Holy Week, Day 2: On Resisting De-Sacralization

From the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke, we know that Jesus cleansed the temple near the beginning of Holy Week, soon after His triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  The accounts are simple, but all bear the same pattern.  First, Jesus cleanses the temple; second, he performs healings in the temple, and teaches in the temple; third, Pharisees are extremely unhappy about all of this.  Each phase has its own profound lessons.

To start with the cleansing itself.  Matthew 21:12 tells us that Jesus went into the ‘temple of God’, and ‘cast out all them that bought and sold in the temple’ and ‘overthrew the tables of the moneychangers’.  Without going into detail of the corruptions of Jewish worship, the essential idea here is that what should have been a holy and sacred place had turned into a place of financial extortion. It’s an example of people using what should be sacred for everyone as an opportunity to benefit themselves, personally.  So, it’s an act of de-sacralization – that is, desecration.  You are making what is holy into something that is no longer holy. 

And, there are two sides to this story:  there is Jesus standing up for the holy, for the right, for the good, demanding that the sacred remain sacred.  And, there is the warning, at least to my mind, that any one of us could get ‘caught up’ in this kind of de-sacralizing the sacred if we are not mindful and careful about the role of the sacred in our lives.  One thing I have come to understand more deeply over the past few years is the importance of self-reflection in Christianity.  It’s found in something like the phrase ‘Lord, is it I?’ Am I the one that’s wrong here?  Am I the one that needs to change?  Am I losing the sense of the sacred in my life?

‘My house is a house of prayer, but you have made it into a den of thieves’ is repeated in all three accounts.  I love the emphasis on a ‘house of prayer’.  The Greek word for house is oikos.  The temple is Heavenly Father’s oikos, and it is an oikos of prayer.  I have often thought about this.  What about my house, my oikos?  Is it a house of prayer?  Oikos can also mean just a ‘place of habitation’.   So, it’s this idea that the space where you live, what you inhabit, needs to be a space of prayer.  It is a house of communication, communication with the divine.  We need daily communication with the divine, and our homes is the place to get that communication.  Does that make them sacred?  It must.  So, intricately connected to the idea of making a space for prayer, is also the idea of maintaining the ‘sacred’ in our lives – that is, resisting the de-sacralization.

After the cleansing of the temple, we move to the next phase in the story:  Jesus then heals the lame and the blind.  The account in Matthew reads that Jesus did ‘wonderful’ things in the temple which made the children there shout ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’ – so there are more Hosanna shouts on this day, the day after Palm Sunday.  And there is also mention of Jesus teaching in the temple after the cleansing, with people awed at what they are hearing.  So, after the cleansing, there is healing, there is enlightenment, there is joy.  And here is the lesson for us:  in order to have these kinds of blessings, we must go through a kind of cleansing – we must self-reflect, self-examine, humble ourselves, come to God in prayer, ask for forgiveness, and so forth.  And again, there are two sides here:  this cleansing is necessary to grasp these ‘good things’, these signs of flourishing; on the flip side, we can be confident that we will grasp these blessings and flourish in the gospel when we cleanse ourselves of the bad in our lives, our tendency to ignore the sacred, our hypocrisy, and so forth.

The third phase is of the story is the reaction of the Pharisees.  Jesus threatens their power and their position, and they want to destroy Him.  Instead of being happy at the miracles that Jesus is performing in the temple and the enlightenment that Jesus is imparting, they want to shut Him down.  Tragically, they want to stop other people from enjoying the blessings that come through observing and maintaining the sacred spaces in their lives.  The message continually throughout the New Testament is that we should expect there to be opposition, yes; but we are to ‘be of good cheer’, because Jesus has ‘overcome the world’.