Monday, March 25

Waiting for…Righteousness

Matthew 21:12-17

Lord! Give me courage and love to open the door and constrain You to enter, whatever the disguise You come in, even before I fully recognize my guest. Come in! Enter my small life!

– Evelyn Underhill

If the only place our neighbors can experience the body of Christ is during our worship services, we have failed.

– Time Sorens

Jesus would have felt a personal sting with the greed being practiced in the temple because he grew up poor. The Levitical law seems to prefer a proper temple sacrifice, like a lamb or goat, but makes allowances for the poor who can’t afford such a thing – they can instead offer a less costly pigeon or dove (Leviticus 1:10, 14). We know that Jesus’s parents offered a dove (Luke 2:24). Jesus thus likely grew up poor and the only way his family could be seen as right in the Law was through its gracious space made for those in poverty (there is much grace in the Old Testament!). Imagine how he must have felt seeing the apparent price-gouging going on with doves AT the temple. Thankfully, the children present (maybe they were growing up poor just like Jesus did…) get things right. The priests and scribes, who have just been busted for making a mockery of the temple, have the nerve to call these pure and wise children theologically incorrect. It would seem that the religious leaders in their striving to be proper in theology and practice get neither right. Perhaps the lesson for us is that it is at the moment that we think we have God figured out, faith mastered, and religious services dialed in we are actually the least able to be led by Jesus. The children at the temple, with no formal training and no religious pedigree, are the real teachers in this story. Who in our lives will be such a teacher for a church trying to get it “right?”

Danny Steis