Devotions

The following is the devotion I shared with our congregational council at our February meeting.

A reading from Luke, chapter 19. (Luke 19:41-48)

As [Jesus] came near and saw [Jerusalem], he wept over it, ⁴² 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. ⁴³ 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. ⁴⁴ 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.”

⁴⁵ Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there, ⁴⁶ and he said, “It is written,

‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’
    but you have made it a den of robbers.”

⁴⁷ 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, ⁴⁸ but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

These two scenes, the one of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem and the other of him cleansing the Temple, are often considered separately. But you could make the case that they should be held together so that we can understand his cleansing of the Temple in light of his deep love for the city and its people.

Jesus comes to Jerusalem because he loves the place and its people. He knows its history, and he knows its future. He knows that it has a history of rejecting God’s chosen prophets, and refusing God’s messengers of repentance and grace, and that it will treat him the same way. You could see, in this scene, an example of God’s love for the whole world. We likely all have a history of preferring our own will to God’s will, and rejecting God’s teachings that have been handed down and the prophets and messengers God has sent to call us to follow God’s way. Even so, Jesus comes. He came to them and he still comes to us.

With a clear sense of Jesus’ love for Jerusalem, we might better understand his violent reaction to the abuses taking place in the Temple. The Temple was supposed to stand as the place of God’s presence on earth. But it has become a place where God’s most vulnerable children were being defrauded. And Jesus wouldn’t stand for that. So it’s the same love that brings Jesus to the city that also motivates him to drive the moneychangers and frauds and cheats from the Temple. So you see, it’s love that unites these two scenes.

There is yet another thing that unites them. It’s this very act of Jesus in the Temple, an attack on the wealth generated by defrauding the poor, that will cause the civic and religious leaders of Jerusalem to turn on Jesus. Just as he said they would, they will treat Jesus like the rest of God’s prophets and messengers.

Let’s pray.

Loving God, help us to see the love you have for all people expressed in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of your Son. Help us to embrace, rather than reject, the message of love and grace that comes to us from you. In Jesus’ name, Amen