Bulletin: Mar. 16
Scripture: Isaiah 50:4-9, Philippians 2:1-13, Matthew 21:1-11
Does a high-priced meal or glass of wine taste better than a lower priced one? Some researchers in California Tech say their study may show that “you get what you pay for” is not just practical advice. They believe that our brains show a preference for higher priced items.
In the study, participants tasted wine while their brains were being scanned by a functional MRI. (I don’t know how this was done, because the only time I’ve ever had an MRI, I had to lie in this tunnel whose top was a few inches from my nose. I didn’t have room to sip wine, much less have any interest in a taste test.) Anyway, these scientists found that when study subjects were told the wine was expensive, the part of their brain that registers pleasure showed, well, more pleasure, than when the subjects were told the wine was cheap.
Their conclusion, filtered through a report I read, was that If something costs more, our very brain functions lead us to think it must be better, more valuable.
Establishing the price of something is a very important part of marketing. When you’re selling a house, which I’ve done twice, so far, in my life, you want to price it low enough to sell quickly, but high enough to get as much money as you can. Pricing it too low can often make a house hard to sell, oddly, perhaps because people suspect there must be something wrong with it. And the longer it’s on the market, the more wary people will be. Then if you have to reduce it further, that just increases the suspicion.
Marketing is a tricky thing.
On one level, today’s scripture passage is about marketing.
The folks in Galillee where Jesus has been preaching, have spread the word – this Jesus, he’s the real thing, the guy we’ve been waiting for. Many of the followers of John the Baptist have joined Jesus’s throng. The people in Bethany who saw Lazarus raised from the dead have spread the news in Judea, including its capital city, Jerusalem.
So as he approaches Jerusalem, Jesus has buzz. Lots of people are talking about him, about who he is – the Son of God! The Messiah! – and what he can do – make the blind see! Rescue the oppressed! Free the captives! Raise the dead!.
Jerusalem is the key market Jesus must penetrate. But it’s a tough market to crack. It’s where the powerful people are, who feel threatened by Jesus’s message of justice and mercy. It’s the center of the Jewish religion, where the temple is, and at the heart of the temple is the Holiest of Holies, a mysterious place where God is thought to reside.
What’s more, Jesus is coming into Jerusalem just before Passover, when thousands of thousands of Jews and non-Jewish god-fearers have come to observe one of the big holidays of the religion. So Jesus has as wide an audience as possible for him to introduce his teachings to.
Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, because scripture says that’s how the messiah, Israel’s new deliverer king, will come. It’s a visual symbol that those with a knowledge of scripture would not miss. And this is not just any scripture – it’s one of those books we’ve talked about before, that predict that a rescuer, a redeemer, will come and bail out the enslaved Jews from bondage – in this case, bondage by the Romans and their Judean collaborators like Herod.
This messiah, the scripture promises, will not come with an army, but riding on a humble pack animal. And far from showing humility, this is a powerful symbol about Jesus’s claim to the throne of Israel. He is claiming to be a true Son of David, coming to lead the people to liberation.
Jesus has his advance men who make arrangements for his ride. Word gets around fast and people come and spread their cloaks and other clothing on the road in front of him. They wave palms, a more contemporary and widely known symbol of honor and power than the scripture reference.
On this Sunday before Passover, which we now call Palm Sunday, Jesus makes a big splash. It’s a positive launch for the New Order.
But to clinch the sale, you need more than buzz and a successful promotion. You need to establish the right price.
Jesus’s message of God’s love and forgiveness comes with the very highest price tag. A blood sacrifice of the very Messiah that created the buzz and led the parade.
I am wary of the language in scripture and hymns about “the blood of the lamb,” because such blood language has been misused and misunderstood. But when we’re discussing the cost of our believing Jesus’s good news, we need to understand. Passover, the religious observance that is part of the background of Easter, is all about blood and sacrifice. The crucifixion, the passion – a church word describing Jesus’s death – is all about blood and sacrifice.
We need to know the high price of the gospel – and we need to know who paid it and for whose benefits. These basics have gotten distorted.
