Who or what are the money changers in the temple of your heart?

 

Third Sunday of Lent  B  2024

In today’s Gospel, Jesus throws the money changers out of the Temple.  Jesus literally upsets the temple customs of his day and then invites the people around Him to change their idea of where God’s true dwelling is soon to be found.  Rather than a holy place of prayerful encounter with God, the temple precincts had begun to resemble a marketplace, and Jesus’ actions registered loudly and clearly as a prophetic protest against the exploitation of the temple and the people of Israel.  Jesus is clear about “His Father’s house” being a place of prayer and covenant, a place where God dwells.

 

As this Gospel is proclaimed in our hearing, we are prompted to wonder what the returning Jesus may find needs cleansing or replacing both in our personal spirituality and in our celebration of Sunday Eucharist.

 

First, in our personal spirituality, what attitudes, preoccupations, or desires do you bring to your prayer and life that Christ would “drive out” if you would let him?

 

In other words, what needs to be driven out of your inner temple for you to have zeal for God?  From what do you need to repent in this Lenten season?  As we pray over the Gospel, can we listen to the echo of the confrontation of Jesus that addresses the temples of our present day lives?   Who or what are the moneychangers in your Temple?  Is it greed, an excessive preoccupation with our possessions, is it the way we deal with the setbacks in our life, can we let go of an anger we feel toward a particular person, or is it our inability to focus on what is really important in our life?  

 

This gospel passage illustrates the anger of Jesus.  Most of us were taught that anger is a negative emotion and therefore wrong.  At our best, we are to count to ten and hope the anger in us subsides a bit.

Jesus is raising the question of justifiable anger.  When is it ok to say enough is enough, and we need to stand up for what is right.

What do we do with our own anger?  Is it part of our spirituality or is the result of a lack of spirituality?  The saying:  he is an angry young man.  This usually the person is a bit off-center.

Now mind you many times our anger throws us off center and there is nothing virtuous about that, but on the other hand there is appropriate and justifiable anger that should not be swept under the rug.    

  

Jesus purified the Temple.  During Lent He invites us to purify the temples of our hearts.

In our Lenten journey, we seek to repent and be faithful to the gospel.  We pray that our spiritual disciplines lead us to the conversion of knowing Jesus more deeply in our hearts and to glorify the Lord in the way we live our lives.

Secondly, what kind of cleansing does Jesus wish in do in the celebration of our Sunday Eucharist?

Perhaps Jesus would suggest there is room for improvement in having more lector training, would he suggest that the homilists are a bit long winded at times, or the choir music could be reviewed and improved?

 

Or would Jesus be convicted that there are bigger fish to fry in evaluating our liturgies?

 

Would he point out the discrepancies between the prayers we say and the way we live our life?   Do we walk our talk in witnessing to the love of the compassionate Jesus?  He might ask if we come together to be entertained or to be edified.  I sometimes hear the comment:  “Father I don’t get anything out of Mass.”  Do we gather at Sunday Eucharist to get or to give?  Should our focus be on our desire to give praise and thanks to our God?   I wonder if there is a direct connection between God’s predilection for the poor and our own?  Would he see us translating this concern for the poor into generous giving and authentic service toward God’s least ones?   This needs to be the defining characteristic of ourselves as a Eucharistic community.

 

But the dramatic action of Jesus – driving out the merchants and moneychangers – is not the most shocking feature of this Sunday’s Gospel.  Not only does Jesus cleanse the Temple, he declares that he himself replaces it.  The place of God’s presence among His people is not a building but ‘the temple of his body.’  In Jesus, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist,  we encounter the living God.  The real priority of our lives is our covenant relationship with God.  Our relationship with God is measured by how well we pattern our lives after Jesus in dying to ourselves for the good of others so that we might rise with the Risen Lord.  As believers and followers of Jesus our own bodies are also temples of the Holy Spirit.  God dwells not only in this building, but also in us who are the living Temples of the Spirit of Jesus.  May we always reverence the presence of Christ that we experience in our sharing with one another.

 

Have a Blessed Day.