AFTER THE HOSANNAS: TEMPLE-CLEARING AND TRUTH-TELLING
April 9th, 2006 – Palm Sunday
Tim Schmucker
Texts:
Psalm 118:19-29
Mark 11:1-11
Jesus’ so-called triumphal entry, on the surface, is a great candidate for the “happily ever after” syndrome. You know the story line. There is suspense, then a grand culmination, and all ends well. Life is great. Happily ever after. The stuff of fairy tales. Girl meets boy, romance blossoms, marriage, children and home, grandchildren, in short – a good life. A violent gang member or a hopeless drug addict encounters Jesus, experiences conversion and a radical change in life, becomes a successful pastor or motivational speaker. All is well. Happily ever after. Or an abusive husband or an alcoholic mother recognizes the deep damage s/he is doing to her/himself and loved ones, faces the demons within and makes radical changes in life. A fairy tale ending. Or take a socio-political movement. A new charismatic leader emerges, and transforms a country or province. (Oh Trudeau, where are you when we need you?) Happily ever after.
Of course we don’t believe it works that way; we know that post-climax is a bit more complicated, quite a bit less rosy. And we know that this is the case with Jesus. Jesus’ Jerusalem entry is followed by his death. Good Friday follows Palm Sunday. But I am getting ahead of myself. Think of the first years of Jesus’ ministry. There in Galilee, in northern Palestine, he was widely popular. A prophet, a miracle-worker, a healer, a teacher and story-teller with incredible integrity, calling all back to love for God and neighbour, hinting at and then announcing the arrival of the promised kingdom. Is he the Messiah?, people wondered, Is he the One God promised to send to redeem Israel? Jesus developed a huge following, along with some significant enemies among the socio-religious establishment.
Then he set his face toward Jerusalem. Jerusalem: the centre of Jewish life and faith. The centre of Jewish religious establishment and practice. The centre of Roman control over Jewish faith and life. And the centre of opposition to him, the centre of the power that Jesus challenged. Now throngs gather around him as he enters Jerusalem as a long-expected King, albeit a misunderstood King. “Hosanna! Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David.”
And that is where our lectionary passage for this Sunday ends, except for a minor postscript about checking out the temple. The suspense, a great culmination, and all ends well. Jerusalem receives its King. The kingdom is inaugurated. Happily ever after.
But that niggling postscript. What happens after the hosannas? That postscript in verse 11 compels us to read further. And when we do, we realize that even during the climax – the so-called triumphal entry – there were ominous signs of all not being well. But that is getting ahead of the story again.
As we explore this story, you may find yourself remembering other details, perhaps even discrepancies. Let’s note at the outset that there are several distinctive elements to Mark’s account of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, both in chronology and content. Our purpose is not to do comparison readings this morning; you can do that this afternoon. Let’s focus on Mark’s story, which, by the way was written first and was in the hands of the other gospel writers when they wrote their gospels.
Jesus, in Galilee, realizes that it’s time to take his message to the centre of power, and travels to Jerusalem for the Passover. A normal population in Jerusalem of about 50,000 at that time, had at least tripled in size because of the influx of pilgrims celebrating the Jewish holiday. Yet in Bethany, in the outskirts of Jerusalem, Jesus prepares to enter the Holy City not as a reverent pilgrim demonstrating allegiance to the Temple, but as a prophet challenging the foundations of state power. Throughout his ministry in Galilee, he confronted the status quo with his powerful actions of exorcism and healing. Now he gets ready to take on the Temple system and those who control it – the Jerusalem religious establishment.
So, Jesus and his disciples are approaching Jerusalem. Perhaps already the crowd accompanying him is beginning to swell. He sends two of the disciples ahead to next village to bring him a colt to ride. This is unusual, because so far Jesus has walked everywhere and pilgrims generally walk into Jerusalem. His mounted entry, however, is a dramatic way to convey his kingly status. We also understand well the significance of the colt; kings rode horses when at war. This king comes in peace. Yet, Mark doesn’t say it’s a donkey. He uses the word colt, which can be the colt either of a donkey or a horse. The other gospels say it’s a donkey. Nevertheless, the clear allusion is to Zechariah 9:9 which tells of a king coming “humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey,” stopping war and bringing peace. But the throngs don’t get it, or they choose to see the Messiah they’re looking for, hoping for.
