From the Mount of Olives Jesus approaches Jerusalem, his followers chanting messianic Psalms. “Save us, we pray, O LORD!” And “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD! We bless you from the house of the LORD.” As the Pharisees urge him to quell the crowd, Jesus responds: “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
Despite our common reading, the last statement is not about creation’s obligation to replace man’s lapsed worship. The Pharisees know the quotation in Habakkuk: “Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house….For the stone will cry out from the wall, and the beam from the woodwork respond….Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity!” The people’s “Hosanna” is not the celebration of our imagination, but the plea of their reality, for relief from violence, injustice, and oppression. Jesus says to the Pharisees that if the people were silent about the sin of the city, the blood-mortared stones of Jerusalem’s walls would not be—would indeed plead as clearly as Abel’s blood from the ground for Yahweh to make things right. In Luke’s account, Jesus reinforces the stones’ imagery by telling them what Jerusalem faces: “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!… For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will …tear you down to the ground…. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” Habakkuk’s prophecy describes the fate of Chaldeans; Jesus applies it to Jerusalem: God judges Gentile and Jew alike, because all people are alike.
As Jesus enters the temple, the passage he quotes from Isaiah is about gathering people to worship him: “…my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples…. I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered.” The leaders’ sin in Luke’s passage is making God’s holiness a barrier to the Temple; they profit from the sacrificial system. Luke ends the passage with all the people the Temple leaders exclude and commodify hanging on Jesus’ every word, in the Temple.
Jesus begins his week of suffering by gathering, welcoming, hearing, defending, and teaching the people others would disperse, reject, silence, condemn, and by the end of the week, mislead.
To a Passion Week seeing and hearing, loving and serving people the way Jesus does.