Mind Map

You know, I am kind of a map head. And I have always been a map head. I love maps. I could spend hours gazing at maps and imagining the places represented by the maps. And just by show of hands, do I have any fellow map heads here in the room? Yes! More than in any other service. The 1045 is the map head service because we've been spending the whole morning looking at our precious maps. But I love basically any maps, maps of the world. Old maps of Disneyland. I could look at these for hours. You know what I'm talking about. I even like maps of imaginary places like Narnia or Middle Earth. Maps! I just love maps.

So, I was completely stoked when somebody gave me a book called "On the Map" by a guy named Simon Garfield. There's so many fascinating things in this book! At least fascinating to me, and about 30 other people who just raised their hands. Like, he points out a myth about maps that most people believe, and it's this. That in the Middle Ages, everyone believed the earth was flat. You could sail right off the edge. That is not true. In the Middle Ages, they knew that the world was round. In fact, even in very ancient days, even in the time of Jesus, everybody had known the world was round when Jesus was alive for centuries.

In fact, about a century before Christ, Greek astronomers accurately calculated the circumference of the planet. So, they not only knew the shape of our world, they knew the size of our world. So, why in the world do we think that they thought the earth was flat? Well, it turns out that this book is the culprit. In the 1820s, an American writer, Washington Irving, you've probably heard of him, he wrote a biography of Christopher Columbus. And he asserted that it was true that he'd done a lot of research, but he made up a scene where there is a trial. And church leaders accuse Christopher Columbus of heresy because he taught that the world was round, while the church taught, the official church doctrine was, that the earth was flat.

In reality, never happened. There never was such a trial. The church never taught the earth was flat. If you look for any official church teaching, or any medieval scholar at all, asserting that the earth was flat, you won't find it because nobody thought the earth was flat. However, Washington Irving's portrayal was so convincing that artists started painting pictures of it. And eventually people believed it as fact. It made it into textbooks. Personally, I think it's partly because we love to believe any stories about how stupid people used to be in the old days, right? It flatters our ego, right? I know I'm not that smart, but I'm smarter than those numbskulls back then.

Now, there's another thing he points out in this book, which was very interesting to me. You know you look at old maps sometimes and you go, "That's ridiculous. The world doesn't look like that." They knew it too. He points out that maps in ancient times, follow me here, served a completely different purpose than maps we use today. In the old days, when people wanted to know where to go, where to find some store in some town, they didn't look at a map, they just asked local guides. Makes sense. Maps were used not to show the world, but to show their world view, to show how they saw the world.

Does that make sense? Kind of like this famous map from the cover of The New Yorker a few years ago. Do you remember this? This is a New Yorker's view of the world. The only detail is in Manhattan, then there's the Hudson River, and everything else is a flyover state until you get to Los Angeles, and that's it. That's the whole world right there from a New Yorker's perspective. That's a world view map. Well, that's what ancient maps were like. They just honestly said, "This is how we see the world, not geographically, but kind of spiritually." Like, this is a very famous medieval map. You see three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the center of the world is Jerusalem.

Now, nobody thought that this is what the world physically looked like, a giant cloverleaf with Jerusalem in the middle, but this was their world view. You could call it their mind map. The way they saw the world spiritually was everything centered on Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the center of history, the center of prophecy, the center of the Bible, and this is also how people in Jesus' day viewed the world. The whole world centered on Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem, everything centered on one building, the temple. It was the center of all existence in heaven and on earth.

In fact, you could picture their mind map this way. You can see it at the top of your notes, two circles overlapping. On one side is heaven, on the other side is earth, and in the middle where they overlap, that's the temple in Jerusalem. See, heaven is holy. The earth, not so holy. So how can sinful, earthly humans meet with a holy God? And we long to do that, right? Like that George Harrison song, "My Sweet Lord, I really want to know you. I really want to see you." We long to have that conscious contact with God. It's like we have a thirst for it. We have a hunger for it. Just like we thirst for water, we thirst for food, we thirst for God.

