Year on year, we measured out our lives in waiting; waiting for our liberation, waiting for a new Kingdom of justice and right. Year on year, we made our way to the holy Temple of the Lord. We sang psalms as we approached the gates of the city, our limbs losing the fatigue of days of travel as the crowd began to move faster, pushing forward to enter the House of God.
More market place than Temple
My brothers moved faster than I did that year, I the youngest son, dreaming of being King David. Separated from them, I struggled through a crowd more fit for the marketplace than a place of prayer. The animals and men mingled together, their cries stifling my prayers. There was a great queue of people waiting to exchange their coins for the Temple coins we must use. Just as my brothers had warned me, the money changers were charging huge sums of money for a few little coins, and I despaired of finding any animal worthy of sacrifice. If I wasted my money on a flawed animal, the priests would only reject it. I saw men turned away from their worship. What use was that?
A poor sacrifice
So I sat by a colonnade, wrapped my cloak around me, and as I began my own recitation, the tears began to flow onto my beard. I was so full of love for my God and so alien from this marketplace of soiled men and animals. In between reciting Psalms, I called out
‘Yes Lord, here is my sacrifice – a broken and contrite heart, Lord hear me. Accept the sacrifice of this heart, this sorry loving heart’.
‘Lord have mercy on me a sinner!’
A house of prayer
Just as I uttered those words, I saw the Lord. Yes, I saw him with my eyes newly purified and my heart renewed. I saw the teacher, Jesus, his eyes alight with the fire of the zeal of Elijah and the tears pouring from those eyes with the grief of Isaiah’s Man of Sorrows. He held a corded whip and with it he drove out the traders out, saying,
It is written, “My house shall be a house of prayer”, but you have made it a den of robbers.’
… all the people were hanging on his words
He entered the Temple, and I moved as close as I could to him. Each day after that I followed him, taking every word he uttered into my mind and heart. Each day, more and more people stood around him, and though the authorities were on fire to eradicate him, his message blazed out. As he continued to teach in the Temple grounds, it seemed to be less like a marketplace, and the smoke and the dust seemed to diminish as a new peace settled on the courtyard. It was clear to me that the chief priests, the scribes, and those who sought to stir up the people against him were moving at the edges of the crowd, but no one made a move against him at that time, as we were held in every word he uttered..
Wonderfully written. For a moment, I was there.
I apreciate this sharining and scrops.
I was moved to tears and prayers. Prayers asking God to guide me to do his work and to provide the resources needed to get it done, feed children, those who are without a home ans children living wirh daily food insecurity, coming to school hungry. I also prayed for my oldest adult child, she needs spiritual wisdom and guidane for a new path to become all that God created her to be.