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| Jan van Hemessen (c.1500 - c.1566) |
Matthew 21: 1-17
Palm Sunday/ 13th
April 2014
Matthew
tells us that Jesus entered “the temple courts” (Matthew 21:12). This Temple that Jesus entered in Jerusalem was
not your ordinary house of worship. It was more than a religious
institution. It’s important to get this
straight right from the start.
The
structure referenced here is the great Temple built on the site of King Solomon’s
(1000-931 BC) original building, rebuilt first by Zerubbabel upon Israel’s
return from exile in Babylon and later completed by King Herod (c. 4 BC). The Temple was enormous. It was one of the wonders of the ancient
world, the holiest site of Judaism, containing the Holy of Holies, the dwelling
place of Yahweh. The Temple was the religious center of Jewish life. But in Jesus’ day it had evolved, devolved
into something else. Without knowing something about the Temple it’s easy to
miss just how courageous, radical, some might say, foolish Jesus was to do what
he did. Without an awareness of this,
which one won’t find in a surface reading of the text, Jesus’ actions—the procession
into Jerusalem and his disruption of the Temple—don’t make much sense. Why,
then, is Jesus so angry when he gets to the Temple?
First, when reading the New
Testament we always need to remember that the Judea of Jesus’ day was an
occupied territory of the Roman Empire. The Romans were cruel, brutal, violent,
oppressive rulers who had little to no respect for the Jews or their God. King Herod, who died when Jesus was about
two, was a Jew, a client-king of the emperor, appointed “King of the Jews” by
the Roman Senate (in 39 or 40 BC); he served at the will of Caesar. Herod had a fondness for architecture. He managed construction projects all over
Judea, including an expansion of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Herod built an
enormous, four-towered fortress built adjacent to the walls of the Temple Mount,
which served as a garrison for Roman troops.
It was high enough for the Romans to look over the walls into the
precincts of the Temple to keep an eye on the suspicious and curious
monotheistic practices of the Jews.
Herod named the fortress Antonia, in honor of his patron Mark Antony
(83-30 BC). After Herod’s death, Rome
divided up the kingdom into four territories rules by a governor; they were
fearful that he had too much power.
Second, it’s imperative to remember
that Jesus’ disruption of in the Temple was not
an attack upon Judaism and its religious practices. Jesus was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew,
and resurrected a Jew—he didn’t come out of the tomb on Easter morning a
Christian. What Jesus was attacking and taking on was the priestly aristocracy that administered the operations of the
Temple, a priestly elite who were extremely rich and powerful and who, as
Josephus (37-100 AD), the
great Jewish historian from the first-century, made clear, were collaborators
with Rome, making money off the oppression of the poor.[1]
The Temple was a religious center,
but also more. It was “the center of
Israel’s political life and power. At
the Temple the high priest held court and presided over the powerful Sanhedrin;
the priestly aristocracy obediently represented Roman interests to their own
people, at times even collecting taxes to place in Roman hands.” The Temple
priests influenced every aspect of Jewish life, in Jerusalem and the countryside. The Temple was also “the center of Israel’s
economy, its central bank and treasury, the depository of immense wealth. Indeed, so much of the activity of the Temple
hinged upon buying and selling various modes of exchange.”[2]
Bible
scholar Obery Hendricks (who was in my class at Princeton Seminary) suggests “that
it is no exaggeration to say…the Temple was fundamentally an economic
institution.” Jesus’ outrage was
directed, not to a group of merchants who happened to set up shop in the Temple
precincts the day Jesus came to town; it was “a very public attack aimed at
Israel’s center of power….it was,” Hendricks makes clear, “an overtly political
act.” Jesus and his followers shut down the Temple—shut it down; it
was a religious-political-economic demonstration that sought to expose the
corruption at the heart of the Temple authority. Why? “Because despite its veneer of holiness and
religiosity, beneath its proclamations of justice and concern, the Temple did
not treat the people and their needs as holy.”[3]
As the prophets of Yahweh said for
centuries, it’s our responsibilities to care for the needs of the poor.
The priestly aristocracy was
enormously wealthy; they took advantage of the poor; instead of trying to alleviate
their burdens they made things worse.
For example, priests “received a portion of every Temple sacrifice and
offering.” On high holy days “pilgrims
to the city could swell to the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands, this
represented considerable wealth.” They
received even more income through “seven lucrative classes of prescribed offerings…[essentially]
taxes enacted solely for their benefit.
