LENT III-B

LENT III-B

Exodus 20: 1-17;: 1 Corinthians 1: 22-25;Gospel: John 2: 13-25

Like the desert on the first Sunday of Lent and the mountain last Sunday, the Temple is a place of special encounter with God this Sunday. But today we do not see the glorious face of Jesus; we see his angry face. Jesus is not happy with what he sees precisely because the way the Temple worship has been organized no longer reflects God’s original idea of a worshipping community.

This cleansing of the temple was a prophetic act. The authorities knew this instinctively. They did not get Jesus arrested, or arrange for Jesus to get beaten up by the security. The authorities asked 'What sign can you show us?' As St.Paul said in the second reading today “the Jews look for signs” and the Greeks for wisdom to verify whether it is from God.

The buying, selling, and money changing that went on in the Temple area had long been happening there, and for good reason. According to Old Testament law, pilgrims to the Temple had to make animal offerings to the priests, who would sacrifice them on the pilgrims' behalf. Strict rules governed the qualifications of these animal victims - not just any animal would do. Therefore, businesses cropped up that specialized in making the right beasts easily available. Likewise, pilgrims came from all over the civilized world, and brought money of different currencies. These had to be weighed, valued, and exchanged in order to be used for purchasing the sacrificial victims. But through the years, gradually, greed and corruption had infiltrated even these sacred services. By the time of Christ, the moneychangers were demanding excessive fees, and the animal vendors were wildly overcharging. In this way, what was meant to be heartfelt service to God had become a path to worldly success.


If they took all that trouble to please God in worship, why couldn’t they take the trouble to investigate the claims of Jesus rather than condemn him so readily? For them pleasing God had become something you do in the rituals of the Temple and not in your relationship with people. This kind of religiosity makes Jesus really angry.
A story is told of a priest who was coming back to his parish house one evening in the dark only to be accosted by a robber who pulled a gun at him and demanded, “Your money or your life!” As the priest reached his hand into his coat pocket the robber saw his Roman collar and said, “So you are a priest? Then you can go.” The priest was rather surprised at this unexpected show of piety and so tried to reciprocate by offering the robber his packet of cigarettes, to which the robber replied, “No, Father, I don’t smoke during Lent.” You can see how this robber is trying to keep the pious observance of not smoking during Lent while forgetting the more fundamental commandment of God, “Thou shalt not steal.”

The second reason why Jesus was mad with the Temple priests was their practice of religious particularity over against universality, of exclusiveness over inclusiveness. Some knowledge of the design of the Temple will help us here. The Temple had five sections or courts: (1) holy of holies (2) court of priests (3) court of Israel (4) court of women (5) court of Gentiles. The court of Gentiles was no longer regarded as part and parcel of the house of God, it had become a market place. Now it was this court of Gentiles that Jesus cleansed. In so doing he was making the point that the Gentile section was just as holy as the Jewish sections. God is God of all and not God of a select group. Like the Jews of the time of Jesus, some Christians today still think that God belongs to them alone and not to others as well. So this cleansing of the temple is about allowing non-Jews to worship along with Jews. The psalms in particular express the great hope that the temple would be for all the peoples. This was one of the great expectations of the coming of the Messiah, the Saviour of God's people, so that all the peoples would worship the one true God.

Throughout the Gospels, there are only a few times when Jesus acts out in righteous anger. Each of those times, he does so to condemn hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is what Jesus hates: appearing to be one thing on the outside, but actually being something else entirely on the inside. That's exactly what the Temple officials were doing. Not truthful in their heart to God.

We easily find ways to make other people think that we are exemplary Catholics, that we have it all together, while on the inside we still seek the kingdom of "me" rather than the Kingdom of Christ.

St John of Kanty, the great Polish professor and priest who died on Christmas Eve in 1473, was another saint who loved the truth. Once he was making a pilgrimage to Rome, on foot, carrying all of his provisions in a shoulder sack. While passing through a forest, he was surrounded by robbers who took all his possessions. Before they left, they asked him if he had anything else they could take, and he said no, they had already taken everything. So the robbers let him go. But before too long, he remembered that he had a few gold coins sewed into his clothes, for emergencies. So he turned around and rushed back to find the robbers. When he found them, he explained that he had not told them the truth - he still had some gold coins that they could take. They were so shocked, and shamed, by this extraordinary sincerity that they not only refused to accept the gold coins, but they restored to him everything they had stolen. He felt to be truthful even to those who violently took what belonged to him.

If God is truth, and if we want to stay close to God and live in the peace and wisdom that God brings, we also have to live in the truth. Only that can bring communion with God.

Jesus wants our friendship, because the only place we can find the fulfillment and satisfaction we yearn for is in communion with God. And he wants this for us so much, that sometimes he goes to extreme measures in order to cleanse the temple of our hearts. Many times, this is why he permits suffering in our lives. When we suffer, we are forced out of our comfort zone; we learn our limitations; we discover that the promises of this world's politicians, advertisers, and self-help gurus just don't hold up under pressure. When that happens, we can become more open to hearing God's voice, to stop pretending that we don't really need God and start leaning more completely on God.

But Jesus doesn't want to have to resort to extreme measures all the time. And so, he gives us another option, an ongoing opportunity for us to work with him in cleansing out the temple of our hearts. It's called confession. The sacrament of reconciliation is a voluntary cleansing of the temple. As Christians, our hearts are the real temple of God - the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Trinity dwell within us. But our sins and selfish actions and habits can turn that temple into a place of confusion, noise, and tension, instead of one where we encounter God and discover his love. Whenever we make a good confession, we give Jesus free entrance into our hearts, so that he can cleanse them, and fill them up again with the light and strength of his friendship.

Destroy this temple, and in three days I will restore it, said Jesus. "This temple," said Meister Eckhart, "is the human soul, which God has made exactly like Himself, just as we read that the Lord said: 'Let us make humankind in our image and likeness' (Genesis 1:26)…. So like Himself has God made the human soul that nothing else in heaven or on earth, of all the splendid creatures that God has so joyously created, resembles God so much as the human soul." Everything unworthy of God has to be cast out from the temple of our soul. This is for all seasons, but it has a special resonance in the season of Lent. Let’s abstain from anything that goes against the holiness of the place of God.