Most years, March 25 marks Lady Day, or the Feast of the Annunciation, in the Christian calendar. This year, that feast moves to April to make way for Holy Monday.
Holy Monday is actually the second day of Holy Week, following Palm Sunday, which marks Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, riding atop a wild donkey — as the Messiah was prophesied to do in the Book of Zechariah.
Holy Monday remembers a side of Jesus often obscured by modern Christian leaders and by those who are not Christian but seek for their own reasons to present Christ as a kind of proto-socialist who would tell conservatives they should never speak out against wrongdoing and support open borders if He was preaching today.
On Holy Monday, Christ took on a less comfortable role — the role of judge.
CURSING THE FIG TREE AND CLEANSING THE TEMPLE.
Returning to Jerusalem after lodging in nearby Bethany after Palm Sunday, the Gospel of Mark records that Jesus was hungry and stopped at a fig tree bearing leaves, but no fruit.
He cursed the tree, saying no one would eat from it ever again — a strange episode we will revisit on Holy Tuesday when His disciples discovered the meaning of it.
Arriving in Jerusalem, Jesus went to the Temple, where His actions were far less ambiguous. Finding the holy place filled with merchants selling animals and moneychangers doing business, the Gospel of John records He fashioned “a whip of cords,” and by force “drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables.”
“Take these things away!” Jesus shouted. “Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!”
The Gospel of Mark records an even sharper rebuke: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’”
FORESHADOWING.
It is from St. Mark that we know Jesus was marked for death the moment He performed this act of rebellion: “And the scribes and chief priests heard it and sought how they might destroy Him; for they feared Him, because all the people were astonished at His teaching.”
From St. John, we know they confronted Jesus over his actions, demanding He show them a sign to prove He had the authority to do such things.
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” He answered.
“It has taken forty-six years to build this temple,” they scoffed. “And will You raise it up in three days?”
But Jesus was not speaking of the same temple as the priests — as we will learn at the climax of this series on Easter Sunday.
