Jesus had just come into the Temple. A group of kids followed him in from the streets where they and their parents had just welcomed him into Jerusalem as a hero. The kids kept cheering as they watched Jesus tear the place up, turning over tables and chasing the peddlers out of the Temple with a hastily improvised whip.
Jesus never shushed the kids or told them to go find their parents (parents have been dropping their kids off at church and then going elsewhere since church began). He let them cheer. Truthfully, I think he egged them on!
There were many who were blind and lame who had come into the Temple to worship and to beg. Jesus went around to them and started healing them. Soon they joined the kids with expressions of joy and worship.
It was the best day at church ever.
Finally, the religious leaders showed up to put things in order. They saw the wonderful things that Jesus had done, “and the children who were shouting in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David,’” they became indignant and said to Him, “Do You hear what these children are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes, have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself?'”
Jesus, the children and the newly healed beggars provoked the indignation of the crabby, stuffed shirts who practiced a religion that sucked all the joy out of worship and all the splendor out of God and left everyone with nothing but dry, dusty lists of rules and regulations about what to eat, what to do and what to think.
But, strangely, that is what many people want from their religion. Pastors hear it all the time. “Keep your sermons simple and keep them practical.”
We hear it from our preaching professors and we hear it from our congregations. And for a generation that is exactly what evangelical pastors like myself have done… We have served our congregations a meatless broth of platitudes and a pasty mush of practical principles. We’ve given you roles for your marriages, steps for raising perfect children, airtight doctrines on how the world was created and how we need to run it now that it is created. We have told you how to think, what you should feel and how you should vote.
We’ve backed it all up with Bible verses, chapters and books that we have piled on your shoulders with relentless self satisfaction and pride in our accomplishments…just like the Pharisees did in Jesus’ day. And along the way for many of you and some of us, God got left out. For whatever part I have played in that travesty, I ask God’s forgiveness and I ask yours.
Don’t misunderstand me. Jesus preached a righteousness that confronted everyone. He taught moral and ethical behavior that demands discipline and provokes repentance. We need to be changed. But it is Jesus who must change us, not a religious self-help regimen.
The power of the Gospel is not any biblical principle or lifestyle or worldview. The power of the Gospel is Jesus Christ… real, living, breathing, laughing, rebuking, crying, creating, healing, resurrecting, sustaining, overwhelming, and undergirding. So… shout Hosanna for Jesus sake! If your faith is listless it may be because Jesus has gone out to work and play and you’re stuck in Sunday School.
Those little kids in the Temple were shouting and dancing about the presence and power of Jesus…. They spoke the truth with joy and the words became power… power that stirred the indignation of hell and the laughter of heaven. Are you a child of God? Call on Jesus Christ right now… Declare like you are a child in that Temple that Jesus rules… Jesus rocks… Jesus saves! Hosanna!
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. For February, our contributor is Pastor Dave Harvey, who has served as pastor of Grand Marais Evangelical Free Church since February of 2008.
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