Easter 2024 - Part 2

Like us during an election cycle when hopes ride high that if we can get the right person elected they will make the world a better place, the crowds had high hopes for Jesus when he entered Jerusalem. They hoped that King Jesus would banish the Romans who taxed them into poverty and executed them when they complained. 

The Pharisees offered a solution to the Roman problem: we need to follow the Torah with precision so that when we revolt God will guarantee our victory over Rome. But the Sadducees had quite a different solution: we can’t beat this superpower so the solution is not revolution but cooperation. Which agenda would you have supported: emancipation or survival? 

As is often the case the political solutions were out of touch with reality. How can the Sadducees talk with a straight face about ‘surviving’ to a people whose friends and family are being crucified? But then again how can the Pharisees talk about emancipation when going up against an unimaginably strong superpower? 

The chasm that usually exists between political & political reality is often because we haven't understood the depth of the problem we're up against. That was certainly true of the people in Jerusalem that day who externalized evil in the form of the hierarchies over them. Evil is "out there" and embodied by someone else. 

But Jesus refuses to offer simplistic solutions that were philosophically, theologically naïve about the problem of evil. He won’t let them externalize evil and locate it outside themselves and in someone else. Right after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem he goes to the Temple and turns over the tables of the money changers. A symbolic act, a type of prophetic street theater, which said ‘look, it is at the heart of your institutions, it is in your parties and partisanship, it is in your political ambitions that evil resides. It’s all much closer to home. 

Jesus recognized that the disarray in Israel was symptomatic of a greater disarray in the created order and in humanity as a whole, a problem that was well outside the scope of the small political ambitions of the people which couldn’t possibly deal with the reality of evil as long as they externalized it in someone else.

 

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