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Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
Almighty and everliving God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 19:41-48
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Luke 19:41-48
✛
The Temple Sacrifice
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In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.
At some point, late in his short life, Jesus turned his face to Jerusalem. We don’t know how long the journey was, precisely; the Bible is frustratingly tight-fisted with the kinds of narrative details that sometimes we’d like so much to have.
But it was Jerusalem that he moved steadily toward. Jerusalem where he would be greeted like a conqueror; Jerusalem where he would be killed as a criminal. He would come in among waved palms and shouted acclamations, the road literally swept clean before him. He would go out as a convict about to receive his punishment, taken to a hill outside the city walls, where the messy business of execution would take place.
There are some deeply religious reasons why that happened, reasons with cosmic implications. Reasons that have to do with Adam and Eve’s Fall from grace in the Garden of Eden; that have to do with the ancient Hebrew covenant; that have to do with the entire creation’s need for redemption. But these are all carried out under the more prosaic dynamics of everyday life in community, where things proceed fairly predictably most of the time.
It was into a community of this sort that Jesus went and did one of the most disruptive things he possibly could have done, an event that’s recorded in the Gospel of Luke in our second reading this evening. Luke writes, “And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought; Saying unto them, ‘It is written, My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves.’” And not only that. Having said it, he stayed there, in the Temple, every day, teaching. Teaching the people about the Good News of God’s salvation, right there under the noses of the Temple leadership. And there was, politically, nothing they could do at that point: the people were spellbound by what Jesus was saying, Scripture says, and, at that point at least, would’ve protected him had the powers that be went after him. So there was nothing they could do but fume and bide their time, waiting for an opportune moment. And that moment would come soon enough.
The reading tonight was from the Gospel of Luke, but Jesus’ so-called “cleansing” of the Temple is recorded in all four gospels. That is an unusual fact that speaks to the significance of the event. Indeed, it very well may have been exactly that event that led most directly to Jesus’ eventual arrest, conviction, and crucifixion. Because for Jesus to attack those who were selling in the Temple was for him to attack the religious economy itself, and in more than one way.
Because the ability to buy animals for sacrifice which he was disrupting was a necessary part of Temple worship. Pilgrims would travel from their homes to the Temple in Jerusalem for Passover and, if they weren’t able to bring any animals with them on the trip (which most would not be) they would need to purchase them there, so that they could make their offering. Unfortunately—at least, unfortunately for them—the money issued by the Roman government was considered idolatrous, because it had the picture of Caesar on it, proclaiming him as a god, so the Roman money had to be changed into Temple currency first, before it could be used on the Temple grounds. So the faithful, many of them poor, first had to pay a commission to have their money changed, and then they had to pay to purchase the animals for sacrifice. Those were two opportunities for these folks to be taken advantage of, and it sounds like that’s what was happening.
But for Jesus to stop these financial transactions is for him to at least temporarily put a halt to the way that not only business, but also worship, was being conducted. It was to throw a wrench into the well-oiled machine of religious life in Jerusalem and, like a prophet, reveal its sinful and profane nature. Even if business returned to normal soon thereafter, Jesus’ actions and his continued presence there represented a profound critique of the leaders of his community.
But there is another way in which Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple was disruptive. It not only protected the poor, certainly. But it would also have at least temporarily stopped the animal sacrifices altogether. The site of those sacrifices, the altar of the Temple, would have been covered with blood; altars always have been. At times in human history—indeed, in our own history—that blood has literally been human blood. We can read about that in several places in the Hebrew scriptures, and elsewhere besides. There is evidence of human sacrifice in various places in the world as early as 3500 BC, over 5,000 years ago. In most places, including within Judaism, human sacrifice would eventually be replaced with animal sacrifice. In Judaism, that transition that may be indicated in scripture by Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, in which the ram is substituted for the young man at the last minute. Regardless, the conception remained that God demanded blood from his people, and blood is what they gave him. For centuries, blood is what they gave him.
So in stopping that system, Jesus was stopping both the exploitation of the poor and the practice of animal sacrifice on the altar of the Temple. But that was only the first step. Jesus’ real goal was to put an end to all blood sacrifices altogether. Even more than that: his goal was to put an end to death altogether. That effort would climax in him taking the place of those offerings, and becoming the last sacrifice, the human sacrifice, the blood spilled to establish peace, but this time, true peace.
But this blood of the sacrifice wouldn’t be taken; it would be given. And not because God demanded it, but because God offered it, of himself. Jesus said, “This is my blood of the new covenant.” A new covenant that is broad enough to invite in everyone who desires to be part of it; no victims required. A new covenant that traffics not in death but in life. But first Jesus would have to enter into the machinery of death in order to stop it forever.
To be clear: Jesus wasn’t an intentionally self-destructive individual. He wasn’t setting out to do everything he could with the goal of getting himself killed. Instead, he was someone who revealed the love of God in a transparent way; who showed what God’s being was, and it was love; and who manifested that love in a concrete, living, flesh and blood way. But in a fallen world, those two types of lives will come to the same end. To reveal God, to love like God does, is to place oneself at the mercy of the principalities and powers of the world. And a world, such as ours, doesn’t know what to do with a person such as Jesus. In this world, a person like Jesus could come to no other end.
The way in which he comes to that end is the story that we will follow—the story we will participate in—in the week to come.
In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.
