Pentecost Water

What is it about kids and water? My four year old, Nathaniel, came home from nursery this week one day and told me that they'd had something really special that day. They'd had the water guns out. But there was one rule. No squirting people. They'd cleaned the garden furniture, sprayed the walls of the shed and watered the plants. As summer comes the plea for the paddling pool is heard once again, on every possible occasion. Kids seem to instinctively know something, that water is one of the most exciting things in the whole of the world.

Water is essential to life as we know it. It has a starring role in the first chapter of the Bible, central to the Creation of all that is, and it is also important in the last chapter, part of the description of the way in which the new creation will be. In between we find it again and again and again. It is one of the most potent images that we have for life and the life giving nature of God.

When God had called the people of God out of captivity and oppression in Egypt, they were led by Moses out in to the desert. As they travelled the horrors of the slavery, the murder of their sons, the forced labour began to fade in their memories and they began to focus on the difficulties of the journey and their fears overtook them. They missed the pomegranates and figs. They were thirsty and saw no source of water. In their lack of faith they rebelled against Moses.

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Changing Stories

Tonight we pick up the story leading up to Easter. This is Palm Sunday, named after the palm branches that the people in the crowds waved as they greeted Jesus, as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. We read and thought about that episode in this morning's service. By the time we get to the account that Matthew tells us about tonight, we have skipped forward a day. To help us get into the picture, I'd like to fill in a few of the things that have happened in the meantime.

Immediately after Jesus had come into Jerusalem he'd parked his donkey and headed for the Temple. He'd seen desks taking over the place that was meant to be available for Gentiles to come and pray. These money changers were there so that you could change your Roman money, which you had to use in the market, for special “Temple” money that had to be used to buy the sacrificial animals so that people could fulfil their religious duties. Of course, the exchange rate was pretty lousy, and the money changers took a fair creaming off the top, but the system had the dual benefit of making sure that no unholy money got into the Temple treasury and also reduced the risk of those undesirable Gentiles coming anywhere near the Temple.

Jesus saw all this, and thought it was great. He changed some money, bought a couple of doves, as his parents had done all those years before, and took them to be sacrificed.

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Tabernacles

I don't know if this ever happens to you, sometimes I get home from an evening meeting and my wife will be sat watching the TV. Now, if it's Casualty, then it's fairly straightforward. I know basically who everybody is, the plot is fairly predictable and so, if I wanted to, I could pick up what's happening and sit and watch it. If, however, it's an adaptation of a Jane Austin novel that I haven't read then it might take me a bit longer, and a few questions, to work out what's going on and who everybody is.

Sitting down to read this passage made me feel a bit like I was walking into the middle of a story, and quite a complex one at that. There's lots of characters, there's a whole cultural, historical, and religious context that I'm not that familiar with, and there's obviously some more immediate stuff that's been going on that I'm not aware of.

So, what I'd like to do tonight is to go through this passage and fill in some of the background, identify the actors and work out what's going on and what themes we can take and use to shed light on our own lives.

The setting is the Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the feast of the Tabernacles. This is a major, 8 day, festival in the Jewish calendar when the people remembered the tabernacles, or tents, that they lived in the desert following the flight from Israel. What is important for us is that this was a feast of pilgrimage. Lots of Jews from all over the known world had come to Jerusalem for the festival.

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