Blog posts will be released each day until Easter Sunday 4 April

Contributed by Christian members of the Faith and Spirituality Team.

Monday

The temple was to be Jesus’ centre of activity for the week. On Monday he went to the temple and found the forecourt was full of stalls selling animals for sacrifice. To buy the animals one had to use the temple currency and the exchange rate was not favourable! The presence of this commercial activity made Jesus extremely angry; a holy place had been turned into a marketplace! In a fury he threw over the stalls and shouted at them all. The temple authorities were very troubled about Jesus and realised he had an agenda that threatened their livelihood.  The story is told in Mark chapter 11, verses 15-19.

There is no particular Christian observance of this day, or on Tuesday or Wednesday. From the Iona Community’s Stages on the Way:

It was on the Monday
that religion got in the way.

An outsider would have thought
that it was a pet shop’s fire sale.
And the outsider, in some ways,
wouldn’t have been far wrong.

Only, it wasn’t household pets.
It was pigeons that were being purchased.
And it wasn’t a fire sale.
It was a rip-off stall in a holy temple
bartering birds for sacrifice.
And the price was something only the rich could afford,
No discounts to students, pensioners or disabled types.

Then he,
the holiest man on earth,
went through the bizarre bazaar
like a bull in a china shop.
So the doves got liberated
and the profit margins got wiped out
and the pigeon sellers got angry;
and the police went crazy;
and the poor people clapped like mad,
because he was making a sign
that God was for everybody,
not just for those who could afford him.

He turned the tables on Monday…
the day that religion got in the way.

Cleansing the Temple. Painting by Shirley J. Veater

The material from Iona comes from Stages on the Way, 1998. Copyright(c) WGRG, Iona community, Glasgow Scotland. wilgooselscotland. Reproduced with permission.

Artworks by Shirley Veater used with grateful thanks. www.shirleyveaterdesigns.co.uk