So where can I slake that thirst? Where can I fill that hunger? The temple is the place on earth where that tension is resolved. They saw it as a sacred place where sacred people, sacred priests, do sacred protocols, rituals, procedures. And if you wanted your sins to be forgiven, man, who doesn't want that? And if you want a relationship with God, if you want to make sure you go to heaven when you die, the temple is the place where this can happen. The only place where this can happen, the only way this can happen in Jerusalem at the Temple Mount. Without that temple, you are lost.

And then Jesus comes along, points to the building, and says, "That temple? That's going to be destroyed. That's going to be gone forever." And the people were like, "What now? Some were just perplexed, and some were outraged and threatened." Seventy-seven is the name of our series, "77 Days in the Life of Christ Ending on Easter." And we've been looking at how did the events of Christ's life get to what happened on Easter week? Like how did Jesus Christ end up on a cross, killed? Who could possibly have been threatened by a guy who went around preaching love and putting babies on his lap and talking about turning the other cheek?

How was that threatening in any way, shape, or form? Usually the manby, pamby, pallid, like hyper-gentle Jesus that is portrayed in our culture, it's perplexing when it gets to people who are mad at the guy. Who could be mad at this guy? And so in this series, what we've been looking at is the drama, the arc, the conflict that Jesus created that wound up with him on the cross. And if you want to understand the plot, you have to look at what Jesus said and did about the temple.

And there's about three reasons why I want to talk about this today. Number one is, my guess is when we continue talking about this story, maybe today it'll finally ratchet in for you, and you'll get it. And you'll have a sense of the big picture of the ministry of Jesus Christ and how it all makes sense historically like maybe you never have had before, maybe up to now. Jesus has been to you kind of like a kind of fragments of nice sayings that you've seen up on plaques on people's walls. I hope today it clicks and you get, "Oh, this is what he was all about."

So there's a second reason I want to talk about this today, and it's this. Horrible anti-Semitic things have been said by so-called Christians in Jesus' name for years, and many of them were based on the passages I'm going to look at today. When pastors clumsily preach these passages, maybe unintentionally, I don't want to judge, but it can come across like Jesus was saying he wants to wipe out Judaism. It can come across like Jesus is saying he wants the Jews to be less Jewish. And as you'll see, that's not what Jesus was saying at all. He was calling them to a deeper way, a newer way of being Israel.

And then finally, I want to talk about this because this could change your life today. Look at the screen. If you can relate to these ideas, these feelings, if you feel distant from God today, more precisely, if you feel ostracized even from church because you're somehow not perfect enough by somebody else's standards, if you always feel guilty and ashamed before God no matter what you do, you confess your sins and you try to do good deeds and you read the Bible and you serve him, but you still can't get rid of the guilt no matter what.

Or watch this now. If your experience with church was that church is an authoritarian place run by authoritarian leaders who are the gatekeepers as to who gets in and who doesn't get in and you could never pass muster from them and you felt judged by them, this could change everything for you because you may discover today that the very things you resist about religion are the things Jesus came to change. Jesus was a revolutionary figure in the history of the world, in the history specifically of religion and how people look at their relationship with God.

We've been tracing this throughout this series, quick review. We started this series with John the Baptist and he's operating in the wilderness outside the temple system which the temple leadership saw as very disruptive. They come and they try to shut him up. He won't shut up and then one day he sees Jesus approaching and he shouts, "Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!" Now, the lambs were sacrificed, thousands and thousands of them up on the temple mount for the sins of each family but here John is saying one day there will be one lamb who by one sacrifice takes away all of the sins of the whole world completely removing the need for any more sacrifices and it's going to make that temple irrelevant and that is the man right there, very threatening to the temple establishment.

And then we saw Jesus going into the temple and overturning all the tables that sold animals for sacrifice making at least for that day the whole temple system impossible because there's no more animals left. He set them all free. And in John's gospel, John tells this story first even though it happened in the last week of Jesus' life and then he goes back and he reframes the whole rest of the Jesus story in that context to show how really everything he did led up to that moment. Everything he did and said and taught was about disrupting what was happening up at the temple.

