6th. April 2020.Daily Devotion.
Good Day everyone,
I rather think that many a house is being well spring cleaned these days. In our time of confinement there is the opportunity to catch up with all those things we mean to do when we have time in the house and in the garden.
As we travel through Holy Week it is time to meditate on the central mystery of our faith, the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Our first stop this week is in the Temple in Jerusalem where we find Jesus Spring cleaning his father’s house.
Here is St Matthew’s account of it:
Matthew 21:12-13
12 Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the benches of those selling doves. 13 ‘It is written,’ he said to them, ‘“My house will be called a house of prayer,” but you are making it “a den of robbers.”’
Commentary: “It was an unheard-of scandal! This young rabbi who yesterday had the whole city in a patriotic uproar, today stormed into the very temple precinct itself and created chaos. Doves flapping, men shouting, women scrabbling after the rolling coins. This fellow from Galilee, once again stirring up trouble!
But stirring-up is always what happens when Jesus enters the scene. Monday of Holy Week has its parallel in our individual journey of faith. He comes, and priorities are overturned, assumptions swept aside. The first thing He did on entering Jerusalem is the first thing He does on entering a life: He goes straight to the temple, to the place where we worship, and cleans out whatever is not part of God’s design.
The process is called by many names: sanctification, amendment of life, getting right with God, but the meaning is the same. The recognition that with Jesus in charge, many things we used to do, say, want, are no longer okay. It’s such a common pattern that we’ve come to expect it.
And then there’s the danger in the Monday experience. We think we know what things He wants to get rid of. When my mother was growing up, the list included wearing makeup, reading novels and riding a bicycle on Sunday. Each group, each era, has its own expectations.
But the hallmark of that Monday in Jerusalem was surprise. Jesus knew what stood between people in those days and God. “Astonished” is how Mark describes people’s reactions to that original cleansing, and astonished is how we feel when God’s housecleaning, not the one we envisaged, gets underway within us. Prejudice. Old hurts. A sense of inferiority. Whatever blocks our relationships with Him, out it must go.
“What are you doing!” we cry when the Cleanser strides in. “I’m making myself a temple,” He replies. Elizabeth Sherrill
Meditate on these verses from the letters of Paul and Peter:
6 Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? 2 Corinthians 6:16
16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:
‘I will live with them
and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they will be my people. 2 Corinthians 6:16
4 As you come to him, the living Stone – rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him – 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:4-5
In cleansing the temple Jesus reclaimed it as a house of prayer for all nations. In the same way he reclaims us that we may be servants of prayer for all nations.
Those who choose to do my will, will receive from me a memorial and a name in my own house and within my walls; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. Isaiah 56:4-5,7
Gracious God, your son Jesus Christ cleansed the temple of those who desecrated the holy place. Cleanse our hearts from greed and selfishness Amen
Lord Jesus Chris, in this sacred and solemn week when we see again the depth and mystery of your redeeming love, help us to follow where you go, to stop where you stumble, to listen when you cry, to hurt as you suffer, to bow our heads in sorrow when you die, so that when you are raised to live again we may share your endless joy. Amen.
