You can't have Easter without the cross

I’d like to briefly go back to where we started on our journey, to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Sometimes I think we get so caught up in the drama and excitement of Jesus riding into Jerusalem that we can hear the echoes of the shouted hosannas. We too, want to run alongside the crowds, straining to catch a glimpse of Jesus. We get wrapped up in the drama of his righteous anger as he and the disciples sweep through the temple courts and we miss the one verse that describes why Jesus died.
Jesus went to the Temple, that place where the Jews believed that they met God; the place that was God’s dwelling place on earth. The outer court area was full of stalls and booths with people selling and buying, poor families and rich ones. All of noise of that mass of humanity was punctuated by the sounds of the animals and birds that were being bought and sold to be sacrificed in the Temple for the forgiveness of sins. And God, in the person of Jesus, once and for all pronounced judgment on the way the Jews had interpreted his covenant with Moses, the way they had taken the law given them on Mt. Sinai and corrupted it, turned it in on itself and made it all for their advantage. In a loud voice and with dramatic action, turning over tables, ablaze with righteous anger, Jesus pronounces the judgment “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer and you have made it a den of robbers.’”
This isn’t just some scuffle over in a corner that a few people notice, that stops business for a minute and then everyone goes back to what they are doing, like a teenager acting up in a public place and folks looking the other way and going on. There is a reason that historic accounts call this “Jesus Clearing the Temple.” All the regular business stopped and for the first time in hundreds of years, just for a little while, the Temple went back to its intended use because after the shouting and the clearing out, after the animals that were to be slaughtered had gained a reprieve, they wouldn’t die that day or in the next few days since it was the Passover holiday, something else amazing happened. We tend to gloss over this in the light of all that is going to happen. Look at verse 14-16:
Matthew 21:14-16 14 The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they became angry 16 and said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read, 'Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself'?" (NRSV)

What is Jesus saying here that made the Pharisees so angry? Jesus is claiming to be the Son of God. The Pharisees knew the Torah, the Law of Moses like the back of their hands and they knew the text Jesus was recalling to them. They also knew the text referred to the praise offered to the Most High God. So, Jesus is claiming that the praise being given in the Temple at that moment, the praise for him, was really praise for His Father. To the Pharisees that was the ultimate blasphemy, and as often as we have overlooked it, that was the political reason the Pharisees decided Jesus had to die.

They could have lived with him being a revolutionary to throw of the yoke of Roman oppression. Israel had seen revolutionaries before. They could have lived with him being a Spirit-filled healer and teacher. Healers and teachers fit well into their traditions. But despite years of waiting for the promised Messiah, despite knowing the Isaiah text of the suffering servant, they could not and would not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, the only One who could set his Father’s house to rights.

After Jesus cleansed it, the Temple became a place of healing and restoration and praise. The blind and the lame were restored and the ones there saw the power and the glory of God and praised Him truly without death and sacrifice and blood but in freedom. And they were the ‘least of these’ that Jesus had taught about in the Sermon on the Mount earlier in Matthew, the children, the true children of Israel, children of the Mosaic covenant that had been pushed aside by the more powerful political and financial movers and shakers of the day. But here, hours before the end of his earth-bound life, Jesus clears a space for them, literally, in the house of God His Father and he heals them and loves them even as the Pharisees come and see and plot to be rid of Him once and for all.

Though Jesus’ action granted a reprieve for the birds and sheep and cattle that were doomed to be sacrificed that day, by his action in the temple he himself, the Lamb of God would be offered up once and for all for the sins of the world. His death on the cross was once and for all the end of the covenant God made with Moses, the climax of that covenant but Jesus’ life, his resurrection is the inauguration of the new covenant that Jesus makes in this world with each of us that will come to Him in faith, believing that He is God and that through his stripes, his wounds, we are healed.

It is an old, old, story. Two thousand years and more old and yet every year, we tell the story. Not because it’s made up but because it’s true. And hundreds of years ago, some of the ones who were there and were part of it, wrote it down for us, so that we would remember and we would become ones who are not just stewards of our money and the material things God gives us but that we would be good stewards of the story, the truth about God at work in the world. And so, this morning, I want to tell you a story. I want to tell you what finally happened to this Jesus of Nazareth.
The 26th and 27th chapters of Matthew tell it plainly:
o the last supper,
• Peter’s protests that he never would deny his Lord,
• Jesus’ heart-wrenching prayer at Gethsemane for his Father to take away this bitter cup and finally Jesus’ obedient “Thy will be done.”
• We read and hear the details of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver and his last words to Judas; “Friend, do what you have come to do.”
• We hear the words in the high priest’s palace and the words “I barely know the man” fresh off Peter’s lips as the cock crows for the third time.
• We hear the whine of the lash and the thud as it crashes into human flesh and we see the crown of thorns, we see it crown that sacred head, now wounded for us.
• And finally, after 33 years, only 3 spent in active ministry, the cross itself where Jesus, son of God, Son of man, submits to the final suffering and with a last cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He dies and the universe mourns.
• The sky turns dark in the middle of the afternoon.
• The veil of the temple is torn in two, the most holy place now exposed and open for all to see, God’s garment ripped from top to bottom in grief.
• Graves are opened and the dead appear to folk in a looking-forward to that day when this new covenant between God and humanity will be fulfilled.

For you see, on the cross, the old covenant was finished, the promises God made to humans though his servant Moses came to final completion, the debt of sin was paid and that covenant set aside. But in His amazing and abundant grace God instituted a new covenant through Jesus Christ that day –a promise and a hope that is extended to you and me if we will only believe. And in this new covenant the law isn’t written on tablets of stone but on the tablets of our hearts.

But all that is in the future. For now the shouts of “Hosanna!” have turned to shouts of “Crucify him!” and “Give us Barabbas!” Imagine the scene in that jail where Jesus and Barabbas sit awaiting their final fate and both men hear the cries “Give us Barabbas!” The guard comes to take one of them away to freedom and one of them to a shameful Roman cross. Barabbas goes free and Jesus dies for him and for all of us.

The kingdom of God has seemingly been defeated by the kingdom of this world and there doesn’t seem to be anything left: the broken body of a young man, a world turned upside down, an afternoon turned into night but somewhere, perhaps only in the depths of the heart of his mother and in the depth of that cave-like tomb there is a small flicker of hope and of light.

But for now we must leave him there in that tomb. Like the disciples, like Mary his mother, we have watched the huge stone rolled over the mouth of the cave sealing it off, capping our connection with him. And as the humans we are we can stand dumbly staring at the stone or we can walk away in awe and grief, shaking our heads in sorrow and leave him there and wonder what in the world is going to happen next.