Overturned Tables

Matthew 21:1-11

April 9, 2017 (Palm Sunday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

It is a scene that is both simple and profound. It’s also a scene we watch every year, and it’s easy to begin to think we know everything we need to know about how it comes out and what it means. Sort of like that movie your family watches every year, and you can all repeat the words line for line: you know how it comes out, and yet you still watch it. We sort of approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week that way. Here we go again. Jesus is headed down the hillside, and we know that by Friday he’ll be hanging on a cross, but even that doesn’t bother us or affect us all that much because we already know that by Sunday he’ll be risen. So here we go into Holy Week again, one more time. Because we’re so familiar with it, it’s easy to miss the wonder of this story. Yes, Jesus enters Jerusalem on this day and he knows he has come here to die. But this week is about more than a donkey ride, a last supper and a horrible death, because Jesus, along the way, is about to upset everyone he comes in contact with. And if he doesn’t upset something in our lives during this week, it just might be that we’re not paying attention.

So, it’s Sunday, and Jesus has probably been in Bethany on the other side of the Mount of Olives since at least Friday. He’s spent the Sabbath rest there (cf. John 12:1), and on Sunday morning of the week before the Passover celebration, he makes arrangements to enter the city. Other times he has come in secret, but this time, he intends to make a statement. He sends two disciples into the city to arrange his transportation, and while we often read this as “Jesus the Clairvoyant,” it’s just as likely he had this set up ahead of time (Card, Matthew: The Gospel of Identity, pg. 184). He intends to act out a parable, a living lesson, as he enters the city on this day (Carson, “Matthew,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 437). The rabbis had taught that the Messiah, when he came, would enter Jerusalem either on a white horse or on a donkey. If he came on a horse, it was said, he would be set on conquest and coming in judgment. (In Revelation 19:11, the returning triumphant Jesus is pictured as coming on a white horse.) But if he came on a donkey, he was coming in peace. Matthew even quotes some of the Old Testament prophets—Isaiah and Zechariah—to remind people that they had said long ago the promised one would come on a donkey, in peace. So Jesus arranges for the disciples to get a donkey and her colt and bring them to him for the so-called triumphal entry.

And so Jesus rides into the city proclaiming peace. He has not come to judge the people; he has come to save them, to rescue them, to pass judgment on their sin to be sure, but to defeat it by giving his life. And I have to wonder if there were at least some in the crowd who got it. Of course, we’re not really sure how big a crowd was there. The movies always show it as rather large, but it wasn’t large enough to attract the attention of the Roman authorities. There’s no account of soldiers being sent to control the crowd or of the Romans being overly concerned. To them, it probably looked like just another Passover pilgrimage. Of course, this pilgrimage had Jesus in the middle of it. He’s riding on a colt with its mother walking alongside to calm it, while some people wave palm branches, and others shout the traditional words from the psalms: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” (21:9).

But it’s too much to think that the whole city is on board with Jesus. In fact, we’re told at the end of this passage that the city is asking, “Who is this?” It’s not that they didn’t know his name, or where he came from. Matthew really tells us what’s at the heart of that question when he says the city was “stirred.” The word literally means “agitated” or “trembling.” Now, the last time we read about the city being upset like that is at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, when the Wise Men come looking for the “king of the Jews” (2:3). The city was disturbed when Jesus was born, when the status quo was threatened. Now, as he enters into this last week of his life, the city is “agitated.” It’s disturbed. Once again, he’s threatening to upset things, to overturn the way things are. King Herod tried to kill him the last time the city was upset. The Jewish leaders will succeed in doing just that this time (cf. Card 185). So let’s not assume everyone is on the same page with Jesus. There are people celebrating. There are folks who assume he is coming to town to throw out the Romans, to take over power. There are lots of people who are waiting along that route for Jesus to do what they want him to do, what they hope he came to do.

