It is the first day of holy week. Holy Week is a penitential time for Christians, a time when we remembered that Christ died for our sins. It is sometimes easy to think of Jesus Christ as a whimpy sacrificial lamb. Jesus urged us to be humble and not boastful. Yet, he was anything but meek. The Bible gives us the clear picture that Jesus was defiant: when he saw sacrilege and injustice, and he spoke out against it, even though it led to being ostracized and ultimately killed.
Yesterday I saw a story on Pat Robertson that aired on the NBC news show Prime Time. When asked questions that pertained to a more open interpretation of the Christianity, Robertson spoke of himself as a “messenger” – he only says what the Bible says. As a messenger, he claimed he can’t change the message. There were plenty of scenes of him in his lavish estate; while the voice over mentioned his $2 Billion sale of the Family Channel to ABC, but they didn’t ask him where the money went. They never asked him about his dealings with tyrants in Zaire and other African states. If there was an implication that Robertson’s is not a Biblical message, it was very subtle. I could not help think of Robertson when I read today’s Gospel reading in which Jesus is turning over the tables of the money changers:
Mark 11:15-19
Then they came to Jerusalem . And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”?
But you have made it a den of robbers.’
And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.
Last year at EDS, Holy Week focused on Jesus as the man who called for change and died because of his stance for the poor and against the arrogant. Holy Week last year fell in the third week of March so that the dates fell on the forty year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s Montgomery March. Here is the Monday Morning Prayer Liturgy that incorporates King’s words and calls for an end to “normalcy.” I am attaching the liturgy here to invite you to think of the revolutionary aspects of this Holy Season.
It's good to see Fred, the Baseball Boy. I remember wondering when I found him if Zac would like him as much as I did. And I see again that he does. And that Jack does also. And probably Luc. And their Grandmother, who knows that boys and toys and baseball go together. My Dad played baseball in the old East Texas League. I have a picture of him in his uniform, and one he took of the first ball being thrown out in the 1931 World Series. I'm a huge fan of our Wharton County Junior College Pioneers, and tell them they're MY TEAM! Isn't there a warm message here? So Bonnie, you're on MY TEAM too, and we're a winning team. This may be the seventh inning stetch, but we're a long way from OUT! So say Hi! to Fred and the boys, and know that the pictures warm my heart. As you have so many times in our friendship. God bless.
Mary A
Posted by: Mary Austin Newman | April 13, 2006 at 03:11 PM