THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT
(B)
(Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; John
2:13-25)
___________________________________________________________
In
our gospel reading St. John tells us that Jesus drove the merchants out of the
Temple with a whip since they were, He said, dishonouring His ‘Father’s
house’. Saints Matthew and Mark speak of
the same event with greater detail, because Matthew (21:13) tells us that Jesus
declared:
Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of
prayer'? But you have made it a den of
thieves;
while Mark (11:17) agreeing with Matthew, also adds that
Jesus saw His Father’s house as a house of prayer for all
nations.
Thanks therefore to St. Matthew and St. Mark we can now
understand why Jesus so strongly objected to His Father’s house being made, as
John said, into ‘a house of merchandise’: it was because His Father’s house was
meant to be a ‘house of prayer’ and indeed, ‘for all nations’.
When
Solomon consecrated the first Temple to the Lord in Jerusalem we are told (1
Kings 8:29-30) that he prayed:
May your eyes be open toward this temple night and day,
toward the place of which You said, 'My name shall be there,' that You may hear
the prayer which Your servant makes toward this place.
And
so, the Temple was God’s House in so far as His name was there; but God Himself
had His proper dwelling in heaven, as we hear in the book of Deuteronomy (26:15)
and in the prophet Isaiah(Isa 63:15):
Look down from Your holy habitation, from heaven, and
bless Your people Israel and the land which You have given
us.
Look down from heaven, and see from Your habitation,
holy and glorious.
Therefore, in the Temple of Jerusalem there was both a
presence and an absence.
In
Mother Church today, each and every Catholic Church is indeed God’s house, His
Name is there for it is consecrated to Him, and it is truly a house of
prayer. However, as in the Old Testament
the Chosen People were well aware that while His Name was with the Temple, God
dwelt in heaven, so today, there is at times, a feeling of absence for some
Christians as they kneel in their church or chapel because they have abandoned a
supremely important part of their Christian inheritance.
For
Jesus took great care to help His Church, our Catholic Church today, by abiding
with us in Mother Church and in each and every parish church thanks to His gift
of the Eucharist and His Eucharistic Presence.
That presence is a great comfort to all Catholics. However, we cannot take the Eucharistic
Presence with us, the tabernacle remains in the church; and even though we may
have received communion at Mass, nevertheless, that Eucharistic presence of
Jesus in us is but fleeting: it is a
Presence given to us as the supreme channel for the entry of the Spirit of Jesus
into our lives.
If
we live faithfully by Jesus’ Gift of the Spirit, given to us in and through
Mother Church, He, the Spirit, raises us up to a new life in Jesus; and if we
allow the Spirit to form us sufficiently in the likeness of Jesus, Jesus and
even the Father Himself will come, with the Spirit, to dwell in us as in His Temple, as St. Paul
said speaking to his faithful converts:
Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that
the Spirit of God dwells in you?
When
that takes place, People of God, the distance of God is totally transformed into
a presence that is closer to us than we are to ourselves, as the following words
of Jesus I am about to quote will explain.
These are indeed words spoken by Jesus with regard to Himself; but since
the faithful disciple is one with Jesus, a living member of His Body, and in Him
the faithful disciple is being made, by the Spirit of Jesus, into a child of God
in the Son, therefore these words of Jesus about Himself and His Father apply
also to each and every faithful disciple of Jesus according to the degree of
their faithfulness.
Thus, we can experience God’s presence, the Father’s
presence to us, both as a total and comprehensive knowing and being
known:
No one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone
know the Father except the Son (Matthew
11:27);
and
as a tenderness and loving intimacy beyond any possibility of adequate human
comparison or comprehension:
No one has seen God at any time, (but) the only begotten
Son is in the bosom of the Father (John
1:18).