Those crowds turned out because they sensed somehow that the oppression, cruelty and poverty which were all they had ever known were being overturned. Something new was at hand, but they misunderstood it, they didn’t understand that Jesus wasn’t fitting into their expectations of the Messiah God would send. Some were looking for a miracle worker, a Messiah who would heal their every ill, or who would turn bread and fish into frequent feasts. Others wanted a political messiah and yearned for the overthrown of the Romans and the restoration of freedom, of the glory days. All chanted, “Hosanna. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David.”
While all three Synoptic Gospels quote Psalm 118 to interpret the triumphal entry and all three conclude with some word about Jesus’ kingship, Mark is most explicit in linking this kingship with David. But Mark more than the other Gospels is most ambiguous about Jesus’ kingship. Even before the Jerusalem entry, Mark makes it clear that Jesus’ kingship is readily misunderstood. The “coming kingdom of our ancestor David” will become an upside-down kingdom, the lowly are lifted up, the rich turned away; the powerful made weak, the weak powerful; the marginalized at the centre, the movers and shakers at the fringes; the hungry fed, the full become empty. They misunderstood.
“Hosanna, Hosanna” they cry out. Hosanna means “save now”, rather than a cry of praise. Save us now, Messiah.
“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” This is from Psalm 118, a psalm praising God for having delivering Israel from Egypt, from slavery, from the bondage of foreign rule.
“Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” sounds very seditious – there’s a revolution afoot – and causes the charges that will soon be brought against Jesus that he is or wants to become “King of the Jews”. A threat to Rome and the Jewish status quo. And all this would have been very obvious and intentional to the throngs acclaiming him King.
The meaning of palm branches and “Hosannas” are found in Jewish history about one hundred fifty years earlier. The hero Maccabaeus had liberated Jerusalem from foreign rule. On that occasion, a great celebration was held with praise, songs, palm branches, and musical instruments. So, the palm became a symbol of the Jews’ desire for deliverance. Yet again, Mark says “leafy branches”; “palm branches” is used in the other gospels.
“Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields.” It appears that, instead of being met by a crowd of Jerusalemites, Jesus comes into Jerusalem accompanied by a crowd of pilgrims. The crowd’s response is fit for a king — like rolling out a red carpet. These are not the people of Jerusalem, but are instead the disciples and pilgrims who are with Jesus outside Jerusalem as he prepares to enter. There is no basis here for the traditional Holy Week comment on the fickleness of a crowd shouting “Hosanna” one day and “Crucify him” a few days later. They are not the same crowd. The Galilean pilgrims shouted “Hosanna” as they approached the city; the Jerusalem crowd shouted, “Crucify him”.
We now come to the last verse of the lectionary reading, the verse that compels us to read beyond. Vs 11: In Matthew and Luke, Jesus cleanses the temple immediately after entering Jerusalem. However, here in Mark, he simply goes to the temple to look around. Apparently he does this alone. The throngs are gone. Evidently no one even notices or recognizes him. There is no crowd, no greeting from the priests. The acclamation that was given Jesus outside Jerusalem has faded. The Messianic triumph-alism has dissipated. But the agenda of transforming those mis-guided hopes and expectations is now under way. Choosing a donkey-colt was the first hint that Davidic royalty will be radically redefined. The ominous mood of v. 11 signals that the inauguration is not what people thought it to be.
Thus, his quick trip to the temple seems anti-climactic, but is an inspection tour in preparation for the action the next day. He then leaves the city and goes to Bethany with his disciples for the night. We would expect them to be tired, because they have walked from Jericho, a distance of over 32 kilometres, much of it uphill.
So Jesus has simply visited temple, looked around, and left. We understand from the verses that follow that he is deeply disturbed by what he saw. But it was too late to do anything. Perhaps Jesus needed to think calmly, plan, not act in a rage. My dad used to tell me “when you are angry, count to ten before responding.” So Jesus leaves the city with his disciples for the night. Next day returns, after having prayed and brooded, brooded and prayed about what he saw in the temple. He had meditated and planned how he was going to respond and tell the truth. Things obviously are not going to be happily ever after.
So let’s read on. Seven more verses. (read 12-14) The next morning, Jesus and his disciples set out to return to Jerusalem, to the temple. He’s made his plans. On the way, he sees a fig tree, and being hungry, goes to take fruit from it. Alas, there are only leaves on it as it was out of season. Jesus curses it. Now surely Jesus knew it wasn’t the season, he knew that his expectations were unrealistic. Yet he still curses the poor tree. It appears that Jesus was angry. And I’d suggest that his anger was more than simply anger due to hunger. You know, it is easy to be angry when you are hungry. My ESL students at the New Life Centre used to say, when they would have trouble pronouncing the difference between hungry and angry, that it really didn’t matter because when you’re hungry you’re also angry. Same thing, they’d joke. No, Jesus’ anger was more than this. He was deeply angry about what he had seen in the temple the evening before, after entering Jerusalem, after all the hosannas. Now, he was on a mission. He was heading back with a plan of confrontation, of righteous anger. And a poor tree gets cursed.
