Mondays are hard. I’m not always on my best form at the start of the work week. I don’t like waking up after a long restful weekend. And if I’ve preached that Sunday, I’m even more exhausted. I understand now why most pastors take Mondays off. I often oversleep which means I don’t have enough time for breakfast and it makes me even more irritated by traffic when they don’t get out of my way as I’m rushing into the office. Mondays are hard.
The day after Jesus’ triumphal entry was pretty rough. He’s hungry and notices a fig tree, but when He walks over to it there is no fruit. After cursing the tree He goes into the temple and just flips out on everybody selling sacrifices and exchanging money. To His disciples, they probably could have written this all off as just another manic Monday. But Jesus isn’t just having a bad day. He’s not simply losing His cool. These two stories give us a pretty clear picture of how God sees the severity of our sin and the sanctity of our worship.
This isn’t the first time that Jesus has been upset in the temple. The Gospel according to John shows Jesus cleansing the temple during the first year of His public ministry. Many scholars suggest that Jesus would have likely expressed His dissatisfaction with the temple worship every passover season.
But what is He so upset over? There were a lot of problems in the worship in the Temple. The priests were skimming from the finances and the merchants were profiting off of the sale of animal sacrifices. But what was really wrong was how worship had become man centered and lost its mission focus.
Jesus declares in His rage, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” The purpose of temple worship was twofold. They were to come to do business with God and the elements of their worship were to draw the attention of unbelievers to see the goodness of God. Yet, the worship taking place in the temple looked no different than what was happening around the world in pagan temples. They were paying tributes to God out of duty and to gain favor. They were not interested in orienting their entire lives with God as their master.
When Jesus curses the fig tree and cleanses the temple, He reveals something at the core of who we are as individuals. We are prone to offer empty worship. We think our worship entitles us to certain privileges. We take Christ off the throne of our hearts and place ourselves there instead. And then we present a gospel to the world that our righteousness is something we have earned and we dare not cross the street to win our neighbors to Christ, but they are more than welcome to come up to us and ask for our help.
This is not the gospel that Christ came to offer. He came to make us right with God and the only way He could do that was to offer His own life as a substitutionary atonement so that we can have His righteousness bestowed on our account. In the same way, we ought also to lower ourselves so that others might see in us the marks of grace by which we are saved. Then, they might find hope in a God who saves.
Make today a day of confession. Repent from the sin which so easily besets and look to Jesus who endured the cross on our behalf.