Rebuking the Pharisees. . .

Matthew 21:23-46 (Jesus rebukes the Pharisees)

“By what authority are You doing these things? Who gave You this authority?”  This is from those who were charged to prepare the people so that when the Father determined the time was ripe and sent forth His redemption, they would be ready to receive Him who comes in the Name of the Lord.  They had already turned on John the Forerunner, despite his obvious popularity and success.  They had already decided that Jesus was not helping but hurting and had to be dealt with -- even if it meant innocent blood on the hands of the guilty.  It may not be pretty but it was prudent, even expedient, that one die to preserve the way of life for the many.  This was not God talking but unbelief.  Jesus calls out unbelief wherever He finds it.  Even worse than unbelief which owes the rejection, the Pharisees took the easy but damning way out.  "We don't know."  Those who ought to have known the Scriptures and that they testify of Jesus the messiah were now left to the lie that they did not know.  They were not so uncertain about rejecting John the Baptist and tainting his work.  They were not so uncertain about marking Jesus as a problem that had to be dealt with.  But they could not even admit up front their rejection.  "We just don't know."  Jesus did know and still does know.  Open your hearts to Him who already knows what He will find there.

 Almighty and everlasting God, grant us by Your grace so to pass through this holy time of our Lord’s passion that we may obtain the forgiveness of our sins; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

1 Prepare the royal highway;
    The King of kings is near!
Let ev’ry hill and valley
    A level road appear!
Then greet the King of Glory
Foretold in sacred story: Refrain

ref Hosanna to the Lord,
For He fulfills God’s Word!

2 God’s people, see Him coming:
    Your own eternal king!
Palm branches strew before Him!
    Spread garments! Shout and sing!
God’s promise will not fail you!
No more shall doubt assail you! Refrain

3 Then fling the gates wide open
    To greet your promised king!
Your king, yet ev’ry nation
    Its tribute too should bring.
All lands, bow down before Him!
All nations, now adore Him! Refrain

4 His is no earthly kingdom;
    It comes from heav’n above.
His rule is peace and freedom
    And justice, truth, and love.
So let your praise be sounding
For kindness so abounding: Refrain

 

Cleansing the temple. . .

Matthew 21:12-19 (Jesus cleanses the temple)

He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.  or so says Malachi chapter three.  The promise took a bit of time in coming but it did.  Jesus entered the temple to cleanse what had become tainted so that the promise of God's House might be fulfilled.  

Malachi addressed the restoration of the worship life of the people of God by the messenger of the Lord whom He sent to fulfill the promise.  In this way Christ purifies the priests although Jesus fulfills these words of promise in a way that no one could have expected. He walked into the Temple scene amid  people who were bustling in the outer court of the temple, known also as the court of the Gentiles.  This was to be a place for the nations to meet with God in worship, praise, and prayer.  That could not happen.  Instead of a house of prayer, Jesus found a thriving commercial business taking care of the selling of the sacrifices and exchanging money for a fee to pay the Temple tax.  It had become the consuming focus of the Temple -- the real purpose of the temple forgotten and lost amid people trading, buying and selling off of one another all the while taking advantage to make a profit off of things required.  What was Jesus to do?  In righteous anger, He drove them all out of the Temple and its courts.  He did not merely command them to leave but overturned their tables and their seats (Matthew 21:12), keeping them from getting back to business.  All the while He addressed them with the prophet's voice, “It is written, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer.’ But you are making it a den of thieves!” In Isaiah 56:7, God prophesies through the prophet that His house will be called a “house of prayer for all nations.” 

Almighty God, grant that in the midst of our failures and weaknesses we may be restored through the passion and intercession of Your only-begotten Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

You strode within the Temple, Lord,
Where merchants vied for gain,
And cried, “Your wares corrupt God’s house,
This place of prayer profane!”
With corded whip and fiery wrath
You put God’s foes to flight.
They could not bear the searching beam
Of your unshielded light.

