Holiness and Mission. Morna D. Hooker

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">17 Here is a challenge to the people to accept Jesus as God’s representative – and a challenge, also, to the Roman authorities, to recognize another king beside Caesar. His first action in Jerusalem is to enter the temple and inspect what is happening there. He creates havoc by driving out those who were selling animals for the sacrifices, and by overturning the tables of the money-changers, sending their piles of coins flying. Why? The answer is given in the quotation from Isaiah:

      ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations,’

      But you have made it a den of robbers.

      (Mark 11.17)

      The temple needed to be cleansed because the worship that was offered there was hollow. The religious authorities were more concerned to make money from the sale of sacrifices than to worship God: they did not truly love God – and instead of helping others to worship God, they were preventing them from doing so. The temple had been built as a place where not only Israel but all the nations could pray, and it was not fulfilling its purpose. No wonder Jesus’ action was seen as a sign of the temple’s coming destruction! What he was doing was to challenge people to repent and to worship God with heart and soul and mind and strength;18 but they failed to do so.

      In the days that followed, Jesus taught in the temple. Once again, he challenged the religious authorities, this time in a parable about a vineyard, whose tenants refused to give the owner the produce that was his share, and who, when he sent servants and even his son to collect it, killed each of them in turn. The chief priests, scribes and Pharisees, listening to him, realized that he had told this parable against them.19 They were the tenants who were rebelling against God, refusing to give him the love and obedience they owed him, killing his messengers, the prophets, and plotting to kill his Son.

      And now, some Pharisees and Herodians challenge Jesus. The extraordinary alliance of Pharisees, whose concern for purity separated them from those Jews who were less strict in their observance of the Law, with Herodians, political supporters of the Roman puppet king, is extraordinary, and demonstrates the danger that Jesus posed. ‘Should we pay taxes to Caesar?’ they ask. The tax to which they were referring was the poll-tax, and the question was a burning one. The Romans were a foreign power – what right had they to be in Jerusalem? Yet they did maintain law and order. In time, resentment about the tax would result in open rebellion against Rome. But the question posed by Jesus’ opponents proves to be a boomerang. ‘Show me a coin’, he says, ‘Whose image is on it?’ Jesus’ final words, ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God’, is a challenge to his interrogators, and one they are not prepared to meet.20

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