And isn’t that the way we often approach Jesus? We want Jesus to do for us what we want. We come to worship or we open our Bibles and we want Jesus to be who we think we is, to do what we think he ought to do in our life. Consider how people turn to God in droves when there is a crisis, whether that’s a crisis in our personal lives, or a national crisis. Suddenly, people show up at church, or Congress gathers on the steps of the Capitol to sing, “God Bless America,” but the rest of time we want nothing to do with Jesus. In times of crisis, we want Jesus to ride into town and be the sort of king we want him to be, to do what we want him to do. Give us peace, pay our bills, heal my child, give me a job, help! Author Chuck Gutenson describes it this way: “There's the Prosperity Jesus, the Right Wing Jesus, the Left Wing Jesus, the Libertarian Jesus, the Capitalist Jesus, the Socialist Jesus, the Communist Jesus, and untold others. What do they all have in common? There are our creation of a Jesus made in our image.” But Jesus refuses to stay molded into the image we make of him.

Most of our disappointment with Jesus stems from the fact that he refuses to be bound by our agendas. He refuses to do things the way we think they ought to be done. He insists that we come along with him and bend our plans to his agenda rather than the other way around. And so people walk away, accusing Jesus of being unfaithful. But who is really the unfaithful one in that scenario? Why do we think we have the right to dictate to the Lord of life how things ought to go? You see, the people here in this crowd want Jesus to come and rescue them from evil and oppression, and Jesus will do that, but it doesn’t involve overthrowing the Roman Empire like they thought it should. Jesus’ mission is much deeper. He’s come to rescue them—and us—from evil in all its depth, not just on the surface. He doesn’t come to give us what we think we want, as if he were a cosmic vending machine. He comes to give us what we need (cf. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part Two, pg. 68).

And there are times when he has to help us see him as he really is, rather than as we wish he were. That’s much of what Jesus spends the first part of this week doing. He begins in the Temple courts. Either later on Sunday or on Monday morning, Jesus goes into this holy place. Now, you’ve got to remember that the Temple, for the Jewish people, was not just a worship center. It was the center of life. To them, this was the place where God lived, where God dwelt on Earth. They came here to offer sacrifices, to give their offerings, to renew their relationship with God. And there were, like it or not, various levels of Temple participation. The most inner court was the Court of the Israelites, where Jewish men could go. Next out was the court of the women, where Jewish women could worship. Still today, in Israel, at their most sacred site, the Western Wall, the remnants of the first-century Temple, women and men are divided in their space for prayer. Women have a much smaller area, and men have not only an outdoor place, but an indoor place where study of the Scriptures happens. In Jesus’ day, though, there was one more court, the outermost court, called the Court of the Gentiles. This is where people like you and me could worship—people who were not Jewish by birth but wanted to worship the God of Israel. And this is where Jesus finds the marketplace. He’s found it here before; this is the second time, according to the Gospels, he does what he does here (cf. John 2:13-17). The first happened near the beginning of his ministry, and this second time happens at the end. Jesus comes in, finds this place of prayer full of vendors and money changers, and it makes him angry. Can you picture Jesus angry? I had a friend once who couldn’t, who wouldn’t accept that Jesus is responding out of anger here. But I can’t picture Jesus doing what he does kindly. Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers and the benches of those who were selling doves for the sacrifice. Jesus is angry because the place of prayer for the Gentiles has been made into a market, and beyond that, it’s a market that’s taking advantage of the poor. So he clears it out and reminds them, “My house will be called a house of prayer” (21:12-14).