A five-shekel payment for every firstborn child; the foreleg, cheeks,
and stomach of every animal slaughtered; even a portion of the proceeds from sheep
shearing. These offerings were the priests’ personal income. …the priests
profited from ad hoc offerings…such as payment for a man’s consecration after a
sinful transgression.” This could cost
as much as fifty shekels.[4]
The priests, who might even have offered
sacrifices in the Temple to Rome, gave their allegiance to Rome. Their
collaboration, it was said, was for the good of the people, to help keep the
peace. For their cooperation, “the
Romans protected the Temple and its caretakers’ wealth by brutally disposing of
anyone the priest identified as threatening their status and power.” A telling example of the people’s frustration
with the Temple was occurred in 66 AD, at the start of the Jewish War against
Roman occupation. The rebels’ first act against
the Roman occupation was to destroy the Temple debt archives…all the people that
owed them money. Josephus, a first-hand
witness who was on Rome’s payroll, tells us, “They carried the fire to the
place where the archives were deposited, and made haste to burn the contracts
belonging to their creditors.”[5] By 70 AD the Romans had enough. They brought the war to an end. The Romans
sieged Jerusalem and eventually demolished the Temple to Yahweh, stone by
stone. All the treasures of the Temple
were then carted off to Rome and thousands of Jews were sent into slavery. If you go to Rome today and stand inside the Arch
of Titus you’ll see a frieze celebrating the sack of Jerusalem, with images of
the Romans carting off their spoils of war, including a menorah. All that remains
of the Temple today is the Wailing Wall, a holy site to Jews all over the world.
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| Arch of Titus, Rome. |
Hendricks, helpfully, sums up the
meaning of Jesus’ protest at the Temple: “it was a repudiation of the Temple
and those who ran it, repudiation of their abuse of the people’s trust, their
haughty dismissal of the people’s worth, their turning the Temple of God into a
profiteering enterprise, their exploitation of the people in the name of God
and for the benefit of themselves and the Romans. It was a prophetic pronouncement to the
priestly aristocracy that they must change or be judged by God.”[6]
Can you see why Jesus is so
angry? Can you see why he’s furious?
Jesus enters Jerusalem to take on systems of power that abuse and oppress the
poor. That’s what the procession of
palms is all about—this demonstration that we just reenacted with our children!
Do they know they were reenacting a
demonstration? Do we know that we’re
training them to be demonstrators? What
are we getting our children mixed up in telling them such stories?
Matthew’s account is tame compared
to Mark’s account and Luke’s. In Mark,
Jesus entered the temple and drove out those who were selling and buying in the
temple, he overturns the money tables. Mark says, “he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple” (Mark
11:16). He shouted, “Is it not written,
‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have
made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:16-17).
When the chief priests and scribes heard this, Mark tells us, “they kept
looking for a way to kill him” (Mark 11:18).
John tells us that Jesus made a “whip of cords”—a whip of cords—and
drove the sheep and cattle out of the temple.
He said, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a
marketplace!” (John 2:16).
What’s on display here is Jesus’
anger. We might prefer to all it “righteous
anger” or “justified anger.” It’s still
anger. It’s not a temper tantrum or an emotional
outburst or a meltdown. It’s hot. It has
heat. It comes from a deep part of his soul, from his gut. This is not “Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild” as
the old hymn says.[7] This is Jesus enraged.
This might not be your image of
Jesus, but it’s certainly the New Testament’s image. This image might even
scare us or anger us. You might be angry at me for what I’m saying.
Anger
often scares us. Some think anger is
always destructive. “There’s no use
getting angry,” I sometimes hear. We’re afraid of our anger, afraid it might
get out of control, get the best of us, cause us to do something, say something
we’ll later regret. So we shut it down. Or ignore it.[8]
Christians,
I believe, have a particular problem with anger. We don’t know what to do with it. We have
difficulty handling it. We don’t think it has a place. We often forget that Paul himself said, “Be
angry but sin not (Ephesians 4:26). What
we do instead is flip this around, preferring to “be angry not”—then sinning all over the
place, projecting the unacknowledged anger within us “out there” upon the
world. Many Christians shut their anger
down. We won’t access it. We deny it’s there. And so we self-medicate. We repress it. Sometimes we somatize it, that is, we send it
into our bodies. Or we become apathetic
or lethargic. Many forms of depression
are actually caused by one’s inability to access s anger and to be angry.
The word anger has its origins in an Old Norse word meaning “to grieve.”[9] This is very helpful to know. Jesus’ anger
toward the Temple is in many ways anger as grief: grief for what it had become, grief for what
might have been, the lost opportunities to serve all God’s children, especially
the poor. His anger is rooted in
mourning for his people. We might call this holy
anger.
And Jesus’ ability to mourn, to
grieve, is directly related to the depth of his love. It’s because he loves the people that Jesus
mourns—mourns for the Temple, mourns for the leadership of the Temple, mourns
for the victims of the Temple, mourns for the Romans who don’t realize that
they, too, are oppressed. It’s holy
anger here that is being channeled by holy love—a love that desires the best
for God’s holy people, a love that
seeks the welfare of all, not just the rich and powerful, a love that seeks
justice and wholeness and healing. It’s
his love that causes him to be angry.
