to make the right choice – accepting Jesus as king and joining him in his exaltation to eternal life. 

And the deep message of Palm Sunday is a challenge to accept him as king. For let us make no mistake, the choice confronting the world now is as stark as that which faced the people of Jesus’ own time. Now, as then, he comes to us as our rightful king, and no less a king for all that he presents himself in humility. And the choice is the same: to accept him as king, or to be accessories in his unjust suffering and death.

This year, as every year, we’re likely to see new faces in church over Easter. For some of those new faces, this will be a one-off event; others may start to come regularly. And all will receive a warm welcome. But let us not forget what is going on in the lives of these visitors. They are being brought to a place in their lives where the road ahead of them divides. There is no third way ahead: they are faced with a choice of accepting the rule of Christ or rejecting him.

Of course, everyone travels at their own pace, and some who walk away from Jesus this year may embrace him next year or next decade. But let us think solemnly of the crisis of identity that looms over everyone of those visitors. And let us commit ourselves to two goals:

1.          To reaffirm our own acceptance of Christ as Lord and King.

2.          To live up to his teaching, so that no one hovering on the brink of turning to Christ may be put off at the last minute by our un-Christ-like behaviour.

DESTROY THIS TEMPLE - A Reflection for Candlemas

(John 2:13-22)

I wonder what Jesus would think – the historical Jesus of Nazareth, that is – if he walked into Canterbury Cathedral today, or the Vatican City. As he watched the goings on in the headquarters of the Christian faith, what would he think? What would he approve of? What would he disapprove of? And above all, how would he react?

I’m not going to even try to answer that question, but it’s a good starting point for our reflection. Because the Bible tells us that when Jesus walked into the Temple in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Jewish faith, he trashed it. According to John’s Gospel, the supposedly meek and mild Jesus made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

It's ironic that Jesus should have entered the Temple – the place supremely dedicated to his own Father – and violently rejected what it had come to stand for. To many Christians the meaning is obvious: this story has been the inspiration for countless rants against the church and it’s attitude to money. And indeed, there must be a number of tables in this and any other church that Jesus would like to overturn, and perhaps a few people he would drive out if he walked in today.

However, that’s not what the story is really about. It’s actually making a much deeper point – a point we can easily miss because we’re so well primed as Christians to look for present day meaning in every Bible story. But this story is not about religious buildings in general; rather, it’s anchored in the Temple itself and what it represented to the Jewish people. What Jesus is giving here is a lesson about the Temple – what it was and what it is. And although the building has been gone for nearly 2,000 years, the teaching is of as much relevance today as it has ever been.

Let’s think for a moment about the history of the Temple. It started out as the Tabernacle – the tent which the Hebrews carried with them during their nomadic existence and erected in each place they stopped. As they left their nomadic way of life behind and settled in cities they built a series of stone temples, but the basic basic concept and purpose remained the same: In a world divided into ‘them and us’, the Temple was what made ‘us’. Does that make sense? Put another way, the Temple was what sanctified the people of God and set them apart from the other peoples around them. In their eyes, it was the place in which the transcendant God of eternity (who was their God and not the God of the other tribes around them) broke through into our physical universe. And thus tt was the one and only place in which they could come into God’s presence.

But just as a tent had outlived its usefulness when the people settled in one place, so a single stone building was no use if the knowledge of God was to break out of its geographical straitjacket and spread throughout the world. And Herod’s Temple in particular, the one Jesus disrupted, had become an instrument of oppression that ruthlessly excluded the struggling masses even within the nation of Israel. In fact in Jesus’ eyes, and in the eyes of the New Testament authors, the Temple hadn’t merely outlived its usefulness; it had become a real obstacle to faith and belonging for the majority of people.

And Jesus could see an even greater catastrophe looming, one that threatened the very survival of a community devoted to the service of Yahweh. He clearly foresaw that the Temple itself was doomed; in fact less than 40 years after his ascension to Heaven it was burned out and razed to the ground. If it had remained the central symbol and home of faith in Yahweh, the heart would have been ripped out of the people’s faith.

What was needed was a new way of understanding God’s presence among his people. And when Jesus says to the authorities, ‘destroy this Temple and I will raise it again in three days’, he is pointing to that new reality. In short, Jesus is consciously supplanting the Temple with a new vessel of God’s presence in the world – his own body.[1]  God continues to be among his people, but no longer in the dark Holy of Holies, where just one man is allowed to come into the divine presence for a few minutes each year. God’s presence among his people is now manifested in the person of Jesus, to be encountered not just by a solitary priest, but by all the masses of people Jesus meets in his travels.

Even that is not the end of the Temple’s evolution, because Jesus’s body was not going to be on earth for much longer. But when he ascends to his Father, he sends the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit lives in the hearts of all believers, directly interacting not with one priest, not with thousands of one-to-one encounters, but simultaneously with the billions of Christians throughout time and space. Everyone who is in relationship with God is now a Temple; why else would St. Paul write, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” (1 Co 6:19)

And thus the Temple has evolved, becoming at each stage the point of contact with God for a wider cross-section of humanity. It has gone from tent to stone building, from one body (Jesus’) to billions of bodies – everyone who has a relationship with the risen Christ. God has always been everywhere, even when his people saw him as occupying a specific physical space. But now, because of what Jesus has done, we are a nation of priests, all of us living in the Holy of Holies at every second of every day. It should be both a source of comfort and a challenge to our lifestyles, knowing that we are constantly in his presence. 

Where does that leave the church today? Many of us find a sacred space reassuring – a place of peace and quiet without distractions, and a visible, tactile symbol of God’s presence. I do myself. Many find that singing worship songs together, or joining in a  liturgy, creates a sacred space wherever we happen to be. I know I do. But we don’t need sacred space. We don't need worship songs. We don't need liturgy. God is, in a telling phrase from the Qur’an, closer to us than our own jugular vein.

While we are here, let us enjoy one another’s fellowship and the beauty of our surroundings. Let us revel in the sense of God’s presence as we lift our voices in song and come together in the Eucharist. But later, as we step outside into the dark, let us remember that we are not leaving the sacred space behind; we are taking it with us.

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[1] In the same way, at the Last Supper, he supplants remembrance of the Passover and Exodus from Egypt – the foundational event in the story of Israel – with the remembrance of his body and blood.