The Fruitful Temple

 April 2 2023

Matthew 21

         At last we have completed our Lenten journey with Jesus and we finally have reached the holy city of Jerusalem. Today is what is called traditionally, Palm Sunday, because today is when we remember that Jesus entered into Jerusalem to the shouts of, “Hosanna, Hosanna!”, and the waving of palms. This is the Sunday that must be one of the most difficult for those outside of the Christian faith to figure out. I mean, today there are probably a lot of churches which may be waving the branches of a Middle eastern palm plant all the while singing songs which have an Aramaic word in them, ‘Hosanna”, which most likely makes no sense to anyone who has not grown up in the church. And even if outsiders can get over these cultural hurdles there is also the strange dynamics of the week itself, that Jesus comes into the city hailed and praised as a king and in less than a week he is being nailed to a cross, on a day called Good Friday which again, anyone who is outside the church is going to be scratching their heads as to how such an ugly death can be at all, good. I often wonder if very many of us can, in a few words, actually help those on the outside make sense of such a week as most of us are usually trying to figure it out ourselves.

         So as we jump into the scriptures for today, I hope we really will strive to listen and understand just what is happening and why. The first very confusing aspect of what is going on in our scripture story is that Jesus sends two of his followers into an unnamed village and they are to find a donkey that is tied up, one that has a colt, supposedly a young donkey, that is with her. They are to untie the donkey and the colt and bring them to Jesus. Now many scholars have puzzled over the reason why Jesus would want a donkey and her colt but the most obvious reason is that Matthew has written his story in this way so that there can be no doubt that what is being played out is the prophecy recorded in the ninth chapter of Zechariah. As it is recorded here in Matthew, the prophet Zechariah prophesied and he said, “Say to the daughter of Zion, ‘Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey and on a colt , the foal of a beast of burden.”. So, Matthew wants us to see that what is happening with the disciples who have gone for the donkey on which Jesus is riding on is done exactly like what is written in the prophecies of Zechariah hundreds of years before. I guess it doesn’t matter that there was an error in the translating of the text into Greek, and that the term, “colt,’ was there to tell us that the donkey was young, not that there was another young donkey with the donkey in question. But, nonetheless, there is a donkey and the real question is what is so important about Jesus riding into Jerusalem upon such a lowly steed. The answer is that Jesus knew that the people of Judaea and Jerusalem wanted him to be their king, but more importantly, they wanted Jesus to be their kind of king, the king that would at last be the conquering king that would lead the Jewish army to victory over the Roman occupying forces. Jesus knew that no matter how much he had spoken of his mission as being one of peace all his audience desired was war. Choosing a donkey to be his ride to enter Jerusalem upon, then, was to not only be a fulfillment of prophecy but it was to also send a signal that Jesus had come in peace to do the work of peacemaking.

         The strange action of the people who gathered that day, to throw down their coats upon the ground was an affirmation that the hunch of Jesus that these people desired him to be their king was right. This was an old custom as is recorded in the ninth chapter of Second Kings, where when Jehu was announced as king, the people threw down their garments so that the kings feet would not touch the ground. And so the people did this for Jesus as well, subtly stating by doing so that they firmly believed that this Jesus was indeed their king. What is not recorded in Matthew is the waving of the palm branches, something that is only found in the gospel of John. The reason as to why they waved these branches is also tied to their desire for Jesus to be king. The waving of the palm branches went back to an earlier time when the people of Judaea had thrown off the rule of the Greeks. So, now when they found themselves under the rule of the Romans the people had longed that Jesus would be the sort of king who would violently throw off this pagan oppression of God’s holy people. 

         So as Jesus came riding into the gates of Jerusalem riding upon a donkey whose feet trampled upon the coats that had been thrown down, these fervent believers of God began to sing a song, or at least part of a song, the one-hundredth and eighteen Psalm where we find the cry of Hosanna! This, Hosanna, is an Aramaic word which comes from two Hebrew words, Hosiah and na. Hosiah is a word that means, “Save us, deliver us, help us or liberate us”. The word na adds a sense of urgency to this plea so that what is meant by the cries of Hosanna is, “Save us now! Deliver us now!” Here in this cry is found the seeds of the conflict which would cause a similar crowd at the end of this week to cry to this same Jesus, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”. I mean, they were crying to this one who they held to be their king to save them, deliver them, yet just what was it exactly was it that they needed to be saved from? Just what sort of deliverance did they expect? How would a king bent on making peace be the one who could save or deliver these people as they had expected?

