After Jesus enters Jerusalem at the beginning of the week, he laments the Temple and its future. A troubling and preventable future.
When I read these readings each year, they tend to run together. I lose track of where I read what. Which gospel is it this year? Luke. OK. Right. So, what just happened?
But when I sit down to read the context of the gospel, it comes to me fresh, like I’ve never read this story before. If I don’t back up, this “cleansing of the temple” could be the same one found in the other three gospels.
But backing up, it sounds different.
As I reminded us yesterday, Jesus doesn’t just show up in Jerusalem like a kid back from college looking to raid the refrigerator. This chapter in Luke sets up a really challenging motif.
Jesus has come as the son of humanity to seek and save the lost.
- Not as a king to rule humanity.
- Nor as a conqueror to claim power.
- Or the divider and destroyer of lives.
But he offers the people an alarming parable which sounds like the opposite! A crazy thing about a nobleman and his slaves and ruling and casting people out to their deaths. Then he turns around and walks to Jerusalem.
The Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday is cast in Luke’s gospel in stark relief to the picture Jesus is painting. A painting which more matches the cruelty of kings than the generous Messiah they’ve come to know.
But Jesus can’t keep up the facade. He has a role to play—a pretend king with a royal army composed of fishermen and outcasts. Clearly, the most terrifying people he could find. The street theater of the Triumphal Entry breaks when he sees Jerusalem.
The Tribute
This beautiful tribute Jesus offers to the Holy City brings tears to his eyes:
“If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!”
Not silence [the stones will shout!]
They are hidden now. Not because God wants them hidden. But they refuse to see what is truly before them.
Now it’s a play, the parts already cast. The nobleman has gone searching for ever greater power and Jesus has come to him like a slave; the mina wrapped in cloth.
If only they could see.
The wages of peace are much cheaper than these costs of war. War that will rain down upon them all when this very city will be destroyed.
At the Temple
When Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Temple, it comes with so little flair. No whip and less indignation than the other versions. This telling in Luke is slim, almost perfunctory.
He drives them out and occupies the space for days. And the people rejoice—spellbound.
The foreboding threats are muted by the people’s affection. None of them aware of the strangeness to come. The true role Jesus was born to play.