Our story today is from Mark chapter 11 and Matthew chapter 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 his friends, the disciples, and they spent the night.

On the following day they returned to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began telling those who were selling things and those who were buying things in the temple to get out! He turned over the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 

The whole time he was teaching them and saying: “It is written: my house will be a house of prayer where people from all over the world can pray. But you have made it a den of robbers.”

Then the chief priests and the scribes were afraid of him. But the people who were blind and those who were disabled and the little children all came to him, in the temple, and he healed them.

On the day we call Palm Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem. He arrives to people praising him and the waving palm branches of his admirers. Where do you go first when you return to your hometown? Jesus goes home: he goes straight to his Father’s house, the temple! Imagine him excited to be in 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 house-sitter 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. If you buy the right thing… If you 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 lot of emotions. But, we read in the book of Mark, 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 the city of 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? Those with disabilities, those who were blind, and the vulnerable—the hurting, the hopeless, the people who couldn’t pay—they all come to him. 

Put yourself in that temple, right now, for a few moments. All 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.