The Third Sunday of Lent, B

      It is amazing how much is really packed into the Gospels, and by that I mean more, much more, than events and facts; but rather, too, there is lots and lots of theology.  The Gospels after all are first and foremost theological tracts – the story of Jesus of Nazareth that is the key to understanding who God really is and what He is like.  If you were to sit down and begin to read through these early, historically grounded, Christian documents, you would soon become aware of the wealth of knowledge that is offered to us, but with each Gospel (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) stressing different aspects of this One called the Christ. 

      The Gospel of Matthew, for example, meticulously portrays Jesus Christ as the complete fulfillment of all the Old Testament prophecies concerning the coming of the Jewish Messiah; Matthew is quite earnest in his portrait of Jesus that He is indeed the fulfillment of all the hopes of Israel, presenting the Lord to the Jewish people as the culmination of God’s covenant with them.  Mark’s Gospel is different in this sense:  he consistently presents to us Jesus of Nazareth as One who gets things done, moving quickly from one scene to the other, painting a portrait of our Lord that would definitely appeal to the Romans – those no nonsense people, so practical in their approach to life (something very much like we Americans).  The evangelist Luke, however, was not a Jew, nor a Roman; he was a Greek, and his Gospel stresses things that would appeal more directly to the Greek mind.  And so he reveals the Savior as that Perfect Man, the One who reveals to us what our humanity is really like, or should be, emphasizing our Lord’s encounters with different individuals, especially women, as a beautiful means of displaying His perfection.  And finally, John, whose Gospel is the most developed of all, and the most universal.  John is at pains to open our eyes to the wonder of the divine origin of Jesus Christ:  that He is the divine Son of God, who has taken on human flesh to dwell among us; He is the Light of the world, the Bread of Life, the Good Shepherd, He who was with the Father from all eternity, born in time of the flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

      But one constant theme you will discover in the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – and that is Jesus’ nearly constant references to His Father.  He has come to do fully the will of the Father.  He often slips away in solitude to pray to His Father, and teaching His disciples, at their request, to pray, as Christ does, the prayer beginning with those words, “Our Father….”  Christ’s work, His very sustenance is to do the will of the One who sent Him.

      In today’s Gospel passage, we find our Lord doing something so seemingly out of character with the image that some people – not having studied the Gospels – have made of Him:  He goes up to Jerusalem and there enters the temple where He found “those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money changers seated there.  He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, ‘Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.’”  St. Luke is even more graphic in reporting our Lord’s rebuke:  “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.”  This is hardly the effeminate Jesus so popularly appealed to when moderns want to escape the kind of judgment today’s Gospel reveals Jesus perfectly capable of exercising. 

      That is, in today’s Gospel we find our Lord angry, but at what? – that merchants, money changers and company were swindling each other in the temple courts?  No, rather, I think the robbery going on here was not so much a matter of false weights and measures and artificially inflated prices; the robbery going on here was that something that should have been given to God the Father was being denied God. 

      What is a temple for?  Obviously, for worship and for the sacrifice that must accompany and be an integral aspect of that worship.  And for the Catholic that means that the house of God, the Church, is where we raise our minds and hearts to God where the eternally efficacious Sacrifice of Calvary is re-presented and becomes the means of our offering ourselves, our sacrifice of praise, to God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.  “Lift up your hearts,” the priest celebrant beckons the people of God, and they answer, “We lift them up to the Lord.”

      The culpable failure to do this, the human being’s highest obligation, is the cause of Christ’s wrath.  And to persist in this dereliction of noble duty is to invite a whip of cords that drives one from the holy place, from the place of encounter with God.  Thus, Christ’s anger and “violence.”  Strange, isn’t it, His infinite patience with the sins all around Him, His compassion for the adulteress, His sympathy with the doubting, His outstretched hand to the often treasonous tax collector; and yet here, in the House of Prayer, He pulls no punches. 

      The difficulty for people of today is the same as in Christ’s time:  they’d rather be in the marketplace than in the temple.  And if they must needs go to the temple – out of habit, custom, or conscience – they’d prefer to bring the marketplace with them:  a worldly importation graphically revealed in some churches were worship has become, unabashedly, American-style entertainment.  And people gravitate to such a show, because that’s where their heart really is, in the marketplace, chained to the requirements that lead to worldly success.  Worship of God becomes a luxury and an extravagance, when in reality it is the thing closest to our nature as human beings.  Buying and selling, the movement of money, the daily round of work, the advancement in career, recreation and entertainment, in themselves, are all good things, but they are not near the highest.  That’s reserved for God.   And our Lord’s anger, His purifying violence should give us pause, remind us of this our most elevated human obligation and privilege:  to draw near to God in His temple, to raise our hearts to Him, to acclaim His praise and glory, and so be fulfilled in the deepest recesses of our being, having bowed the knee to one’s Creator, and in worship having come to know God more and more and to love the Lord and to taste here the glory of His presence always with us – that glory that He has promised only to those who worship Him in spirit and in truth.