Message 03-16-08

Series:            Lectionary [Palm Sunday]

Scripture:            Matthew 21:1-11

Title:                                        Release the Captives

We celebrate the day when Jesus rode into the temple of Jerusalem not because it was such a grand event but because it stands in such a contrast to the end of the week. Rumors, stories, personal accounts of the work and words of Jesus had spread throughout the country and as Jesus comes to the Passover celebration in the capital the word is out that he’s here. He is a celebrity. A crowd gathers, people shout and sing and all the people are talking about who this is. That’s the way the week starts, but by the week’s end he is being led out of the city carrying a cross.

It is not unbelievable. It is just sad that it went this way and if the Bible is true, it had to go this way. There was no way around Jesus dying.

I have a good friend who is really bothered by Jesus’ dying and Jesus being referred to as a sacrifice. The problem stems from the issue of Jesus being sacrificed to somehow appease an angry God. I have the same problem. My friend’s perspective includes getting a little weak on the Bible and how it expresses itself. He slides toward the idea that it was a book that was written in a certain time by a certain people and they had certain ideas that we don’t really have to accept. That’s sort of how he looks at it and that helps him accept what he reads.

I don’t accept it that way and that, of course, is the source of conversations between us. I take the Bible as true, completely true and that I am called to come to understand it. I’m the one who has to get weak on my own assumptions and bend my will to come to terms with how it is presented in the book. I need to give myself over, humble myself and seek to understand how what it says could possibly be the way it is, the way reality actually works.

So I want to share that perspective with you today.

We start with this entry into Jerusalem. Jesus sends these two friends, students or apprentices, of his into a village to obtain a couple of animals that he knows will be there. But here’s the significant moment for me – he tells them to untie these beasts and to bring them to him because he has need of them. That is the core of this story to me. He tells them to untie the beasts and bring them to him because he has need of them.

Now Matthew took this as significant too, but he thought it was important because it fulfilled Scripture. Matthew writes his gospel to share the Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, so everything Jesus does is connected back to a prophecy.

But then Jesus starts down this valley to cross over from the Mount of Olives into the city of Jerusalem. His Disciples start to celebrate him. The people hear that it’s Jesus and they’ve heard the stories and they start to shout welcoming him. More than anything else they express their hope. “I hope this is the one. I hope this is the one who will make a difference.”

Jesus comes into the city and the whole city is stirred. Do you recognize what’s going on here? Jesus is untying the city. He’s setting it free to speculate, to hope. Why? He’s doing this because God has this use for Jerusalem, for the people of Israel.

Listen to what God tells the people of Israel about what they are supposed to be doing. In the book of Isaiah he says:

 6 "I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness;
       I will take hold of your hand.
       I will keep you and will make you
       to be a covenant for the people
       and a light for the Gentiles,

 7 to open eyes that are blind,
       to free captives from prison
       and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.

The word is out – the prophet of Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth has come. People are wondering, people are hoping. Is this going to be “a new boss, same as the old boss” or this is going to be one we can really trust. When people begin to hope they begin to move. The whole city is stirred.

This city is about 100,000 people on regular days. It’s a big, thriving place, but during the times of celebration it could swell up to twice that number or more. It is also in a time when there is a movement of discontent. People have been living with the Roman occupation for decades. The leader the Romans put into place, Herod the Great, had died some 30 or so years before and his iron grip on the country was never replaced.

The Romans had tried to place their own stronger hold on the country to squelch small rebellions that were springing up. Some 6-8 years before this a new governor had tried to place flags with images of Caesar around the temple area, not in the temple but around there. A group of Jewish leaders had gone to him to complain. He called out the guards, threatening to have them killed if they didn’t accept his decision. In an amazing move they bared their throats, saying they’d rather die than live to see this desecration of God’s temple. The governor, Pontius Pilate, relented. He didn’t kill the protestors and he removed the flags.

The Jews were not going to accept images of people, of any kind in or around the temple of God. They were telling the world that God was stronger even than Rome. “Rome”, in the guise of Pontius Pilate, relented because of practicality. They didn’t want to deal with an uprising and they knew that they were stronger than this little Temple. So they let the people have their way within the boundaries of the Temple. The authorities of the temple made sure that any money that came into the temple areas was exchanged from coins with Caesar’s picture to shekels to coins with no pictures. Money changers were brought in to help with the exchange.

People from the rest of the country would sell their produce and bring the money to the temple and need to buy animals for the sacrifice. So farmers selling animals were brought into the Temple area. Convenience was the idea. Jesus comes into the Temple courts and comes upon the money changers and the people selling the animals. Jesus comes in and drives out all of it. We can suggest that the people were scamming, charging too much, and that the priests were making money of their own off of it. But what we see clearly is what Jesus did?

You probably have heard that phrase that comes with the initials WWJD – What would Jesus do? This is an example of the choice of Jesus. He chooses inconvenience. He chooses to overturn the tables and benches. He unties the people from their greed and convenience. Why? He needs them to get back into a clear relationship with God. He needs them to create an atmosphere where people who enter the Temple feel like they are coming into God’s presence. Instead, it feels like they’re coming to a marketplace. They’re not coming out of the world and into a clearer communication with God. They’re just back into the old thing, commerce and feeling like they’ve been cheated.

Jesus is untying them and telling them that God has need of them.

The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. Why? Because Jesus would untie them, set them free and give them purpose in living out lives for God, lives that showed that God cared.

The priests and teachers see what’s going on and hear the children shouting their praise of Jesus and they tie themselves down tighter. “Do you hear what these children are saying?”

“Yes”

And he sends them back into the scriptures that they studied and proclaimed. Why? He sent them back into Scripture to untie them, to set them free. Jesus unties them from their intellectual and spiritual binding, so they could be used by God to bring light to the people, to the Gentiles. At least, he tries to untie them and set them free so that they could be used by God. The leaders of Jerusalem at that time were in tight with the Romans. They were political pawns at best and in outright collusion at worst. And Jesus tries to untie them.

Why would Jesus do this? Because that’s what he was sent to do. Do you remember the mission statement of Jesus? It also comes out of the book of Isaiah. It reads:

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,

because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,

to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor

 

Jesus came to untie, to release and to bring people back into relationship with God so that they could be used by God.

I think this is the key to the story, but also to the atonement. I think this is the key to Good Friday. Jesus died to free us from all that binds us down, from the sin that so easily entangles us and to let us move into life as true human beings. It is important to know what Scripture says, but it is more important to know what it reveals to us about what God does.

We use words like “sacrifice” and they are hard for us to get our heads around because we aren’t living in a sacrificial system. We aren’t as close to life and death and these people were on a daily basis. This was a physical example of the spiritual reality. Something dies with sin. A core piece of ourselves dies as we sin. When you cheat – in any way – even if no one finds out, some piece of you dies and you know it. You can feel it. When people can’t feel it we say there’s something wrong with them. When you hurt someone else something dies within you. You know it. You can feel it. You can feel it when a relationship breaks apart. You can feel it when your eyes start to lead your heart into areas it should go. You can feel it when you negate someone’s worth. If you don’t feel it, human beings say there’s something wrong inside you.

Instead of allowing us to die or to live forever with that wrongness within us Jesus comes to untie us, to set us free so that we can be of use again, so we can move back into relationship with God. So God can open the world to us once more and give us a place of purpose in the scheme of things, of life.

A life was required because death was inevitable. Death is a real thing, probably the realest thing in our existence, but God said that he was more real than death.