And then we saw Jesus talk to the Samaritan woman and she tries to change the subject. Do you remember? And she says, "I got a question for you. Which mountain is really the genuine temple mount because we Samaritans believe the temple should be here on Mount Gerizim and you Jews think the whole center of the world is up there in Jerusalem. So what's the right temple mount?" And Jesus says, "Moot point! Believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem." What? Yeah, where the temple is, that's going to be completely insignificant. Completely insignificant.

And then we saw Jesus healing a man who had been ousted from the temple system saying, "You don't need that temple system. You don't need this pagan temple system. You just need me. That's all." And then last weekend we saw Jesus in the last major public speech of his ministry just layering and just skewering the religious authorities of his day. So this tension between Jesus and the religious authorities who sort of had their headquarters up at the temple has been ratcheting up and now in the last few days of his life he just turns the intensity up to 10 and he tells them, "I tell you something greater than the temple is here." What? What could possibly be greater than the temple?

In our mind maps the temple is the center of the world. Did you know that in those days they believed that all the threads in the tapestry of the Bible all found their focus at the temple? All those stories all came together on that piece of ground. Now the Bible doesn't say this, but their tradition held that the temple mount was where Adam and Eve were created. And their tradition told them that the temple mount was where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac and God provided a substitute. And the Bible does say that the temple mount was where David had a vision of God and where Solomon built the first temple.

So all these different threads of the Bible they all find their focus at the temple mount. What could possibly be greater than that? And then the next day as Jesus was leaving the temple that day one of his disciples said, "Teacher, look at these magnificent buildings. Look at the impressive stones in the walls." And Jesus replied, "Yes, look at these great buildings, but they will be completely demolished. Not one stone will be left on top of another." And by the way, this all happened in 70 AD. The Roman army comes in to squash a rebellion. The soldiers go out of control. They pry apart every single stone on the temple mount. They toss them all over the edge. And the place is raised to the ground, 70 AD.

And in the 1990s, archaeologists digging around Jerusalem made an amazing discovery, an entire street frozen from that moment in time. You can see in this picture the stones thrown down from the temple platform, how they buckled the street pavement. These stones were just left there by the Romans to kind of show the power and force of their army. And then the rubble of the centuries buried this. But you see this, you kind of travel back into time to the moment that was a specific fulfillment of the prediction of Jesus Christ just 40 years after He said these sentences, "Not one stone was left."

Well, by the end of the week when Jesus keeps saying stuff like this, you know, the people in charge of the status quo don't like it when you say the status quo was ending. And so they've had enough, and they actually bring Jesus to trial for this because speaking against the temple in those days was considered treasonous. And they bring some witnesses up at His trial, and they say, "We heard Him say, 'I will destroy this temple made with human hands, and in three days I'll build another not made with hands.'" Now, they weren't quite accurately quoting Jesus there, but they definitely got the gist. He is speaking words that are threatening to our temple.

Now, these days we think, "What is the big deal?" So some guy stood up and said, "You know, within 40 days, that building, within 40 years, that building's going to be demolished one day." Would we, like, be offended at that? Somebody stood like downtown Santa Cruz, "Within 40 years, this city hall will be demolished." Nobody, people might applaud. I don't know, nobody would be offended, though. Just kidding, don't email me. But, so why were these people so offended, right? What's the big deal? I want to build up some understanding and some sympathy for Jesus's accusers here, all right? Because back then, I jot this down in your notes, the temple was so much more than a building.

Imagine this. Imagine the emotion and honor connected to the Statue of Liberty, connected to the Vatican, connected to the White House. Well, it was all of those buildings sort of rolled into one times a thousand. First, the temple represented the place of God's presence. And I mean this literally. Like, if you wanted to be close to God, you didn't just pray wherever. You came to the temple, even though you really couldn't get that close. If you look at the screen, we saw this earlier in this series, but on the temple mount, there were four courts, each with tighter and tighter restrictions. There was the Court of the Gentiles, which was open to everybody, Jews and non-Jews. And then came the Court of the Women, Jewish women could only go this far. And then the Court of Men, men who were Jewish could only go this far. Then the Court of the Priests, only priests could go this far. And finally, only the high priests and only once a year could enter the Holy of Holies, where God's presence was manifest.