Some commentators attempt to figure out the symbolic meaning of this fig-tree cursing. Others simply admit that all attempts seem more or less far-fetched, that it is hard to find a satisfactory explanation. For today, let’s just take it at face value; Jesus was angry. Righteously angry! Before we turn to what he does with his anger at what he had observed in the Temple the evening before, we need to look at the temple itself and its central role in Jewish life.
The temple, though indeed a building for worship, was quite unlike any church or a synagogue we can imagine. The temple was for worship through the action of animal sacrifice; so it was elaborately arranged, with large open courts and altars and drainage systems and so forth, for the very messy and bloody business of slaughtering animals for sacrifice, burning parts of them, and cooking and eating other parts. This had
, of course, led to the growth of a kind of market on the spot, where worshippers could buy their animals; and, since custom demanded that temple-dues should be paid, not in the detested Roman money but in the nearest available equivalent to the old Hebrew shekel, the money-changers also had their stalls there.
This, understandably enough, had turned the outer court of the temple into a noisy, haggling marketplace. It was an inappropriate passageway to the altar, and it also took up a great deal of room in the only court where non-Jews were allowed to come to pay their respect to the God of the Jews, and where they ought to have been made welcome. It was meant to be a house of prayer for all the nations.
But it wasn’t solely for this reason that Jesus was so angered. He would have been neither surprised nor indignant at the existence of this marketplace in and of itself. Commercial activity was an entirely normal aspect of the temple at that time. Indeed the Temple was Jerusalem’s dominant economic institution, upon which most of the city depended. The burning issue for Jesus was rather the way in which the political economy of the temple had become oppressive to the poor.
The highly profitable Temple commercial interests were controlled by the high priestly families. These financial powers were represented in the Temple by “money changers” and “pigeon sellers”. The money changers controlled the currency exchange and transaction, since all money brought by pilgrims had to be converted into Jewish coin before Temple dues and tithes could be paid. With revenues pouring into Jerusalem from Jews all over the Mediterranean world, these banking interests wielded considerable power. And “pigeon sellers” refers to those who sold the staple commodity that the poor needed to meet their temple obligations. A sacrificial offering of doves was needed, for example, in the purification of women and the cleansing of lepers. Jesus thus “overturns” the stations used to make a profit off those condemned to second-class citizenship by keeping them poor.
So he “drives them out”; “drive out”, the verb Mark usually uses for exorcism. (read 15-16) A traditional Mennonite / pacifist concern and dis-ease with this passage is whether Jesus used physical force on people. I’m actually not very interested in delving into this now. Suffice it to say that the Hollywood movie (or is it a painting?) version that shows Jesus using a whip on the sellers and money lenders is simply incompatible with the Jesus we know throughout the Gospels. Full stop. He drove them out in a way that was completely compatible with who he was and what he taught.
Jesus justifies such bold action by teaching and citing two great prophetic traditions in verse 17: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations. But you have made it a den of robbers.” Jesus first appeals to Isaiah’s vision of what the Temple ought to represent: a refuge for all peoples, especially the foreigner and the dispossessed. But he then invokes Jeremiah to illustrate what the Temple has in fact become. The metaphor “den of robbers” comes from one of the bitterest attacks upon the Temple system in Hebrew prophecy. Jeremiah warns against “trusting in… the Temple of the Lord” and insists that unless justice is practiced toward “the alien, the orphan, and the widow”, the Temple will be destroyed. According to Jesus this ultimatum now applies, and in the next chapter, he will give an object lesson about how the Temple exploits the poor in the story about the widow’s mite.
So Jesus was angry – righteously angry – with what was happening at the temple: not merely because of the marketplace activities, but rather because of the economic oppression and domination. It was about the socio-religious system that kept the poor down-trodden, it was about the unjust trading, it was about a system designed to oppress for the benefit of the powerful. And in no uncertain terms, Jesus declared that this injustice was incompatible with the upside down kingdom.
And of course the result was the religious oligarchy, the powers that be, the status quo sought to kill Jesus, eliminate him. And they soon did.