         And so the stage was set, right there as Jesus entered Jerusalem. Yes, the crowds stirred up the whole city and everyone wondered just who is this guy, this one riding on a donkey. The crowds answered these questions saying that Jesus was a prophet from Nazareth of Galilee. Now, I think that Matthew intentionally writes his story this way, stating that Jesus was a prophet as an introduction to what Jesus does immediately upon his arrival into Jerusalem. Matthew tells us that the first thing that Jesus does upon entering Jerusalem is to head to the Temple  to drive out all who bought and sold in the Temple, overturning tables of the money changers and the seats of the pigeon sellers. Now, for a king who wanted to portray himself as a peace loving guy this does seem like a violent sort of thing to do and we have to wonder, what gives? The answer is that as you study this action of Jesus in all four of the gospel accounts what you find is that all Jesus desired is to cause a disruption that would effectively shut down the Temple at least for a short period of time. Jesus did this by primarily chasing the animals from the Temple courts out into the street. We can only imagine the clamor and confusion that filled the streets of Jerusalem as cattle and sheep ran in terror out of the Temple courts into the streets already filled to overflowing with those who had come to celebrate Passover. Even so, Jesus had to make the workings of the Temple grind to a halt because as Jesus said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer but you have made it a den of violent thugs.” Here Jesus quotes from two different prophecies the first is found in the fifty-sixth chapter of Isaiah, where the prophet foretells of how one day even foreigners who join themselves to God will minister to him, so that they might love the name of the Lord and be his servants. And everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, holding fast to the covenant of the Lord, these God will bring to his holy mountain, and God will make these joyful in his house of prayer for all peoples.” Here then is the hope of God, what his desire has always been, to bring all peoples in to his house and make his house a house of prayer for those united to God, to those who love the name of the Lord. But this glorious image of what God desired is not what greeted Jesus as he entered the Temple that day because as Jeremiah had also known, as he wrote in the seventh chapter, “Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers?”. It was here at the Temple that the violent intentions of God’s people were stoked like coals of a fire. Instead of being a house of prayer for all people it had become a hideout for those who sought violence against all peoples except themselves. So at last, with the arrival of Jesus, the word of God had spoken, the time had come for this evil place to be shut down for it no longer served the purposes of God.            The violent desires in those who called themselves God’s people only helped to reveal that they treasured something other than doing the will of God. They had taken their longing of sovereignty and had treasured it more than they had treasured their Heavenly Father. Then they began to worship this dream of statehood to the point where such an ideal had become for them a false god which stood opposed to the one, true, living God. Since what their hearts treasured was something other than what God promised to bring about, their treasure became an idol and as such the people who worshipped it gave it power through their own actions of violence. So from the moment Jesus entered into Jerusalem the cross proved more and more inevitable.

         What is fascinating is that Jesus, upon creating such an uproar within the Temple courts does not just leave and find some place to lay low for a while. No, Jesus instead, remains within the Temple and we are told, that as the blind and the lame came to him, Jesus healed them. We read this as if there is nothing really astonishing here, we know of the healings that had always been a part of the ministry of Jesus, but what should have amazed us is that here in the Temple courts were those that could not walk and those who could not see because people with infirmities were not allowed in the Temple according to Jewish law. In the twenty first chapter of the book of Leviticus we are told that such infirmities such as blindness and being lame were considered to be impure conditions which a priest could not have. It was, perhaps these restrictions, which led King David to state in Second Samuel, the fifth chapter, that those who were blind and lame were never to enter the house of the Lord. Yet here is Jesus, going against time honored tradition, and we have to wonder just why is he here, once again, pushing the buttons of the Temple authorities? We are told that when the chief priests and the scribes saw what Jesus was up to they were indignant, that was the only emotion they could call forth upon witnessing God making the broken to be made whole. How wonderful it was then that a little gaggle of children who were watching Jesus began singing and praising God with loud cries of, “Hosanna to the Son of David.”. These children just knew that this Jesus, this one who transformed the lives of these hurting people, here was the one who could surely save all of us. All the leaders of the Temple wanted is for these little nuisances to be quiet. “Don’t you hear what they are doing?, they asked Jesus. Jesus, of course, knew what these children were doing, they were the ones David had spoke of when he penned the eighth Psalm, that, “Out of the mouth of children and nursing babes, God has prepared his praise.” Here, right before their eyes, this ancient song was being played out but these officials, so bent on the rules, missed out on what David had known so well.