And it was so holy that a thick veil, like a gigantic curtain, cut off the Holy of Holies from the rest of the planet, because this is where God's sacred, untated, holy presence was. This is where it all happened. And the temple also represented, more than just this, represented the means of atonement. Atonement for your sins, forgiveness of sins was found there. At the altar of the temple, the priest sacrificed unblemished lambs, and if you wanted to be forgiven, that was the only way. And one of the major times they did this was at Passover, the Seder. Every year in the time of Jesus, a million or more Jews from all over the world would make elaborate pilgrimages to the temple, and they'd bring their lambs to the altar, and priests would sacrifice them during the Seder week, and then later everybody would take the lambs and they would eat the lambs together with a symbolic meal at Seder to remember God's deliverance through the blood of the lamb. And that Seder meal is still practiced to this day.

And because of these massive annual pilgrimages, the temple was also the center of community life. It was where your family gathered. It was where you made memories. Did you ever have an uncle or a dad or a grandpa or a grandma or a mom who told you about the first time that they ever walked into a major league ballpark? Have you ever had that discussion with somebody, and they walked up the ramp, and then they came and they saw the expanse of the green field? We share those stories with another because they're almost like rites of passage. There's so many memories attached to ballparks. That's just a tenth of what the temple meant to people. They loved this place so much, as we saw the first week of this series, that they carved images of the temple in their synagogues. They put mosaics of Herod's temple on their dining room floors. They put pictures of the temple on their money. They loved this place.

They may not have had a kingdom anymore, but they had the temple. They may not have had their independence, but they had the temple. They sang songs about the temple. They told stories about the temple. They made pilgrimages to the temple. It was the center of community life. There were concerts at the temple, choirs performed at the temple, orchestras performed at the temple. You get the idea? And then finally, it represented the promise of better things. Now, stay on the front page of your notes for just a second, because I want to explain this. In the Bible, in the Hebrew Scriptures, there were all these promises that this world, the way it is right now, full of sorrow and suffering, it's not going to stay this way forever. One day, God is going to build something new. The Scriptures call it the New Heaven and the New Earth.

And here is the way they imagined it. The New Heaven and the New Earth will start right there at that building in Jerusalem, at the temple. It will almost be like a droplet coming down from heaven. And it goes, "boink," right there. And then the ripples start emanating out from that spot. And the resurrection of the dead happens. And the people who are still living are healed from all their diseases. And there's no more death, and there's no more crying, and there's no more pain, because God is doing something brand new, and the ripple effects go to the whole world. And that's why saying the temple was going to be destroyed was utterly ridiculous, because everything else on earth could be destroyed, but not the temple. The temple is ground zero for what God has promised to do for the rest of history.

Now, you put all of this together with just how physically impressive this place was. The first century historian, Josephus, saw it before it was destroyed. And he wrote a lot about it. Here's just one of his paragraphs. Imagine this. The temple was covered all over with gold. And at the sunrise, it reflected back a very fiery splendor and made those who looked upon it to turn their eyes away. It was a breathtaking, stunning piece of architecture. So look back at that list on page one. Imagine all this being controlled by one family, because that was exactly what was happening in Jesus' day. One family, the Annas family, they controlled everything that happened at the temple. They controlled who got into the temple. They controlled who got to buy and sell in the temple. They controlled when the temple was open. You can imagine how much power they had.

Now, you know what they say about power, power, corrupts. And absolute power, what? Corrupts, absolutely. And the Annas family was widely considered to have become corrupt and greedy and authoritarian, not just by Jesus. If you look at writings of people in the first century, criticism of the controllers of the temple are all over the place. The people loved the temple. But they loathed the people who controlled the temple. And so when this charismatic teacher who has a magnetic personality like nothing anybody's ever seen before comes out of the north and starts saying things about the religious leadership, people are resonating. People are with them. And as it's intensifying, people are starting to say, "Amen." And they're starting to think, "This is the Messiah we've been waiting for. And one of the things the Messiah's going to do is he's going to purify the temple leadership. He's going to do it. Let's go. The crowds are loving this message." They're hearing it loud and clear. Something's going to change up there on the temple mound.

