Third Sunday of Lent
“Jesus found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money changers and overturned their tables …. He proclaimed ‘Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” Jn. 2: 14-15
The good shepherd. The obedient son at the Cana wedding feast. The kind, gentle prophet who dazzles a woman at a well. The tender healer. The compassionate forgiver. The wonder worker who brings Lazarus back to life.
These all reflect our usual images of Jesus.
Until we hear today’s gospel reading – an event so important that all four gospels include it.
Here we’re presented a portrait of Jesus we’re not familiar with – a Jesus who “made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area;” a Jesus who “spilled the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables;” a Jesus who insists in a loud voice “stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
This is a Jesus we don’t recognize.
Why the sudden change in personality?
Even more puzzling, why intentionally do something that Jesus knew would ultimately lead to his arrest and execution?
The Temple in Jerusalem was the most sacred and hallowed of all places to the Jews at that time. To attack it was to do violence to the very heart of the Jewish people. The Temple represented the ultimate symbol around which everything else revolved, the center not only of their religious life, but of their social and political lives as well.
The temple was THE place where the God of the Mosaic Covenant lived. As such, only in this hallowed building could a pleasing sacrifice be offered to God. Only here could one be forgiven, protected, assured of God’s presence in their midst.
But, there was also a dark side to this temple.
This structure had the singular intention of becoming a place of worship and safety. Instead, it had gradually become, in Jesus’ words, “a marketplace.” What Jesus meant is that this place designed to be the house of God, had eventually become a refuge for thieves.
The temple had given rise to an enormous organization whose members made their living from the temple taxes forced on the poorest rural people. It had become not a sanctuary for worship and community spiritual enrichment, but a place noted for its unabashed idolization of greed, a building that now represented the symbol of everything that oppressed people.
Jesus’ act was a symbolic gesture. His timing was impeccable. He carefully chose the Passover event, the time when each year pilgrims from all over the world gathered in this one place. His radical gesture had the single intent of waking up the Jewish leaders to the emptiness of their sacrificial gestures – sacrifices made on the backs of those least able to endure them.
But Jesus doesn’t just stop at tearing down. He wants to offer a replacement, a new option. His own self. The “temple of his body.”
What Jesus means by that is that the systems of this world, so saturated with the power of money, need to be replaced by a new kind of life offered to all by the resurrection of Jesus. Instead of a religion co-opted by market forces, Jesus offers one in which a new set of values can become operative.
The value system Jesus is presenting is one that will deliver people from bondage to greed and bottomless self-regard. In its place, Jesus wants to build a new kind of temple – in our hearts. A temple that highlights compassion and service and justice and peace and the highest regard for those who cannot fend for themselves.
This new temple Jesus is proposing for all of us is one centered in his Father, enriched by the power of the Spirit, and modeled on that of his own life fully dedicated to the God who, in St. Paul’s words, is “wiser than human wisdom” and “stronger than human strength.”
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