What ought we to be righteously angry about in our society, in our community? Righteous anger is not anger when we have been wronged; it is anger when the weakest, the most vulnerable are wronged and suffer due to injustice at the hands of the powerful. What are the injustices against God, against God’s kingdom of shalom, that ought to get our blood boiling, that ought to have us cursing the fig trees and clearing the temples? Where do we need to be telling the truth that most do not want to hear? While there are numerous realities that need to be exposed, many truths that need to be told, there is one that is simply unimaginable, and that is the increasing marginalization, poverty and homelessness in our country. Canada is an incredible rich country. Our economy has been booming for years now. Yet, there are more people in poverty, more and more people who, even though they work 50 hours a week, have to choose between paying the rent and putting food on the table. Our minimum wage is not a living wage. A family with two minimum wage jobs is still living below the poverty line. SHAME. Our country needs a living wage, not a minimum wage.
The number of children living in poverty is also shameful. In 1989 our Canadian Parliament resolved to eliminate child poverty by the 2000. At that time, 11.6% of Ontario children lived below the poverty line. Now, 17 years later, and 6 years after the target year, Ontario’s child poverty rate is stuck at about 16%, a 33% increase of poverty among children. One in every six children lives in poverty. Obviously economic growth alone is not sufficient to ensure the well-being of children and families.
Social assistance levels are a disgrace: A lone parent family with two children in Ontario receives about $1100. The average provincial rent for a 2-bedroom apartment is about $900 which means that this family is left with $200 for food, clothing and all other expenses. A couple with two children receives about $1,200. The average rent in Ontario for a 3-bedroom apartment is $1,100 which leaves $100 for all other expenses. We are condemning these folks to poverty and despair.
The meaning of h
omelessness has changed. Twenty years ago, “homelessness” meant you lived in a rooming house or a shelter. Today it means you live in the back alleys, under the bridges, and increasingly as the city has “cleaned out” the downtown, it means you live in ravines. You are the disposable of our society.
We have made symptoms of poverty – drug use, crime, etc. – into the causes of poverty. They are not; they are the results of poverty. Youth in rich North America are being criminalized. Guess which North American state or province has the highest number of youth per capita in prison. New York? A southern state? Manitoba with all the First Nations youth in jail? Good guesses. The North American state or province that has the highest number of youth per capita in prison is – are you ready – is Ontario! Poverty results in the lack of opportunity and hope, hopelessness and marginalization results in gangs, crime, and violence.
The temple today that we need to clear is Queen’s Park, our Ontario parliament. The temple where we need to boldly declare the truth is in Ottawa, our national government. Jesus would have us say loudly that it is a scandal that we have not ended child poverty, almost two decades after a commitment to do so, that it is a sin that people working full-time cannot both eat and pay the rent. The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer.
We also need to be truth-tellers in our churches. We are so wealthy. And what have we done to seek justice for those on the margins of our society, the disposable of our communities? Sure, we have done little things of compassion, but as Rick Tobias at Yonge Street Mission has said after a life-time of offering compassion to the marginalized on the streets of Toronto, things are getting worse. Compassion is not enough; we need to demand justice from our society for the marginalized, the poor, the homeless.
And this is happening; there is a movement afoot. Many faith-based groups and organizations are coming together to do significant truth-telling to the powers that be, to insist on the end of poverty in our rich country.
Two examples: A week ago, Jane Pritchard, Doug Johnson Hatlem, and I (as Lazarus Rising and MCC) joined 350 other street level workers from across Canada. The gathering was organized by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s National Roundtable on Poverty and Homelessness. Included was a clarion call for evangelicals who walk alongside poor folks “to add to material action a clear, creative, and challenging public voice,” a public voice insisting “that homelessness will be a priority” for Canadian ?policy makers concerned with” justice and mercy”. Then last Monday, the day before the opening of parliament, the full-page declaration was published in the Ottawa Citizen. The Ottawa Manifesto.
Secondly, three days ago I gathered with 100 other religious leaders – Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu – at Queen’s Park to hear again how a significant portion of our society is not benefiting from the wealth we have, and to continue advocating for the marginalized in the corridors of power. ISARC – the Inter-faith Social Assistance Reform Coalition – declares that public policy must play a stronger and more deliberate role in ensuring that all families can share in our province’s prosperity.
What about you? Do we only think about politics — our system of living together, sharing the wealth and taking care of the most vulnerable — when elections roll around? Is the closest we get to “the marginalized” when we drop a loonie in their hat on the street? What are you doing after shouting hosanna?
People of faith are telling the truth of God’s kingdom represented by Jesus entering Jerusalem on a colt. After the hosannas, there is much kingdom work to be done. Clearing the Temple of its injustices, its structures that bind the least of these. Truth-telling in the Temple. Will we join in, or will we just go home after shouting easy hosannas?