We don’t know what Jesus did between arriving in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and the beginning of Passover on Thursday, so today’s story is a suggestion as to what he might have been doing…..
The few days following Jesus entry into Jerusalem were as we would have expected. We went daily to the Temple to pray, and Jesus would sit in the portico to teach and to listen to the Elders debating points of theology. We saw the Temple Guards keeping a close watch on what we were doing, which I suppose was not at all surprising as on two previous occasions Jesus has taken exception to some of the dishonest trading going on in the Temple precincts, and had overturned the tables of the money changers and let the sacrificial animals go.
When it happened it was always a shock to us. We knew that he was a man of great passion. We knew that those who sought to separate people like us from Yahweh, by means of rules we could not keep, as we had neither the money nor the time to keep them, were always an annoyance to him, but an annoyance more than anything else. He would sit patiently while the Pharisees and Sadducees asked their detailed theological questions trying to trip him up so that they could report him to the High Priest or to the Roman authorities, but time and time again he would come back at them, not with a quick riposte, but always a carefully thought out answer. When we asked him how he always managed to best the scholars in an argument, he would say that he just took a deep breath, asked Yahweh for the answer, opened his mouth, and the answer would be there. Sometimes when we were sent out to preach we tried that that technique. Don’t get angry, no matter what they say, take a deep breath and wait for Yahweh. And the answers came even to us.
It was only really in the Temple, that place where the people should be able to come closest to Yahweh that his patience occasionally ran out. It took just a seller of doves charging more than was reasonable, lining his own pockets at the expense of those, like the poor widows we would often see there, who had scraped together enough to buy a dove to have sacrificed only to see the price go up, so that they could not afford to make that sacrifice after all. Once it was the sight of a money changer trying to convince a man from Galilee that the rate of exchange was such that he needed to hand over all of his Roman coins in order to buy a few paltry coins that he could use to buy the cheapest of sacrificial beasts. Jesus just leapt at the money changer’s table and overturned it. He picked up a handful of Temple coins and gave them to the startled visitor and shooed him off to the sellers of beasts. Then he turned his wrath on the money changer and made it very clear what he thought of him and his practices. He told him in no uncertain term that the Temple was the House of Yahweh and a place of prayer, and he had turned it into a den of thieves!
The merchant was cowed by Jesus words, but as soon as Jesus had calmed down and moved on, I saw the merchant scuttle off to where one of the Temple Guards was standing impassively. I could see lots of gesturing of hands and pointing, and the man being pointed in the direction of the High Priest’s house. It did occur me to wonder why the guard had not interfered to stop Jesus. I did not wonder why he was being sent to the High Priest’s house. Maybe if I had stopped to wonder that, I might have known what was going to happen.
God's stories 