From Mark 11 and Matthew 21

Arriving on the donkey, Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, it was already late—so he went out to Bethany with the twelve, and they spent the night.

On the following day they returned to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.

The whole time he was teaching them and saying: “It is written: my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations! But you have made it a den of robbers.”

Then the chief priests and the scribes were afraid of him. But the blind and the lame, and little children came to him, in the temple, and he healed them.

On the day we call Palm Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem. He arrives on praise and a donkey and the thrown coats of his admirers. Where do you go first when you return to a city you love? Jesus goes home: he goes straight to his father’s house. Imagine him craving the temple, eager to be in the holy place—my house, he calls it, his father’s house, a house of prayer and beauty and hope.

But it’s like arriving home to discover that the caretaker let the house go while the owner was away. The air smells like pigeons; the floor is covered in droppings. Men count their coins and the clinking interrupts the chanting of prayer. The money-changers and the bird-sellers are in the business of forgiveness. Buy the right thing. Make a sacrifice. Then, maybe, God will listen. 

People create steps to forgiveness. Sometimes we make others go through them when they wrong us. Say the right words. Make the right gesture. Maybe even pay some sort of literal or emotional price. And we put ourselves through these steps when we mess up—we put on feelings of guilt and unworthiness and shame.

Jesus sees it in the crowds that day: there are people who can afford forgiveness—and there are people who can’t. He must feel a swirl of emotions. But, Mark tells us, he sleeps on it. It’s late. And the next morning he comes back and flips the furniture.

Jesus isn’t impulsive. He isn’t violent. And he isn’t a sinner. He doesn’t go back to Bethany and say, “I got a little carried away back there—sorry, guys.”

He takes it upon himself to physically remove the obstacles between people—and God. 

Because Jesus is in the business of forgiveness. And when the obstacles are gone? The blind and the lame and the vulnerable—the hurting, the hopeless, the people who couldn’t pay—come to him.

Put yourself in that temple, right now, for a few moments. All the barriers are gone; the overturned furniture, the mess we make of religion is on the floor at your feet. Step over it, get around it, and walk right up to Jesus.

Do you need forgiveness? Do you need to forgive? You’ve come to the right place.