The temple of your body, Lord,
They crushed when you were slain;
But after three days’ sleep in death,
God raised it up again.
And now you have a dwelling place
On earth, in all its lands.
Your people are your temple, Lord,
A house not made with hands.

Make ev’ry heart your temple, Lord,
Each life a holy place.
Forgive the sins that flaw your plan,
Your patient work deface.
In love that does not shrink from truth
These temples purify.
And then in mercy, Lord, remain;
Your Spirit’s gifts supply.

Come, visit, Lord of righteousness,
The Church that bears your name.
Drive out our fear and unbelief,
The pride that is our shame.
Renew the life we share, O Christ,
In love and prayer and praise.
Then send us forth, our strength restored,
To serve you all our days.

 

Palms or Passion. . .

As we begin Holy Week, there is a perennial debate among Lutherans over the Sunday which was called Palm Sunday and now is called Passion Sunday.  I must admit that it is a curious one for me.  When I grew up the majority of Lutherans I knew had confirmation on Palm Sunday.  Instead of Jesus riding in on the back of a donkey, a row or two of finely groomed young men in the first real suits and young women in their white, lacy dresses were assembled for the rite Luther loved to hate -- confirmation.  So we did not hear much of Jesus entrance into Jerusalem amid palms and hosannas nor did we pay much attention to what was coming later in the week.  It meant one thing to us -- no more catechism class!  Yeah!  The two hours on Saturday mornings sitting quietly except to repeat memory work would finally come to an end.  Who could not be happy about that?  It was, at least in our minds and the minds of our relieved parents who saw us finally finished, a much more important occasion than what happened in the Gospel. So maybe this has soiled my perception of the argument in favor of palms and tilted my sympathies toward the passion over the palms.  I cannot say that I am objective about this but I am not without appreciation for the argument which changed the day.

Some complain that the reading of the Passion overshadows the rest of the week and renders the individual stories of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday superfluous.  I disagree.  We do have palms and hosannas -- where they belong in the great procession that enters Holy Week by following Jesus through the crowds to the cross.  We do pay attention to the grand welcome in which the Savior came to His appointed destiny humble and mounted on a donkey.  But we do this in the context of the larger outcome.  Jesus did NOT come for the crowds or the accolades or the welcome.  He came for the cross.  In the past the palms gave us a glory moment which was not Jesus' primary glory.  He came for the glory of the cross.

Yes, I agree.  It is cumbersome to read the whole Passion story in one fell swoop.  It is long.  It taxes the skill of the reader and the listener.  But such is the weight of these words that we at least once in Holy Week hear it all -- from beginning to end -- before we explore the smaller stories inside the big one.  Yes, it does kill the surprise ending but the Church and those who have gathered to celebrate the day already know the surprise ending -- we know He dies and we know He rises again.  This is exactly why we come.  To hear it all again -- the old story retold again, not for dramatic effect, but because this IS the Gospel. 

So sing All Glory, Laud, and Honor and wave the palms and shout the hosannas.  But make sure that on this Sunday everyone knows where this goes -- to the cross.  And don't forget to sing one of the great Lenten chorales (O Sacred Head, A Lamb Alone Goes Willingly, etc.) or one of my personal favorites, No Tramp of Soldier's Marching Feet. 

Every day in every way better. . .

The beautiful image of progress is indeed alluring.  Every day in every way we are getting better.  No one would deny that this is what we wish, what we hope to believe, and what we expect.  But is it true?  Can anyone realistically say that we are getting better and better as individuals, as families, as neighborhoods, as communities, as nations, and as a world?  

It is true, of course, that there are different ills, different sins, different problems, and different vices in every age and time.  They are not exactly the same but they are not exactly unique either.  Modernity has always brought with it its own slant on the age old sins of the commandments.  They are more often only more complicated than before and with more problematic consequences than before.  Those consequences are usually the increased numbers of victims and casualties we face because of this thing call progress.

