Cleansing Monday

a devotional for Holy Week

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Thank you for joining us!

Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

Friends, there were SO MANY amazing and insightful comments last week! I highly invite you to go and read the responses to our discussion—they were incredible! But today, I would like to highlight this comment from

Sara Mahlum

on last week’s meditation, all about snakes and shedding what no longer serves us:

As the seasons of creation and of the church calendar slip by, it seems to me I am rhythmically made new, again and again. On a cellular level, I am made new every several years. But I maintain a sense of self. Memories. Hopes. What is the continuity that is me from moment to moment? Am I who I was; or will be? Like a snake, I grow and outgrow myself, leaving behind pieces of who and what I was. I pray this growth is towards the making new of all creation as I dig into Christ’s work in the world.

Thank you so much for sharing this beautiful thought with us, Sara! Sara writes a newsletter here on Substack called Sara’s Lenses, all about art, photography, and ecotheology—subjects I know many of you care passionately about!

If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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it is the Monday of Cleansing
when the Savior upended the tables

and I am cleaning out the fridge,
sweeping the floor,
stacking the dishes, 
scrubbing the sink.

as the Savior banished 
the ones who tarnished the name of His Father

so too am I banishing 
the grime of the winter past, 
the grime of what does not belong,
the grime of what no longer serves. 

my people would have spent this time
making ready the home for Christ,

and so am I
and so am I
and so am I.  

As usual, I am genuinely shocked to find that Lent has come to an end, and Holy Week is here.

In the old days, Holy Week would have been the perfect opportunity for what we call “spring cleaning”, airing out the house and tidying away the dust and clutter of our wintering. I still think that’s a beautiful tradition, even if the idea of a full roof-to-floor spring clean sounds a bit daunting.

Every day of this week had a liturgical meaning, once. And Holy Monday was the day when the Church remembered the cursing of the fig tree, the questioning of Jesus’ authority, and the cleansing of the temple.

In that last story, Jesus displays a wrath we do not often see in the gospels as He sees the mockery that greedy people have made of the holiest place. In response, He turns over their tables, scattering their money everywhere, and drives them out with fervor. Their greed, their lack of respect, is abhorrent to Him. They represent a cynicism that cannot coexist with holiness.

It does cause me to wonder: what lies have I allowed to set up shop in my soul—the holy place where God dwells—selling me trinkets and trash? What cynical shopkeepers have I allowed space, turning my rituals and grace-seeking into a farce?

The word "cleanse" has lost its meaning. We think of it now in a health-food sense thanks to strange pseudoscience and a dangerous mixture of spirituality and cultural views of nutrition. But we don't need to be cleansed of toxins or bad energy or anything of the sort. None of that is the true enemy.

All we need to be cleansed of are the things that set up shop in our minds and lie to us. The things that try to tie our holiness to our worth. The things that put a pricetag on grace.

Turn those tables over.

Scatter that fool's gold to the wind.

The temple is holy because of Who Dwells Within.

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Thank you for reading!

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