Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Year B

Tohu-Va-Bohu And The Cleansing Of The Temple

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Year B

St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN

Sunday, March 7, 2021

 

On Mount Sinai, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God (Exodus 20: 1-17, but the commandments have over the centuries been divided into two specific categories— commands that order our relationship with God and commands that order our relationship with one another. However, if we look at the Bible as a totality, we will see clearly that the Scriptures give a priority to those commands that deal with God. The Ten Commandments begin with an insistence that the Lord alone is God and there are to be no other gods besides him. Why is it important to worship the God who revealed himself to Moses? The God or gods we worship will most definitely shape our beliefs and practices concerning the moral life, be it the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or the gods of the ancients or the glamor of wealth, power, pleasure, and honor. The deity we place our utmost trust in will direct our lives and determine the choices we make. Now, the Bible’s repeated calls on humanity to renounce its attachments to false gods and false worship and embrace the worship of the one true God might shape the way we interpret the Lord’s actions in the Jerusalem Temple, actions we have come to know as the ‘cleansing of the Temple.” 

Jesus had just performed his inaugural miracle of turning water into wine at Cana in Galilee in John’s Gospel. After that, he travels to Jerusalem for the Jewish feast of Passover. Upon entering the Temple— the sacred center of Israel’s culture and worship, he finds it has become, not a house of prayer, but a “marketplace.” He expected to see people in prayer, levities and priests carrying out their priestly functions, the choir rehearsing songs for worship, and several ministries holding prayer meetings. But what did he see? He saw merchants, traffickers, moneychangers, and people who seem interested in only one thing— making money. It is important to point out that Jesus is not against the rich, nor is he against doing business and making money. His disappointment is the abuse and misuse of the Temple. The people he met there were not ready for religious activity. He saw that the the gods and allures of wealth, power, honor and pleasure have been enthroned in God’s own house. The purpose and the sacredness of the temple was being undermined. If God’s house is treated that way, what does it say about the people? Jesus was amazed at their irreligiousness and their lack of the sense of the scared and mystery. So, he turns over the tables of the moneychangers, disrupts the flow of sacrificial animals which were coming in and being bought by the people and eventually clears and cleans the Temple. 

Some people have interpreted this event as Jesus’ protest against commercialization and materialism in religious practice. They argue that religion should remain radically pure and distanced from the corrupting influence of commerce. While I distaste strongly the practice of using religion as a tool to amass material wealth, I believe there is a more fruitful and profound reading and understanding of Jesus’ actions in the Temple. Jesus cleanses the Temple because it was corrupt and immoral. Do you know what else he wants to cleanse? The individual temples of his Spirit.  St. Paul said that the body of each Christian is a “temple of the Holy Spirit.” By this, he means a place where the one true God is honored and worshipped. We become truly joyful when we become a place where God is first, second and third before anything else. Jesus has come not only to “cleanse the Temple of Jerusalem” but also the temple of your own body, your own life. Everyday, he comes into your own life expecting to find a place ordered to the worship of the one true God. Will he find his temple holy and suitable? Or will he find “a marketplace?” What is a marketplace? It is a place where many things other than God have become primacy. The marketplace is the shrine of secularist ideology which says that we can be perfectly happy with the goods of this world without God. It is the idolatry of politics, of materialism, of commercialization, of pursuit of wealth, of culture wars, of racial tension, and violence. It is the place of tohu-va-bohu— disorder. The marketplace is a place where the false gods of wealth, power, honor and pleasure are worshipped. When this happen, these gods will invade the sacred space of our soul and dominate our soul, for they want to be our gods. They want to be at the altar, shrine and sanctuary of our hearts. 

The third Sunday of Lent calls us to allow Jesus to embark on the temple-cleansing of our souls. The image of the temple-cleansing Christ is a memorable image with enduring power. However, we should not reduce his actions in the Temple to mean only his impatience or protest against the corruption of religious institutions. If we do that, we miss the point. We should bring it home too. Jesus also wants to cleans you, he wants to cleanse me. He wants to rid the temple of our own body idols we have blindly and foolishly given a primary place in our lives.