Service that Hinders

Keeping the main thing the main thing

The church is a place of ministry and God has given to the church those to whom is entrusted the ministry of the word. Ephesians 4:11 calls them ‘Apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers’. Yet Ephesians 4:16 also shows that the purpose of this ministry is so that the body ‘builds itself up in love.’ So there is an ordained work and a lay work of service in the church. The ordained provides the foundation for the lay. We speak the word so that the church may mature and build itself up in love.

In this sense the word received from Moses and the prophets is no different. Jesus could say that all the Law and the Prophets spoke hangs on the command to love the Lord our God and to love one’s neighbour (Matt 22:40). The service of the Word is foundational for the service of love.

This Sunday as we read Matthew 21, the triumphal entry and Jesus’ work of cleansing the temple I was struck by two things. First, Jesus got rid of a service in the temple that hindered worship. Second, there was a service hidden in plain sight which he accepted.

First let’s think about the service which Jesus rejected. In Matt 21:12 we read “and [Jesus] drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.”

As the temple did not accept Roman coins and in the case of those needing to find an acceptable animal to sacrifice we can understand that these people cast out by Jesus were there to provide a service to the worshippers. Yet instead of facilitating worship this service had come to hinder it. For starters with all the bustle the Gentile worshippers could not come into that place to pray at all. Jesus’ words about a ‘den of robbers’ shows that greed had become central instead. In a strange way this is not unlike the story of Mary and Martha. Martha was serving the Lord by all that she was doing in the house. So busy was she that she needed help and seemly frustrated asked Jesus to tell Mary to help her. But Jesus did not let Mary’s desire stand. Though her endeavor to serve the Lord was central to her, she did not realize that she was willing to hinder her sister’s worship to accomplish it. In this way the purpose of her service had inadvertently become the service itself.

It is possible to hinder the worship of God’s people in our actions to facilitate it. For a preacher of the word what does this mean? Well, it means you should realise that your sermon is not the end in and of itself, but the means to the end. The sermon is not the place for you to show how good of a preacher you are, no, it is not the place to get them to hear your words, but it is the place to get them to hear Him, to see how good He is. As it is often said; do people come away from your preaching saying how great you preached, or, do they come away saying how great Jesus is? Our job is to make Him know. That means, as much as possible, we need to get ourselves out of the way.

Jesus got rid of a service in the temple that hindered worship, but there was a service hidden in plain sight which he accepted.

In Matt 21:14 is says “And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.” It is a very brief statement which I passed over without a thought many times. Let’s consider it for a moment. How did the blind and the lame come to Jesus in the temple?¹ The blind could not see Jesus and the lame could not get to him, yet somehow they both come to him. It might be possible that the lame guided while being carried by the blind but more likely they were led to Jesus and carried to him by some nameless helping hands. These people bringing others to Jesus don’t appear in the text yet their service was invaluable. Let that be how our service is towards God’s people; nameless, thankless, but invaluable.

1. It seems that by a mistranslation of the Septuagint the Blind and Lame were hindered from coming into the temple at all, and, the blind and the lame as an expression indicated repulsive people whom you would want nothing to do with. See here (page 45-46) https://www.igwebuikeresearchinstitute.org/journal/5.4.3.pdf