Monday: Cleaning House

I have a confession to make. I'm a bit of a slob. (My family and friends are probably laughing at what an understatement that is right now.) I let surfaces pile up to the point that they no longer serve their original purpose. For example, at this moment, I have so much stuff stacked on my kitchen chairs that I have to sit on the couch to eat. I look at my chairs every day and wish for a couple of seconds that they were empty and useful, but it never gets farther than that.

This confession has a point beyond letting the wired world know that I'm bad at cleaning. In some ways, I think that my spiritual life reflects my apartment's need for a good maid service. I feel like I've got clutter in my soul. I have secret (and not-so-secret) sins that are piled up. I look around every day and think "I should probably get rid of that", but that's usually all it amounts to. Hanging on to sin is so comfortable and requires no hard labor on my part.

This week is Holy Week in the Jesus-following world. It starts with Palm Sunday (which was yesterday) and goes until Resurrection Sunday (a.k.a. Easter). Growing up Baptist, Holy Week was a blip on my radar most of the time. I knew that Jesus had to be doing something on the days between Palm Sunday and Good Friday (the day that Jesus died), but I didn't really look into what that was. It turns out that on Monday Jesus was cleaning house. And not just any house. He spent a part of Monday throwing people out of the Temple in Jerusalem. In a show of righteous anger, he overturned merchant tables and ran off anyone trying to bring in items to sale. They had turned a place that was supposed to be for prayer and worship into a sin-infested business venture.

The Temple in Jerusalem is no longer around, (the Romans took care of that around 70AD) but God still has His temple on earth. It's the souls of those that claim Jesus as their own (1 Corinthians 3:16). Today, the Monday of Holy Week, is a day of temple cleaning. It's not something that is easy and Jesus may look mean for a while, but the ultimate purpose is to return things back to the way God meant them to be.