You know who else is hearing this loud and clear? The temple leadership. And this is why they say after Jesus' big sermon against them just a few days before his trial, then the chief priests, the teachers, the law of the elders, looked for a way to arrest Jesus because they knew he had spoken against them. But they were afraid of the crowd. And I want you to see that dynamic crystal clear. Why? Because again, there's been terrible anti-Semitism in the name of Jesus over the centuries. But Jesus was clearly not anti-Jewish. He was calling an end to the temple system. He was not calling for an end to the Jewish people or to Judaism or for the Jewish people to be less Jewish. He was calling everyone to a new way of being Israel.

This is why he said to those temple leaders in the same chapter, "The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone." This is the Lord's doing. It is wonderful to see. He's saying to the builders of the temple, "You have rejected this stone. I know what you want to do. You're looking for a way to arrest me, put me on trial, put me away, maybe silence me for good. But though you are rejecting me, I am actually the cornerstone of a new thing that God is building to replace the temple." And when he says, "This is the Lord's doing," he's saying, "and there is nothing you can do to stop it." Why?

Because I want you to think about this. In Jesus, because of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, we actually have every one of those four things that the temple represented to people like times infinity. Jot this down quickly, because if Jesus sacrificed on the cross, I have God's presence now here with me. When Jesus was crucified, and then the next three weeks before Easter, we're going to go into all this in more depth, it says, "When he had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment, when he died, he was the Lamb of God, sacrificed for the sins of the world. The curtain of the temple was torn into, from top to bottom, the curtain of the temple." That was the veil that separated the holy of holies, where the sacred presence of God was, from the rest of the planet.

Josephus said, "It was 60 feet high, 30 feet wide, and as thick as a man's hand." He said, "It was so heavy that 300 priests were needed to hang these curtains, yet it gets torn into instantly from top to bottom, from God to us." And what this meant was, because of what Jesus did on the cross, God is suddenly opening all those gates, all those walls, all those barriers, all those fences, even that curtain up to and including the holy of holies, saying, "The presence of God is now available to all." But how was that possible? I thought a holy God couldn't dwell with unholy sinners. If you're putting into the sacrifices on the temple, how is that possible?

Well, it's possible because in Jesus I have atonement for my sins. Watch this. At Passover, the night before Jesus is betrayed, He and His disciples are eating the Passover meal, and it says, "He took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And He said to them, 'This is my blood, which confirms the covenant between God and His people. It is poured out as a sacrifice for many.'" He's saying, "Guys, guys, remember when this all started three years ago? And that thing you heard John the Baptist say, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world? Well, that is happening tonight. I will be the sacrifice that puts an end to the need of all other sacrifices forever. And when people simply trust in Me, they are totally forgiven. They don't have to do anything else."

And that's why His sacrifice is why now in Him we have the center for community life. This is so beautiful. Jesus says, "Do this in remembrance of Me." And when we take the communion meal, we find that center of community life together. Personal story, I'll never forget crashing through the jungles of Guatemala with Steve Reed, one of our missionaries here, a scene like this is all we could see from the windows of our Jeep. And then we got to our destination, which was a little village, thatched roofs way off the grid, everything you imagine a village in a jungle to be. Steve knew the pastor at this village. They had an open-air church like this, and we had arrived just in time for communion.

We sat down on a homemade bench in the back. And to really understand the story, you have to know Steve is the whitest human being I know. He's about 6'4". He has this thick Western American accent, you know. "Olam, yummy, go." This is how He talks even though he's fluent in Spanish. In other words, we could not have stood out more like sore thumbs in that village if we had tried. Yet in that moment, a Mayan, a little Mayan man who must have been a foot and a half shorter than Steve, he passes me the bread, and he passes me the cup, and he looks at me, and we partake in communion together.

And I have to tell you, in that moment, I just wept, one of the most profound experiences of my life, because I looked at this brother of mine in Christ. And here's somebody who I probably wouldn't have anything else really in common with. We don't speak the same language. We're not from the same culture. We probably don't have the exact same political concerns, but much more important than any of that, we both spoke the language of communion. And me and all those Mayans that were there and Steve, we had found the center of our community at the cross, and especially in divisive times like this, as followers of Jesus.

