Zeal for Your House
Tables crashing. Animals scurrying. Merchants skedaddling. And Jesus brandishing a makeshift whip.
The “Cleansing of the Temple,” which happens to be our Gospel reading for the Third Sunday of Lent in Year B, is absolutely one of the most stunning incidents from the life of Jesus, captured in some respect in all four Gospels. However, John’s account stands out in the way it makes theological claims: the incident in the Temple is tied to Jesus’s nature as the Son of God and to a prediction of his death and resurrection. This association is important for us as we celebrate this season of Lent, as we are called to a cleansing of our own.
Those around the Temple who witness the incident are shocked, asking Jesus, why do you think you have the authority to do this? This is the Temple, God’s House, after all. Such an action could only have been done by someone with serious prophetic credentials — Elijah, for instance. Jesus responds with something that goes right over their heads:
“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
Of course, why would they be thinking about a Temple other than the one they’re standing in? Here, Jesus associates his own body with the Temple, both places in which God is truly present.
As we readers know after the fact, Jesus’s “temple,” his body, was destroyed and rose again after three days, and the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Romans, never to be rebuilt, as rabbinic Judaism took the place of Temple worship. But does all this mean that Jesus doesn’t care about the Temple itself? Of course not; why else would Jesus take such a drastic action? Both as the Son of God and someone immersed in Jewish practice, Jesus knew that the Temple was the place of worship dedicated to his Father, and so to see the temple corrupted by petty commerce (and perhaps even idolatry) must have been infuriating — enough so to pick up cords and flip tables. The Temple was in need of a “cleansing” to return it to its ordained purpose: the worship of God. In this passage, John also reminds us that Jesus himself becomes the new Temple. In driving the moneychangers out of the Temple, with the temple having been restored to righteousness, Jesus is now free to establish himself as the the place where God dwells.
Especially during this season of Lent, as we prepare to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, this imagery is so important for us. What is it that is supposed to be cleansed, to be restored to right relationship with God? First, our hearts. Our First Reading for this week is taken from the Book of Exodus, Chapter 20, in which God declares his presence on Sinai and gives Moses the 10 Commandments, as well as the rest of the Law. The Ten Commandments offer us a model for what right relationship, a “cleansed temple,” would look like — in the first three with God, in the last seven with other people. As God says, “I, the LORD, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt…” we are reminded of God’s continual providence in our lives and God’s continual presence among us, and from this comes our responsibility to trust God. In our baptism, we ourselves also become temples in which God can dwell, but so often our hearts become hard, corrupted by ignorance, vice, and sin. How can we allow God to more deeply enter our lives? What areas of our life are we hesitant to hand over to God? Which idols do we allow to take precedence? As Jesus clears out and restores the temple, we ask him to do the same to our hearts.
With our own hearts renewed by God, we can turn our attention to the world, such as the final seven commandments call us to do. Our world, the place in which God comes to dwell with us, is in need of a cleansing in so many ways. All of creation, which we know is “very good,” has become corrupted as well, as a consequence of the corruption in our hearts. Our home, the earth, suffers as a result of continued pollution and climate change due to unchecked industrialization and our own indifference toward God’s handiwork. The call to an “ecological conversion” is not separate from our Lenten observence, but instead should be part of it. As Pope Francis reminds us in Laudato Si,
[T]he ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion…Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience. (§217)
Of course, our communities and families need to be cleansed as well. A variety of evils keep us from living together as the children of God we are called to be: poverty and economic exclusion, violence of all kinds, abortion, racism, homelessness, capital punishment, euthanasia, and so many more. All of these are affronts to our nature as bearing the image and likeness of God. In our first reading for this Sunday, taken from Exodus, we hear the Ten Commandments given to Israel, ways to give to God what is God’s and to humans what is due to them in justice. How can we improve our relationships with other people? How can we stand up for God’s image in each one of us and creation? If we can rededicate our hearts to God, allowing God to purify us, we can begin to cleanse our world and our families as well, making a fitting place for God to dwell among us.
As we continue through Lent, let us remember our call to continual conversion, to allow our hearts to be cleansed by the presence of Christ.
