Lent: Third Sunday, year B: Read: John 2:13-25.
Making ill-gotten gains from the sacred is nothing new. Remember the selling of indulgences which arguably sparked
off the Reformation; remember simony, the selling of the sacraments. One thing is the money necessary for the up-keep of the
institutions and good works of religion; quite another is making of religion, its works and its institutions a marketplace.
Of course, it is not money which is evil, but the human heart, greedy for the power it thinks money can bestow.
The Gospel is filled with warnings of Jesus about the danger of riches, because greed is often matched by a gradual,
practical denial of the need for God or for anyone. When sternly pronouncing His dictum, “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s
and to God what’s is God’s”, Jesus holds money in His hand. Those stern words are reflected in His sterner
action in today’s Gospel. Yet, in the Gospel too Jesus praises those who put money at the service of higher values:
think of the widow’s mite, or of the praise for Mary of Bethany when Judas complains of the cost of ointment used to
anoint the feet of Jesus.
However, you might well argue that Jesus was being unreasonable in today’s Gospel. After all, the law of Moses
established that sacrificial offerings of various animals were to be made in the Temple for different circumstances, especially at Passover, when the lamb was to be sacrificed. How were the people to do
that, especially weary pilgrims, if they could not buy the animals on the spot? Well, the fact is that Passover had become
for many an opportunity to make a quick denarius out of the pilgrims who came to Jerusalem from all over the Middle East and elsewhere. People were short-changed, weights on scales to measure gold, etc.,
were falsified. With the occupation of Jerusalem by the Romans, doing business out on the street was subject to Roman taxes;
yet bringing it into the temple itself meant that the leading religious classes knew exactly what was going on and exacted
their stiff percentage. Jesus was no fool. What ought to have been a solemn and pure-hearted commemoration of the liberation
of the Jews from Egypt at Passover, had become a corrupt business of exploitation. So even just from a moral point of view, His actions
were far from unreasonable.
But the reason for that action is much deeper. His cleansing of the temple is prophetic and symbolic of God’s
power destroying the sin which contaminated humanity; it also symbolized the imminent end of the old Covenant with its sacrifices
and laws (hence the indignation of Jews). Recall that this scene in St. John’s Gospel follows immediately on the Wedding in Cana. St. John’s Gospel is filled with intense symbolism, and the episodes in it are carefully crafted
to help explain each other. Jesus gives the first great sign of His glory at a wedding: and marriage is the symbol He Himself
uses to describe the new and everlasting covenant between God and humanity, not sealed in the blood of animals, but in His
own precious blood, the Lamb of God without blemish. The water of the Old gives way to the wine of the New, freely poured
out to cleanse and purify in the forgiveness of sins. The cleansing of the Temple, then, reveals the divine zeal which consumes
Jesus in His burning desire to free us from sin, to heal us from selling ourselves to greed and its lust for pride and power;
to dispel the fatal illusion of self-sufficiency; and to restore to us that purity of heart by which we can worship the Father
in spirit and truth and love one another with the same self-sacrificing love of Jesus.
Greed consumed the heart of man only because he listened to Satan’s deception. Satan lusted for power so as to
destroy God and take God’s place; to destroy God’s creation, whose chief work of art is man and woman made in
the image and likeness of the Creator. Hence Jesus saw in the Temple that day not just dishonest business; rather He saw Satan’s
destructive greed consuming humanity, and it so disgusted Him that it awakened the inevitable reaction of the depths of his
divine and human natures, the reaction to destroy the Destroyer, which He would accomplish on the Cross but here prefigures
symbolically in the cleansing of the Temple. The Devil’s greed had contaminated humanity, and Jesus now felt as if it
was trying to contaminate Him Himself, for in His human body He had become the new Temple of the living God.
Deep and challenging is the effort to try and understand this zeal, this righteous anger of Jesus, and how it still
is very much alive and kicking in His relationship to each one of us, to His Church as a whole and to humanity as a whole.
For it is wrong to empty the meekness and humility of Jesus of its deep, underlying jealous love for us. Christ is
in love with humanity, and passionately so. His jealousy is obviously not to have what we have or to be what we are, for all
we are and have comes from Him: it is the jealousy of a lover who desires exclusively the total love of the beloved. Clearly,
that does not mean He does not want us to love one another! But it does mean that when we do so, He wants us to do it in the
power of His love and for His love’s sake alone. His zeal to win, keep and protect the love He gives us is what brought
Him down from heaven to die for us. The death of Jesus unleashed for us the veritable deluge of divine mercy which is communicated
to us by the power of the Holy Spirit. So mercy is not just some sweet spiritual elixir, or like a court’s dismissal
of a criminal: it is the power of Christ’s death destroying with the righteous anger of God the sin which contaminates
us. Sin is not some spiritual dirt which clings to our souls; the contamination of sin is that it gradually weakens our openness
to God to the point of making Him irrelevant to our life and death. Sin turns us away from the Light of God and draws us to
an inner spiritual darkness where the Prince of darkness buys and sells us and hoodwinks us into thinking we are asserting
some sort of sovereign independence from God.
If we apply this to the Church as a whole, clearly Jesus is going to be just as zealous in purifying Her of those creeping
compromises which would allow the contamination of darkness to block out His Light. I believe that we must see the uncovering
of the recent scandals in the Church in this country and elsewhere in the light of today’s Gospel, and hence as a time
of truth and grace. Throughout the centuries there have been particular times when Christ has acted through His Spirit and
through the protagonists of history to unmask and to expel sin from the Church, and even to protect humanity itself from Satan’s
over-stretching hand. Such purification of the Church is painful and, for some, humiliating; but it is necessary, because
by it He is being faithful to His promises and to His jealous love for Her, impeding the gates of hell from prevailing against
Her.
Since the consequences of Satan’s and sin’s deception lead to eternal, spiritual death, it is no wonder
that Jesus invests all His passionate zeal to cleanse us of them and to enliven us with His glorious, merciful love. Lent
is the time of grace for us to stop again and try to realize just what Christ’s love for crazy, loveable mankind actually
cost Him. We need to understand the sufferings of Jesus if divine compassion is to be born within us; our own sufferings offer
us a doorway to that. Lent is the time to understand with our guts that the mercy He offers us, especially in the sacrament
of penance, is not some sort of benign nod from an angry judge. Rather it is the almighty force, the almighty “whip”,
if you will, of His zealous and jealous love, channeled to us through the Holy Spirit, and poured out for us by His own death
and Resurrection. The purpose? To drive out of our souls the weary shades of darkness and lighten our footsteps in the joy
of His wonderful Light.
So, as you bring to life in your imagination the cleansing of the Temple, take it as an image of what Jesus desires to do for you personally:
not to beat you to death, but to free you from sin by might of His great loving. You are to become a living temple of prayer
and adoration for the One who was pierced for you. Human nature all too easily accommodates sin and its fascination until
it ends up enslaved, making our hearts and souls a living hell. Join with me and be glad and grateful for the zealous love
of Jesus for your house where He will purify you for ever, gladden you with the new wine of His mercy and where He will sit
you down and serve you with the rich foods of His eternal wedding banquet.
Msgr. Peter Magee
St. Matthew’s
Cathedral
Washington, DC
10.00 am Mass, March
23rd, 2003