Can you imagine the confusion and chaos Jesus has created? But he goes even further. What he does next is even more daring. Matthew says, “The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them” (21:14). What’s so strange about that? I mean Jesus was always healing those sorts of people. Yes, he was, but not here. The blind and the lame were not allowed, by the religious leaders’ rules, to be in or near the Temple. They were “imperfect,” and it was the common practice that anything or anyone imperfect was excluded from the Temple, because you could only offer to God that which was perfect or whole (cf. Card 186). And yet, Jesus lets in the blind and the lame, and the children, and all the ones the religious leaders have excluded. Jesus welcomes the ones who have never been able to worship or pray in this place of worship. This is not a story about whether or not we should sell things in church, though that’s often the way we take it. This is a story of the savior turning the tables over in our lives, welcoming the outcast and the stranger and the one who isn’t yet old enough to quite understand it all. This is Jesus upsetting the way things have always been and establishing a new reality—which ought to cause us to ask who we exclude. Who are the “blind and lame” in our own world, the people we overlook or ignore or don’t think ought to be included in the kingdom of God? Who are the “second-class citizens”? Now, I’m not talking about overlooking or condoning sin in the name of “welcome.” That’s not what this passage is about. It is about Jesus welcoming anyone who wants to come and allowing them the opportunity to follow him. Jesus overturns the tables and welcomes those who were once excluded. For us, following Jesus on the road to the cross might cause us to overturn some tables and upset some modern Sadducees—they were the ones who were in control of the Temple, but by the end of this day, they were upset with Jesus. Something has to be done.

A bit later in the week, we’re told, two other groups who often aren’t seen together try to trap Jesus. The Pharisees were the precursors to modern-day rabbis. They were largely laypeople who taught the Scriptures and urged people to follow the Law of Moses closely. They were probably closer to Jesus in their doctrine than any other group of that time, but they were also the group Jesus fought with the most. Jesus’ argument with the Pharisees had little to do with what they believed; it made more to do with the legalistic ways they practiced their faith. But their partners here are the Herodians, a group that was very pro-Rome. As their name suggests, they were friends or followers of Herod, the Roman-appointed king of the Jews, and so it’s strange to see them cooperating with a group of Pharisees who were decidedly anti-Rome. The only thing that could have brought these two groups together is their mutual hatred of Jesus. And so, one day, they approach Jesus and attempt at first to butter him up: “Teacher,” they say, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth” (22:16). It’s flattery that’s meant to disarm or soften what comes next, I imagine Jesus at this point is like, “Just get on with it, and leave out the flattery.” But he listens, and eventually they get around to their question, a question we all have especially with tax day about a week away: “Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?” (22:17).

Sometimes we hear this passage as an endorsement for paying taxes, but if you notice, Jesus doesn’t really answer the question. He doesn’t tell us to pay taxes or not to pay taxes. Of course, there are other places in the New Testament where we are told to obey the government, to pay what we owe, but that’s not what happens here. Instead, Jesus calls them on their deceit by asking them for a Roman coin. The irony, of course, is that the Pharisees shouldn’t even be carrying such a coin if they are so opposed to the Roman government; Israel had its own coinage that you used for paying the Temple tax. Yet they seem to have no trouble giving him one; someone has a Roman coin right in his pocket! So Jesus looks at it, and he sees two things on that coin: a portrait and an inscription. The portrait would have been of Tiberius, the reigning emperor. That was offensive to Jews because they didn’t believe in images of human beings. But even more offensive was the inscription: “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus.” The coin proclaimed Caesar as the son of a god, as divine. Caesar is not claiming that the coin belongs to him; Caesar is claiming that worship belongs to him. When Jesus says, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (22:21), he’s not talking about taxes. He’s actually drawing a line in the sand. Caesar is demanding worship and does not deserve it. Only God deserves worship. What’s on the line here is who your first allegiance is, who your worship is given to. And with that statement, he’s upset the Herodians and the Pharisees alike, because he has supported neither one of their causes—and he has escaped their trap. Jesus has overturned the tables of their well-ordered lives, and they are left, as Matthew says, “amazed” (22:22; Card 197).

