Lent 40

And so we move to the readings for Holy Week here.  As strongly as I can, I urge you to spend time every day this week reading this story and reminding your heart of what was given on the cross. All four or five of you reading, be part of the many who re-walk Jesus' walk from this morning's triumphal entry to Friday's tortuous walk to Golgotha and the many steps between. It is all mystery and I do not understand most of it, and if I think too long, I get too cynical and modern and clever to believe it. But if these last 40 days have shown me anything, it is that God, from the beginning of the story we have, prepared the world for this week and told them and showed and loved them and warned them that Jesus would come and be with us, and in his With Us would change everything.

On this Palm Sunday, Jesus enters the temple and chases out all the people who had wrecked it with their self-interested greed to make room for the blind and the lame and children. He healed people and listened to children and infants from whom praise had been ordained.

May I know my blindness and lack of strength, better than I know my own self-interested greed.

Matthew 21:12-17

New International Version (NIV)

Jesus at the Temple

¹² Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. ¹³ “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’^[a] but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’^[b]”
¹⁴ The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. ¹⁵ But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple courts, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant.
¹⁶ “Do you hear what these children are saying?” they asked him.
“Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read,

“‘From the lips of children and infants
    you, Lord, have called forth your praise’^[c]?”

¹⁷ And he left them and went out of the city to Bethany, where he spent the night.