Note: It’s Holy Week (the week between Palm Sunday and Easter) during which the church commemorates the Lord Jesus Christ’s last days, His crucifixion, and His resurrection. It is an incredibly significant time in the life of the church, so if you don’t have one, this week would be a great time to find one. Churches get tons of new people around Easter, so don’t feel awkward. If you need help finding a church, give me a shout.
Consider, as the week goes on, what is happening in the life of Jesus Christ as he draws closer and closer to His death, burial, and resurrection, the most significant event in the history of mankind. Remember, as He is fully God and fully man, Christ is fully aware of the horror and agony to come just a few short days after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We’ll go a bit off script this week and dive into the traditional Holy Week readings associated with each day.
Holy Monday - Events
Jesus curses the fig tree
Jesus clears the temple of corrupt moneychangers
Why did Jesus curse the fig tree?
Much like the fig tree that looked fruitful and appealing from a distance but upon closer inspection revealed no fruit, Jerusalem maintained an appearance of godliness and an external piety that proved only to be counterfeit religiosity, devoid of Christian love, joy, peace, or self-denial. Jesus pronounced divine judgment on the tree, indicating what lies in store for all trees that fail to bear good fruit (Matthew 7:19). No amount of leaves, or external religion, can hide the true state of our hearts from the eyes of Him who sees all things. Let us not be barren, fruitless, unrepentant hypocrites, or white-washed tombs, but let us seek to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in union with Christ. We will see the fig tree again tomorrow, on Holy Tuesday.
Why did Jesus clear the temple and drive out the moneychangers? Did he really flip their tables?
It’s difficult for us to understand today, especially those of us who meet in strip malls and abandoned Walmart warehouses, but the temple was given to Israel by God to be a sacred place of worship, repentance, and prayer. In other places in Scripture, men were struck dead for failing to obey God’s commands for proper worship and administration of the ceremonies and sacrifices that occurred within the temple. There were those who sought to hide their unethical business dealings under the guise of “true religion” in the temple, and who often exploited the poor, charging exorbitant interest to those who were desperate for aid. Jesus Christ clearly saw through their act; they had turned the house of the Lord into a “den of robbers,” a phrase straight out of Jeremiah 7:8-11:
Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord.
The temple leaders continued carrying out their religious duties, going through the motions as prescribed, meanwhile they extorted and oppressed the poor, and stole what did not belong to them.
God’s purpose for what He makes, from the family, to marriage, to the church, even to life itself, is the only one that matters. Human perversion and distortion of the good and beautiful things God has made will always be met with similar divine judgment and righteous anger.
The Lord’s flipping of tables and chasing the moneychangers out of His house is not a license to use His righteous anger as a rubber stamp of absolution every time we want to defend our own outrage. This story is often misconstrued and misapplied to justify our own less righteous anger, saying that while we were in fact short-tempered and lacked self control, Jesus flipped tables in the temple! Jesus was acting in defense of the holiness of God against the hypocritical temple leaders; chances are, our own reasons for our angry outbursts are far less holy.
But remember this Jesus when the He Gets Us ads tell you that the Lord is a tolerant, spineless hippie who just wants everyone to believe in themselves and be happy, more like a boyfriend than a King. The true Christ, before whom every knee will bow and tongue confess, has no tolerance for false religion or hypocrisy.
Go In Strength
There really is one major question that pervades Holy Week, and it’s this: who is Jesus Christ to you?
Is He the Savior of sinners, or just another good “moral teacher?” Is He the eternal God by whom all things were created, or is He just another man with some catchy ideas? How we answer this question is of eternal importance. Here’s Lewis:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
Let us say boldly with Simon Peter, “you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
More specific to Holy Monday, who are you to Him?
Are you the fig tree, that looks beautiful from afar, but which bears no fruit? Pray that the Lord would send His Spirit to you, that you might bear fruit as a clear, undeniable sign of your union with Christ.
Or are you the moneychanger in the temple? Do you go through the motions every week, know all the religious songs and sayings, participate in all the temple ceremonies, sacrifices, and fasts, but deep down in your soul, you lack Christian love, self-denial, charity, peace, and compassion for your neighbor? Is your religion merely a beautiful external cover for a dead heart? You are not alone. Outside of Christ, we all have dead hearts. But He promises to give us a new one:
And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Look to Jesus this Holy Week, and consider the love it takes to leave the glories of heaven, to take the form of a man, and to suffer and die at the hands of your very own creation to rescue fallen men from misery, and to turn God’s enemies into His sons.
These things are worth meditating on this week and every week.
In the words of Paul,
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
And in the words of J. Gresham Machen in his final telegram before his death,
I’m so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it.
May your Holy Week be a time of repentance, faith, meditation, and prayer.
See you tomorrow.
In Christ,
LC
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Our Church just wrapped up our "Jesus is..." series and my pastor did a fantastic job of breaking down the various aspects of Jesus' ministry and divinity ending it on Palm Sunday. There is no doubt, there shouldn't be at least, that Christ is King. Of all creation, of our hearts, our souls. Fully Man, Fully Divine, crucified and raised as pardon and breakage from our sins. Great work brother. May God continue to Bless you.