Finally, though having been made fully and at times
painfully aware of our own nothingness and unworthiness, we are also given total
confidence that this treasure, this most wonderful relationship and presence,
this divinely evocative power of knowing and loving, cannot be lost, cannot be
taken from us by any power, or under any circumstance save that of our own
turning away from God:
I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish;
neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. My Father, Who has given them
to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father's
hand. (John 10:28-30)
The
High Priests and the Temple authorities abused God’s presence in the Temple in
as much as they turned the necessary requirements of sacrifice into a profitable
and indeed prolific source of money largely for their own purposes and to their
own advantage. Hence their hatred for
Jesus’ symbolic act which manifested and condemned their excessively financial
involvement in the Temple as distinct from their religious and liturgical
commitments to it.
There is so much for us learn here, People of God, so
much to guide us as individuals in our relationship with and appreciation of
Mother Church.
See
how much ‘official worship’ meant to Jesus!!
Jesus regularly worshipped in His local synagogue with
St. Joseph. The whole family, Jesus,
Mary and Joseph, went to worship in the Temple every Passover. Consider how, when twelve years of age He
became a ‘bar mitzvah’, son of the Law; that is, of age as a Jew to observe the
Law fully; and how, it would appear that that legal ‘coming of age’ led Him to
stay behind in the Temple, delighting in His Father, while His parents were
returning home with the caravan. The
official Jewish liturgy was -- as He thought in the zeal of His youth -- the key
for the determination of His very life-style.
As
an adult Jesus still continued His regular attendance in His local synagogue, he
read there, He healed there, He taught there.
As for His visits to the Temple in Jerusalem we have today’s Gospel
testifying to the dignity He required and indeed demanded for worship in God’s
house!!
As a
Man, however, Jesus also promoted another mode of worship, ‘in Spirit and in
Truth’:
The (Samaritan) woman said to him, "Sir, I can see that
you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people say
that the place to worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Believe Me,
woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this
mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you do not understand; we
worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is
coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit
and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship Him. God is
Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth."
(John 4:19-24)
When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love
to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see
them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go
to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your
Father who sees in secret will repay you. In praying, do not babble like the
pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be
like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. This is how you
are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name … (Matthew
6:5-9)
How
do we reconcile such apparently different if not opposed attitudes: public,
liturgical worship and individual, personal prayer? In a word, by the eminently Christian
relationship of complementarity, springing originally from God’s creation of man
and woman. There is, essentially,
complementarity in both our physical and our spiritual lives.
In
our liturgical and sacrificial public worship of God we, as His children and
brothers and sister in Christ, offer Him acceptable and sincere obedience and
familial praise. In return we receive
His blessings: ultimately the supreme blessing His own beloved Son made man for
us and glorified by His Spirit. That
gift of His Son in our Eucharist still has a glorious ‘physicality’ for us who
are so very much ‘flesh and blood’, physical in our being; and that
physicality of Our Lord in the Eucharist, though passing short in us, is nevertheless a most precious spur to
an ever deeper personal relationship with Him.
His complementary Eucharistic
Gift of the Holy Spirit is however an enduring presence enabling and empowering
us to work at that personal relationship with God established in our oneness
with Jesus, a work which is precisely our prayer life. Thus, we are necessarily nourished by our
public worship and we intimately deepen and develop our oneness with God in our
private, personal, prayer.
What
God, in His great wisdom and goodness has joined together, let not sinful and
misguided men try to separate!
There is such a beautiful harmony in God’s prescriptions
for the fullness of human life; and because Christianity and Catholicism are
being cast-aside in our Western eagerness and lust for present, indeed if
possible immediate, pleasure, plenty and power, the very fabric of our society
is self-destructing and our vision of future blessings has no power to inspire
or unite. Liberty, fraternity, equality
become divisive concepts when understood and coercively applied by ever more
laws discovering and determining criminality, independently and at times in
denial of the Christian teachings of Faith, Hope and Charity.
The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul; the
precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the fear of the Lord is
pure, enduring for ever; these are more precious than gold, than a heap of
purest gold.