So, Jesus has alienated the Sadducees, the Pharisees and the Herodians so far this week. Who’s left? Oh, yes, there are those guys who have been following him around for three years, the disciples, the ones who on Thursday night will share a Last Supper with him. But they also shared a next-to-last Supper with him that Matthew tells us about in chapter 26. Jesus is back in Bethany, but this night he’s at the home of another friend, Simon the Leper. Now, we have to assume this is Simon the used-to-be leper, otherwise they wouldn’t want to be around him because of the contagious nature of the disease. Jesus was probably the one who healed Simon, and so Simon is most likely throwing this dinner in appreciation. Jesus and the disciples are all there, and during the meal, a woman comes in “with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume” (26:7). We have to get the picture a bit because Matthew says Jesus is reclining at the table, which means this is somewhat of a formal meal, and the participants are reclining at the three-sided table called a triclinium, with their feet out behind them. This means if the woman is going to anoint Jesus’ head, she has to come all the way into the room, into the center, into full view of everyone there, and pour this very expensive oil on his head. It runs down his head and his beard, probably dripping onto the table and the pillows, much like the Old Testament describes the anointing of a priest for service. Some scholars estimate this perfume may have been worth somewhere around twelve thousand dollars (Card 225). And in a moment, it’s all poured out onto Jesus’ head.

I know in our house how just a little bit of perfume that Rachel squirts on will fill the room. Imagine how this rich, expensive aroma would fill the house and linger for a long time, how twelve thousand dollars’ worth of perfume would get into every corner and nook and cranny of the room. Now the disciples are upset. It’s a waste, they say. She could have sold that perfume and done a lot of good. A lot of good could have been done with twelve thousand dollars. The poor could have been helped with that money. Yet, as they’re grumbling around the table, Jesus becomes very protective of the young woman. “She has done a beautiful thing to me,” he says. “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me…She did it to prepare me for burial” (26:10-12). And it’s this act, the Gospels tell us, that causes Judas to make up his mind. In his mind, Judas crosses a line at this moment. After this, he goes to the religious leaders and agrees to hand Jesus over to them. He agrees to betray Jesus, and the price they agree on is thirty pieces of silver. In modern money, that’s about five thousand dollars. It’s the price of a slave in the Old Testament, making you wonder if Judas agreed to this amount thinking that if Jesus was going to act like a slave, he would sell him as one. But the even stronger contrast here is between the woman and Judas. The woman extravagantly gives up twelve thousand dollars, while Judas makes a five thousand dollar profit (Card 226). What is Jesus’ life worth? It depends on where you sit, and it depends, it seems, on how much he has overturned the tables in your life.

You see, Jesus’ act of turning over tables didn’t stop early in the week when he left the Temple. All week, he did that in people’s lives. Things they thought were settled, ideas and notions they believed they could count on, depend on—Jesus turned all of those things upside down. We know that for the religious and political leaders, Jesus became a target. For Judas, he became—what? An opportunity? An obstacle? A friend Judas believed he needed to push to become what he thought Jesus ought to be? Whatever was going through Judas’ mind, we know he sold Jesus out. And what about the rest of the disciples, the last friends it seems Jesus had? Well, most of the disciples don’t say too much, but if we jump a bit further ahead in the week, we learn about Peter. After Jesus’ arrest, John and Peter follow him into the courtyard of the high priest’s house, where he is on trial for his life. John seems to know people there, but others are trying to figure out who Peter is, and why he’s there. Three different times, someone identifies Peter as having been with Jesus, and each and every time, Peter says, “I don’t know the man.” We usually criticize or vilify Peter for saying that. He’s spent three years with Jesus; how could he deny him now? But I think we’re too hard on him. After all he’s experienced in this last week, after all the ways he’s seen Jesus intentionally upset tables and anger people, it may very well be the truth that Peter has no idea who Jesus is anymore. He thought he did. He alone, out of all the disciples, was bold enough to say that Jesus was the messiah, the savior, the Son of God (Matthew 16:16). But, as I mentioned last week, the Messiah was not supposed to serve, and Jesus had just washed their feet that night. The Messiah was also not supposed to surrender, and yet Peter watched as Jesus allowed himself to be taken away in chains. And most of all, the Messiah was not supposed to die. And in the darkness of that courtyard, it was evident Jesus had no hope of escaping death. I don’t think Peter was lying in those dim morning hours before the rooster crowed. When he said, “I don’t know the man,” I think Peter was telling the truth. Everything he thought he knew about Jesus has been overturned. Nothing is certain anymore because Jesus is not who Peter thought he was.