We really need to remember, as Christians, we have different cultures, different politics, different ethnicities, different languages. I mean, some are male, some are female, some are Democrats, some are Republicans, some speak English, some speak Spanish, some are citizens, some are not, some are warrior fans, some are still Lakers fans, inexplicably. But we are united when we remember Jesus is the center of our community. And he is the cornerstone of something that can never be destroyed by any army ever, greater than the temple, something greater than the temple is here.

And then finally in Jesus, I have the promise of better things. You tired? A little tired of the way this world is right now? Check this out. Jesus says at the end of that communion meal, I tell you the truth. I will not drink wine again until the day I drink it new in the kingdom of God. This can pass us by if we're not aware of the language here. In those days when somebody would say, I won't eat again until the day I, or I won't drink again until the day I do whatever, they are making the most solemn oath they can make. They're making a promise, a vow, an oath saying, I promise that I am going to do this thing.

When Jesus said this, he was saying to you and all of his followers, I promise I am going to bring you to the feast of the king. And we're going to be partaking of the rest of this meal together in the new heaven and the new earth. Something new is starting here. The droplet has started in Jerusalem and it's going to ripple outward until one day there will be no more death, no more mourning, no more pain, no more sorrow. And I promise one day you're going to be at the feast with me in my father's house. He's saying, you have my word on it. Isn't that awesome? This is what Jesus represents to us now.

But I got to show you something. The Bible has an intriguing observation about heaven. You know what it says? No temple there. Don't need a temple anymore because the glory of the presence of God has flowed out and it's everywhere. The Lord God and the Lamb are its temple. So look up here. We're about to close, but look up here for a minute. Jesus, you see what he's doing? He's drawing a whole new mind map. This is a whole new way of perceiving the way heaven and earth relate. Their mind map had been this. The temple is the bridge. And I got to go to the sacred place and sacred priests do their sacred things so that I can get to God somehow.

But Jesus is saying, because of my sacrifice, this is the new mind map I want you to have. He is the center. All roads point to him. Listen, all the threads of the tapestry of the Bible are now all woven together in him. Your life will be altered forever when your mind map of how your connection to God works changes to this. Because if this is your mind map, no more worrying if you are worthy to enter. No more anxiety about whether you're doing it right. No more staying at a distance from God because you feel guilty or ashamed or because you've been made to feel guilty or ashamed.

And this does not mean that there's no more sacred places. This means every place is a sacred place because everywhere you go, you are bringing the presence of God. This doesn't mean there are no more sacred priests and sacred people. It means you are a sacred priest because you are now going out to the presence of God. This doesn't mean there's no more sacred protocols and tasks. This means everything you do in the name of Christ down to giving a cup of cold water to somebody is sacred. Jesus Christ has made it all holy. It changes everything when you see it this way.

Now the tragedy is a lot of Christians still have a mind map that looks like this. Even though there's no more temple, they still live with a temple model in their heads. And then they got to go to a sacred place and do sacred things. Sacred priests tell them to do. Well, the problem with this is it leads to an emphasis on what I should be doing for God instead of a joyful emphasis on what God has done for me. And that's why the living Jesus is still here today, still changing mind maps to this. He's still overthrowing the tables in the temple in our minds because I slip back into the temple model all the time.

You know, you could summarize what Jesus did for us in this phrase in Jesus. God is with us. God has burst through the holy of holies and he's made you holy. And you are part of the ripple effect that started that day in Jerusalem on the cross. And it's now rippling out through to the rest of the world through you. Now, Jesus is the bridge in whom heaven and earth unite. So he really is all you need. Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for being God with us. Thank you that you really are greater, greater than the temple, greater than all the sacrifices put together. You're the greatest of all. That you came to abolish all the dividing walls that separated us. So God, help us not to slip back into that old temple model. God, help us to embrace, to embrace what you have come to do, to rush into your loving arms, into your holy presence, because you have made it available to us by your grace. We praise you for it. We are set free by it. And we thank you for it in Jesus' holy name. Amen.