"no More Business As Usual"

“No More Business as Usual”

Matthew 21:12-17

This is the first Sunday of Lent.

The word “Lent” comes from the old English word, “lencten," which means “spring.”

And one of the things that many of us do in the Spring is we “Spring Clean.”

We go through the house, look at the clutter, the stuff we no longer use or perhaps never used and either throw it away, give it away or have a yard sale.

We pull out the vacuum cleaner and suck up the dirt and dust.

We open the windows and allow the fresh air to flow in.

It’s a time of new beginnings.

It’s exciting.

It’s anticipatory.

It’s a time when death breaks into NEW LIFE!!!

This has been a long winter.

I’m ready for Spring; how about you?

In our Scripture Passage for this morning, Jesus does some MAJOR SPRING CLEANING!!!

It’s almost time for Passover which is the major Jewish Spring Festival which celebrates the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery.

And thousands upon thousands of Jews would make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate at the Temple because the Temple was the beating heart of Judaism.

It was the center of worship and music, of politics and society.

It was also the place where you would find more animals—dead and alive—than anywhere else in the world.

But towering above all this,

it was the total focal point of the nation and the way of life for the people.

And like so many institutions that are run by human beings, it had gotten off track.

It had lost its way.

It had become corrupt.

The train was running off the tracks!

Once upon a time there was a king who wanted to give his country a new lease on life, so he decided to capture a city that none of his people had lived in before, and make it his capital.

The problem was that the city was up on a high and rocky cliff, and it was easy for the inhabitants of the city to ward off any invaders.

When the people living there saw that the king was coming with his army to invade their city, they were sure they would have no problem warding off the attackers.

They were so sure, as a matter of fact, that they replaced their regular guards with blind people and people with disabilities—people referred to as the lame.

They said, “We’re so sure that our city is so impenetrable that the blind and lame will be able to keep this king’s army out.”

But the king had a better trick.

He knew that the city he wanted to overtake, no matter how strongly it was built on this hill, needed one thing.

And that one thing was water!

So, he found out where the spring of water was that the city used, and decided that this was the way into the city.

So, he sent his army up the water shaft.

And up they went and they took the city.

And it indeed, became their capital!

But the king didn’t forget the blind and the lame people who were put in place to guard the normal way into the city—in order to keep him and his army out.

So, he made this rule: “No blind or lame people are welcome here!”

The king in the story was King David and the city was Jerusalem, and the place where the blind and lame were not welcome was the Temple!

The story is found in 2 Samuel 5:6-10 and 1 Chronicles 11:4-6.

So there was a group of folks who were not allowed in the Temple of God, and there is a list in Leviticus Chapter 21 of other people who were excluded—they were the disfigured and deformed, persons with crippling conditions, huchbacks, dwarfs, eunuchs, anyone with any kind of blemish, and others.

They were not allowed to offer sacrifices.

The religious leaders in Jesus’ day allowed them to enter the outer courtyard of the Temple, but they weren’t really very enthusiastic about this.

In truth, they didn’t want them around at all!

Their presence made the “so-called” normal and descent people uncomfortable.

Their deformities detracted from the scenery.

But Jesus did, with these Temple traditions, what He did with the money-changers’ tables: He turned them upside down!!!

If you have a Bible with you, open it up again to our Gospel Lesson from Matthew 21:12-17.

Let’s read it again.

[Read Matthew 21:12-17 again]

Notice what happens right after Jesus overturns the tables, Jesus quotes Jeremiah Chapter 7:11, “My house will be a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves.”

And then, and then, the people who had been kept out of the Temple started pouring in: They are the blind and the lame.