And that brings us back to the scene at the beginning of the week, on that first Palm Sunday when the people were crying out “Hosanna!” and demanding that Jesus be who they say he will be. King? Messiah? Religious figure? Teacher? He may indeed be all of these things, but he will be them on his own terms. How often do we insist Jesus be who we say he will be? If we look carefully, we can find our own faces in that Palm Sunday crowd. Hosanna—Jesus, I want you to provide me comfort, to make sure that I never suffer. Hosanna—Jesus, I need you to give me assurance of going to heaven. Hosanna—Jesus, I need you to fix that other person. Hosanna—Jesus, I need you to answer this prayer request the way I think it ought to be answered. Hosanna—Jesus, I need more money! Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna! And if you don’t give me what I want, Jesus, I’ll be among the crowd shouting, “Crucify!” by the end of the week. Do what we want, Jesus, or we’ll walk away. Come through for us, Jesus, on our terms, or we’ll become angry. Do what I say, Jesus, be my personal, private savior. That’s what the world says I deserve, anyway. Do what I say, Jesus.

But Jesus never works that way. He will not be controlled. When Jesus comes into our lives, he overturns the tables. He upsets the market. He throws out the ways of the world and calls us to a new, radical, Christ-like life. Jesus’ ways and the world’s ways cannot coexist in our lives. Growth in Christ, becoming a disciple, is a matter of giving him more and more space, room, in our lives. As we pray in our Wesleyan Covenant Prayer, the prayer that we share each year around New Year’s, “Christ will be all in all, or he will be nothing” (UM BOW 292). He enters the city on Palm Sunday just as he enters our lives when we invite him in. He comes to be king over all, not just over an earthly kingdom. An earthly kingdom is far too small a vision. Jesus comes to be king over a kingdom that is coming, a kingdom of righteousness and peace, a kingdom that will last forever, a kingdom that he desperately wants you to be part of. Not “part way in.” All in.

All throughout Lent, we’ve been asking the question, “Who is this man?” It’s a nice academic question, and scholars throughout the ages have wrestled with it. Along the way this season, in sermons and in LifeGroups, we’ve looked at the various ways Jesus’ life and his followers have made a difference in history and culture. We’ve talked about how Jesus brought a new way of living to the world, and how he taught us about forgiveness and reconciliation and welcoming all people and healing and hope. And all of that is true, wonderfully true, but the question remains: who is this man? This week, of all weeks, forces us into a place where we have to answer that question on a personal level: who is this man to me, to you? If all we do is answer the question by saying that Jesus is an historical oddity, or even a profound historical influence, we’ve not taken the path the Gospel writers intend us to take. These books are not biographies. They are witnesses, testimonies, intended to help us not just know more about Jesus, but to know Jesus. They are meant to move us from the crowd shouting, “Hosanna,” to being one of the people whose tables Jesus upsets, whose life Jesus rearranges, because when he does that, our lives begin to better match what God the Father intended for us from the beginning. So let me ask again: who is this man, for you, for me? As we head into Holy Week, will you walk with Jesus to the cross or are you content to stay behind in the Palm Sunday crowd, disappointed that he’s not who you want him to be?

Listen again to these words from the Covenant Prayer: “Christ will be the savior of none but his servants. He is the source of all salvation to those who obey. Christ will have no servants except by consent; Christ will not accept anything but full consent to all that he requires. Christ will be all in all, or he will be nothing” (BOW 292). Who is this man, to you?

In a moment we’re going to pray, and some of you might want to come to the steps to pray. For those of you who remain in your seats this morning, I’m going to ask you to place your hands, palms up, in your lap, in a posture of being open to whatever God might have for you or might say to you. And as we all pray, let’s allow the Spirit of God to search our hearts and minds. Who is Jesus to you? As we enter this Holy Week, my prayer is that he will become more Lord and Savior and all to you. Let’s pray.