         What Jesus was doing when he spent his time in the Temple healing the hurting and soliciting the praise of children, was to, again, provide a prophetic image of the Temple to come. Jesus, in chasing out the animals from the Temple court was indeed sending a prophetic message that this Temple was on its way out, its purpose having been fulfilled. Since it had become a haven for violence there was nothing else to be done but for God to step aside and allow the course of these violent actions to sweep away all that opposed the plans of God. Yet, Jesus in his healing of the broken was also doing a prophetic act, pointing us to a new temple that was still to come, a place where healing not hurting occurs, a place where the praises of children are heard and welcomed. This new temple would be a place for those who would bear forth the name of the Lord and produce the fruit of peace. The people of Judaea and Jerusalem were like the fig tree Jesus encountered the next day which had no fruit, so Jesus cursed the tree and the tree withered and died. His disciples upon seeing that the once vibrant, green, tree now very much brown and lifeless were amazed and they asked Jesus how this had happened. The answer, Jesus told them is faith. If only they would have faith, they too could be part of what God is doing. You see, the reason that the fig tree was cursed and therefore good as dead was that this tree had the unlikely fate of representing the people of God. Like this tree, they too they had not borne any fruit, the fruit which Jesus spoke about to his disciples in the early days of his ministry. The fruit that they were to bear is the fruit of peace. When they were people who brought peace into a violent world then they would be like salt for a pot of stew or like a light that lights a room. But most of the people of Judaea had no intentions of wanting to be part of this coming kingdom of peace founded on the holy love of God. So, in choosing to worship a false god and give it life through their violent actions, they were unable to respond to the holy love of God and live. To have faith is to trust that without a response of fruit, without being what God has created them to be, rest assured all that was left was death. It was by this same certainty, Jesus went on to tell his disciples, that they could say to this mountain, “Be taken up and be thrown into the sea.”, and it will happen. This is a commonly quoted phrase to appeal to the power of faith and as great as that may be, I believe that here Jesus is speaking about something very different. We can not forget just what mountain that Jesus is referring to because the mountain to which he had to be pointing to was none other than the mountain upon which the Temple was built. The power which will render the Temple obsolete, effectively throwing it into the sea, is none other than being persuaded of the certainty of his creating a new Temple which will be a place of prayer for all people.This Temple will be a place which will at last bear the fruit of peace. You see, if we are convinced in the power of God to do the impossible then we can rest in the promises that God makes. This means that violence is not necessary to bring about the plans and the will of God. All that is necessary is faith. You see, the chief priests and elders in the Temple refused again and again to believe in the way of righteousness. They refused to trust in the ways of God which are the ways of holy love, a love which loves us not in our successes but instead finds us in our failures and forgives us and gives us life. It is no wonder that those considered the worst of humanity, the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed in this love because they knew that only through the forgiveness of God could they find a new life praising him. So it was these, the least of these, they were the ones who will enter the gates of the new Temple Jesus prophesies is surely on its way.

         Now, just so these leaders of the old Temple understand how their violent ways have put them on the outs with God, Jesus tells them the story of a vineyard. The owner of the vineyard lease it to some tenants. When the grapes were ripe the owner sent his servants to get his fruit. The tenants however beat and killed every servant the owner sent. So, at last the owner of the vineyard decided that he would send his son, surely those tenants would respect him. The tenants instead decided to kill the son falsely believing that if they did they at last would receive the son’s inheritance. Jesus then asks the leaders of the Temple, just what will the owner do with these tenants? The leaders told Jesus that of course the owner should put these tenants to a miserable death and lease the vineyard out to those who will give the owner fruit in due season. Tragically these leaders could not see that they, in fact, were those tenants who refused to give the owner the fruit he deserved . They rejected Jesus, the very stone the builders refused to set at the corner so the Temple could be built to glorify God. They rejected Jesus, the very Son of God, because they refused to bear the fruit of peace. But this one who was rejected, whose blood was spilt, the one who forgave with his last breath, this is the rock upon which the new Temple is built, the Temple all of us are called to be a part of. As you look at the cross this Good Friday, ask yourself, will you like Jesus, be one who bears the fruit of peace? Amen