We are pitiful in our defense of progress.  We point out with glee to the terrible things of the past that were once acceptable or tolerable or even promoted.  Slavery and misogyny are the typical things we name as areas in which we have made progress.  And we have.  But with this progress has come with a host of other problems which were never envisioned when race and sex caused some to be unfairly oppressed.  Our own willingness to accept and promote the death of countless millions in the womb while contemplating how to make death simply a choice for those who want it, when they want it, and painless to boot.  What about the increasing numbers of people who have given up on marriage or children and those who enter marriage and exit with impunity?  What about the promise of social media and its end result of cyber bullying and the incredible portion of its capacity devoted solely to porn?  What about the hopes placed in artificial intelligence and our seeming inability to distinguish between what machines say and do and people say and do?  What about the progress of technology that has come at what kind of cost to us -- costs in relationship, loneliness, and depression.  What about the grand expectations of the UN and world arenas designed to prevent or stop wars and the state of war and conflict that is literally all over the globe?  What about the attention given to the environment and climate change and the way we seem to use more dangerous and toxic minerals and elements without a thought to what to do with them when we are finished with them?      

There is no promise of improvement to the future.  In fact, the whole perspective of the Scriptures is just the opposite.  Things are not getting better.  Things are not improving at all.  The world is in a death ward spiral down.  It is not in an upward movement toward a better world but a world marred by sin and death reaching down further and further into this abyss.  That does not mean every part of technology is bad or every part of life is crap but it certainly diffuses the idea that we should have hope in our ability to sort out the past in the future and make it better.  We are not here to simply warn the world of this regress but to speak hope to the hopeless.  That does not pin such hope on a date in the past but on the one who alone can redeem the future with a new heaven and a new earth, one raised up through death to a life death cannot overcome and one in which the terrible cycle of sin and failure are finally ended.

One acquittal, one conviction. . .

Finland’s Supreme Court has acquitted Päivi Räsänen for her 2019 Bible verse tweet but Räsänen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola were found guilty in 3-2 decision for expressing their beliefs in a decades old church pamphlet  It was a narrow 3–2 decision, but the Finnish Supreme Court has agreed that disagreeing with the sacred tenets of gay marriage and LGBTQ+ rights is a criminal act guilty of hate speech. So after twenty years of legal wrangling, Räsänen has been criminally convicted for publishing the 2004 pamphlet for her church, along with Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola. The conviction is for “making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group”. The Supreme Court unanimously acquitted Räsänen for her 2019 Bible verse tweet.  Räsänen was previously unanimously acquitted on all charges by two lower courts. 

The long serving parliamentarian and former Minister of the Interior has been convicted for “hate speech” under a section of the Finnish criminal code titled “war crimes and crimes against humanity”. The medical doctor and grandmother of twelve was tried in early 2022 and again in 2023 for expressing her beliefs in a 2019 tweet, which included a Bible verse, in addition to a 2019 radio debate and 2004 church booklet.  

After the prosecutor appealed for the second time, the Supreme Court, which heard the case in October 2025, has now ruled on two of the three original charges: concerning the tweet and the church booklet. The Supreme Court was not asked to rule on the radio debate as the prosecution did not appeal it, so Räsänen’s acquittal for the debate stands. 

“I am shocked and profoundly disappointed that the court has failed to recognize my basic human right to freedom of expression. I stand by the teachings of my Christian faith, and will continue to defend my and every person’s right to share their convictions in the public square.” stated Päivi Räsänen after receiving the judgment.

“I am taking legal advice on a possible appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. This is not about my free speech alone, but that of every person in Finland. A positive ruling would help to prevent other innocent people from experiencing the same ordeal for simply sharing their beliefs,” added Räsänen.  

This is one profound example of how far the so called Christian Europe has deviated from its roots and how orthodox Christianity has become that speech which is no longer tolerated.  So much for freedom.