Luke 19:41-48

Posted by DJL on Nov 23, 2013 in Daily Bread | 0 comments

As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.” Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer;’
but you have made it a den of robbers.” Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.

I think it’s important that we hold these two scenes together. Otherwise, we run the risk of isolating Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple from his deep love for the city and it’s people.

Jesus comes to Jerusalem not from some sense of inevitability but because he loves Jerusalem and its inhabitants. He knows its history; moreover, he knows its future. He knows, that is, that it has a history of rejecting God’s chosen prophets and refusing God’s emissaries of repentance and grace and that it will treat him the same.

In this devotion, I think we see God’s love for all the world manifested in microcosmic form. For we also regularly prefer our own will to God’s and reject both the law and the prophets God has sent.

Yet Jesus comes anyway. To them…and to us.

And with a clear sense of Jesus’ love for Jerusalem in place, we can understand better his violent reaction to the abuses taking place in the Temple. The Temple that was supposed to stand as the place of God’s presence on earth had become a site where God’s most vulnerable children were being defrauded. And Jesus just couldn’t stand for that.

And so the same love that drives Jesus to the city now motivates him to drive the moneychangers and frauds and cheats from the Temple. Love, you see, unites these two scenes.

There is one more thing that unites them. It is this very act – this attack on the wealth generated by defrauding the poor — that will cause the civic and religious leaders of Jerusalem to turn on Jesus and treat him like the rest of God’s prophets.

Prayer: Dear God, let us see the love you have for all people expressed in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of your Son. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

 

Post image: Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), “Expulsion of the Money-changers from the Temple”