The Earth, The Sky and Everything In Between

This is something I wrote about this time last year. I hope you like it.
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The crowds had gone home for the evening, and the palm branches had long since blown away in the desert wind. The donkey - that noble steed on which Jesus’ revolutionary humility sat hours earlier - now returned to the post from which it was borrowed some hours earlier. If we didn't know what would happen just a few days later, it'd be easy (and true) to say Jesus was coming off His brightest moment with the people of Israel. “Hosanna!” they shouted, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!” The masses could barely contain themselves as they shouted their praise to the prophet from Nazareth. But for now, the streets were silent, and so was Christ as He entered the temple that evening to be with His Father.

What He saw inside would stop anyone in their tracks. I would like to say that never before had one seen something so Holy shrouded by such sin, but Christ knew as He stared at the merchant tables with their gimmicks, slogans, and advertisements of happier spirituality, that the infiltration of such greed into the very dwelling place of His Father was but one more example of the reality of sin: that it will stop at nothing in its pursuit to mock the Glory of God.

No one was innocent in this picture. The merchants, among other things, were selling doves. I wonder if they charged more for white doves. They're prettier; they seem rare. I wonder if merchants advertised white doves as the key to really impressing God, that maybe then He'd listen a little closer to a person’s daily prayers? Was there a 2 for 1 circumcision ‘special’ running in the Court of Gentiles? Here was a place where promises of deeper spirituality were offered at competitive rates. The bleak reality of the situation was that of these lies, no one was innocent. Not the merchants for selling them, not the people for buying them, and certainly not the temple priests for allowing such desecration to take place.

I believe Jesus wept that night, both for the love of His Father’s House and for the love of those who had shamed it. He knew that these were the very people for whom He would give His life by week’s end, and Jesus knew the action He would take in the temple the following day would turn the road of His ministry decidedly in the direction of the cross.

When Jesus cleared the temple, He showed a side of God’s character that we rarely see in the personhood of Jesus. He held nothing back as He set to ruin all that stood in the temple that was not of God. Making good on Isaiah 42:13, Jesus was a warrior that day, acting on the jealous love God has for Himself and His creation--a love that does not compromise itself on the whims of any societal sin. And all this He did for the ultimate purpose of redeeming that which God had set apart as His dwelling place.

What I hope you find simply amazing is that Christ has repeated this process in all who accept what He would offer just days later, and continues to offer today. His relentless pursuit of our hearts led Him to die upon the cross, so that all who accept Him would inherit a warrior who, like a sculptor, works to remove all that does not belong, until all that remains resembles nothing less than the shape of our Savior.
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I hope that's something you can consider throughout the Easter week (or any other week). I know I have some tables in my life that desperately need to be overturned. I guess I'm glad Christ got his practice in so long ago. Maybe he can clear my life of its tables. Maybe I won't crucify Him in return. Maybe I already did, and maybe He loves me anyway.