It’s love that contains and channels the anger. It’s love that allows Jesus to use his anger—anger not as an end in
itself, not anger for anger’s sake, instead using it by paying attention to his
grief and sadness, acknowledging it, honoring it, and then acting from it,
doing something creative and healthy and transformative with it. Anger becomes the fuel required for action.
Many years ago at a General Assembly
I picked up a button that caught my eye. It read: “If you’re not angry you’re
not paying attention.”
Sometimes
I wonder if we Christians would be more effective, have a stronger voice, a more
positive influence in the world if we were better in touch with our anger, if
we allowed ourselves to be angry, allow ourselves to grieve. The world wants to know from us: Why isn’t
the Church angrier over a whole host of issues—gun control, the environment, human
trafficking, corporate corruption, sexual exploitation, abuse in the halls of
government, violence toward women, toward children, men…? The list is long. What
are we grieving over, what do we mourn?
In
Bible Study on Thursday morning one person (and I have his permission to share
this) quite candidly, honestly, admitted that living his middle class life
here, that he’s complacent. “I don’t
have to care, I don’t have to be involved, I have everything I need.” No need
to be bothered. No need to be
angered. No need to care. I have everything I need.
I think Christians need to get in
touch with what angers us. We’re not called to be angry, of course. We’re called to love. Yet, if we loved more, the kind of agape-love that Jesus showed and which
the Spirit offers us—deep, compassionate love—perhaps if we loved more we might
be able to get in touch with our anger and then our anger could be placed in
the service of love. Maybe we’re not
angry over the injustice in the world, maybe we’re not grieving and mourning
enough because we’re not loving enough, or deeply enough, with compassion, with
empathy, entering into the pain and grief of the people (starting with the people
right here around us) and then doing something about it, either sharing their
pain or do something to help alleviate it.
A lot of evil is allowed to emerge in the world because we refuse to be
angry, because we refuse to love, refuse to care.
When
our capacity to love is deepened—true love that seeks the best for others—we
might find ourselves getting angry, mourning, grieving for our neighbors in new
ways. When our capacity to love is deepened,
the things we’re angry about begin to change.
The things that upset us now and worry over, the things we complain
about, the things that annoy us, that trouble us will change when we deepen our
capacity to experience God’s love.
As
we approach Holy Week perhaps this will be our prayer: that we deepen our capacity
to love. Then, perhaps, this week you can
identify one thing that you’re angry about—just one thing—then honor the anger,
sit with it, just one thing that causes you to grieve and mourn. Then offer that anger up to God so that God
can do something with it.
It’s love that drives Jesus. It’s love that causes him to get angry. It’s
his anger—contained, tempered, and channeled by love—that becomes the fuel that
drives him to act, that fires him into the world, that causes him to suffer,
that causes him to set his face toward Jerusalem—“steadfast he to suffering
goes”[10]—knowing
full well what he had to do, knowing the consequences, knowing what would
happen.
Holy
Love. Holy Anger. Holy Love. This is the
way of Jesus Christ. Don’t expect anyone
to applaud you for living this way. Don’t
expect society to reward you. Heck,
don’t expect the Church to encourage you to live this way. Religious institutions
often prefer to stand in God’s way. But for us to say Jesus is Lord, for us to
walk with him again through this Holy Week, for us to claim the joy of Easter
morning means that his way must also be our way. And this, too, is our way—holy
anger, holy love is our road, if we walk with him. A road, if we walk with him,
which leads to the truth, a road that leads to life, the way that yields—I promise—resurrection.
[1] See Marcus J. Borg and John
Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What theGospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Last Days in Jerusalem (HarperOne,
2007).
[2] My description of the Temple
throughout the sermon relies heavily on the scholarship of Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering theTrue Revolutionary nature of the Teachings of Jesus and How They Have BeenCorrupted (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 114.
[3] Hendricks, 114-115.
[4] Hendricks, 115-116.
[5] Cited in Hendricks, 119. For a full, detail account of see Josephus, The Jewish Wars (75AD).
[6] Hendricks, 122.
[7] “Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild” written
by Charles Wesley (1707-1788), Hymns and
Sacred Poems, 1742
[8] See Garret Keizer, The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a SometimesDeadly Sin (Jossey-Bass, 2002).
[9] I’m grateful to Alisa Glassman of the Industrial Areas Foundation for this reference, from a conversation this past week.
[10] From the hymn “My Song Is LoveUnknown,” text by Samuel Crossman, 1644.
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