So lets recap the background. Passover was the celebration of the Israelites being liberated from Egypt. Pharoah and the Egyptians had to suffer 10 Plagues before they would let the Hebrew slaves go into the desert. The last plague caused the death of the first born in every household – animals as well as people. The only way the Israelites could escape this plague was to kill a lamb and smear the blood on the doorposts of their homes. Which they did. And, as you probably know, that’s where Passover gets its name – the ghost of death passed over the homes where the lamb’s blood was smeared. This is THE classic use of sacrifice in the Hebrew bible. Killing a lamb to save a household from death.
Later, the writers of Psalms used this imagery – though your sins be as scarlet, they will be washed white as snow. It’s a reference to the sacrificial atonement ceremony, where an animal is sacrificed as a sin offering. The priest says, in effect, here, God, please put the sins of the person who gave this animal on the neck of the animal and forgive the person.
So this is where Matthew and other writers in the New Testament get their imagery and symbols when they call Jesus the lamb. It is the passover lamb, the lamb of temple sacrifice that they’re talking about. The writer of Revelation, the last book of the bible, has a series of dreams and visions where the writer sees the lamb of God, and where he sees blood turn white as snow when it touches the lamb.
Through the centuries and millennia of the Old Testament, animal sacrifice was a religious practice not only of the people of Israel, but also of other religions of the Near East. Much ink is spent in Exodus and especially in Leviticus on the types of sacrifice for various purposes – what the parents of a first-born son should buy and give to the temple priest to sacrifice, for instance, and how poor families could substitute pigeons for a lamb if need be.
Animal sacrifice was an accepted practice of the times, in Roman and Greek temples as well as the Jerusalem temple. People understood the currency of sacrifice. There was an established pricing system of lambs and pigeons and rams and bulls, in Jerusalem, and add pigs – and maybe other exotic animals I don’t know – in other religions.
In his last week of life, Jesus goes into the temple and clears out the money-changers – who are there making deals for sacrificial animals as a commercial enterprise. He calls the place a den of theives. It’s not because they’re taking money into the temple. It’s because the whole practice of sacrifice has lost its holy quality. It had become a system of bribery of the Roman-appointed priests. This wasn’t the religion of the God of Exodus. It was a commercialized travesty.
But what the gospel writers understood Jesus to be saying could be paraphrased for our modern ears as, You call this sacrifice to the Lord? This is nothing. You wouldn’t know a true sacrifice to the all powerful God if it walked up and turned over your money-changing table. Like this…
So Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice. In the words of Paul’s letter to the Philippians,
“he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.”
Jesus established the price, a high one indeed. Why did he do that? For us. He established the price so high so that we would value the purchase above all others. What did he purchase with so high a price?
Forgiveness of OUR sins. Why our sins? Well, first, the gospels tell us Jesus was without sin. And second, we have a hard time believing that God would forgive us – or humankind in general – for our misdeeds and shortcomings. We feel guilty and unworthy. How could we ever expect God to forgive us?
Jesus had to do a tremendous marketing campaign for that.
Lets go back to that study using MRI measurements to establish the value, that is, the good taste of a glass of wine. The article I read didn’t say that the subjects of the study were going to be charged the price of the wine. I assume, although I don’t know, that part of the pleasure that registered in their brains was that they were getting this high-priced wine for free. That increases the pleasure, doesn’t it? How many times have we done something – maybe even spent money – to get something “for free”?
This is one case where the saying, “there’s no free lunch” is just mistaken.
There is. There is a most wonderful case of a free lunch, a get out of jail free card.
In his obedience even in the face of death, Jesus paid the highest price imaginable – so that we could freely accept God’s forgiveness. There isn’t anything we could do that would merit that kind of grace. That’s why we call it grace. It came at a very high price, but for us, it’s free.
When you get something of value for free or a greatly reduced price, do you sometimes hurry to obtain it before the promoters or sellers change their minds? You know a good deal when you see one, so you don’t ask questions, you just accept it? As the saying goes, Don’t look a gifthorse in the mouth.
Our only cost is the obedience of gratitude. God forgives us and in return asks only that we forgive others and try to obey the two greatest commandments, Love God and Love Neighbor.
That’s a good deal, a great value at a great price.
Praise God. Amen.
Tags: gospel of Matthew, Palm Sunday
