3rd Sunday of Lent

From the creation of the cosmos to this very moment and until the end of time, God in his infinite love and fidelity has given us every gift and blessing.

He has revealed himself in surprising and profound ways and never more so then in the law, given to Moses as the Ten Commandments and most completely in the fulfillment of that law; the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In both the commandments and Jesus God gave us the way and the means to our salvation.

 

The Ten Commandments  (three for love of God and seven for love of neighbor) are so well known that we sometimes take them for granted.  They have become trivialized either by making them saccharin platitudes or narrowly defined goals, but they are neither.

 

The Ten Commandments are not the end of our obligation to God's covenant, but the beginning, the groundwork, of our daily ethical and moral life, it is our daily response to God's call to love him more deeply and to love another more unreservedly, especially the poor and the marginalized.

 

These ten things are not facts to memorize or a list to keep in order, they are not rules to confine us by their narrow observance, they are to expand us as we live them in their deepest and widest aspect. God never restricts us, but gives us opportunity upon opportunity to grow ever more human.

 

Jesus taught that the commandments are an invitation to turn the table on what the world expects of us. They surprise us and compel us to act beyond our complacency or the ok routine we fall into. They remind us that faith is not settling in and locking the doors behind us, but opening them wide to all in need.

 

The Temple in Jesus' time had become more of a gate keeper, hiding God within and keeping those that searched for God outside.

 

Jesus knew that the law and the temple was not about restriction and exclusion, but about possibility and inclusion. He showed this in his life by touching the untouchable, table fellowship with tax  collectors, forgiveness and friendship with prostitutes, hanging out with fishermen and not Pharisees.

He spoke clearly about expansion and inclusion of the Law in the Sermon on the Mount when he said you have heard it said, you shall not commit murder, but I tell you shall not be angry with a brother or sister.

 

The Temple system had become the sign of this narrowness and exclusion. It had become spiritually bankrupt and caught up in the precision its cultic practices. 

The of course, Temple worship was correct and fruitful in its way.  Each group of worshippers had their proper place or court; men, women, the Gentiles.

The sacrificial system ran smooth with its money changers, turning Roman coin into Temple currency, and its sellers of approved sacrificial animals.

But, in all this hustle and bustle something was lacking or forgotten or ignored. It was too much business as usual.

 

Jesus, as a sign of this complacency within God's own house choose to physically disrupt that routine business of worship. In the Spirit (the same Spirit that drove him into the wilderness" Jesus drove off the money changers and the sellers.

 

Those in authority asked Jesus what was the meaning of this. What gave Jesus the right to interfere with the temple. Show us a sign.

Jesus tells them – destroy this temple and in three days. I will raise it up.

 

Nobody understood what he meant.  They thought he meant the concrete temple.

 It would not be until the resurrection of Jesus that the disciples in the Holy Spirit that they had received from Jesus, remembered that day the event and understood he was speaking about his body.

They came to believe after Easter that the temple was no longer the house of God.

God was and is present in Jesus himself and now, through the Holy Spirit, in his body, the mystical Body of Christ, the Church. 

Not in the brick and mortar church. God is present not in cement, in her sacraments, and in her choices and actions, aligned to the fulfilled commandants.

And, because the ordinary and the routine is not good enough, not nearly good enough a response to God's gift of his Son for our Salvation,

not a good enough response to the commandment, to honestly love God and selflessly love neighbor ( including our enemies, if we believe Jesus)

We must go beyond the expected and routine to respond to God's love for us.

Nothing less than a total commitment to love, by our committed lives of Faith, Hope and Charity.

 

 

We as Church, in our liturgies and in our community, and individual Christians, in our daily lives, should imagine Jesus not only cleaning out the Jerusalem temple, but also cleansing our own inner temple, challenging us to expand our idea of faith and embrace kindness and mercy as the norm, to go beyond the routine obligations to find the deeper meaning of what it means to be loved by God and what our human response should be to that amazing infinite gift.

 

We need to realize that the Law of Moses, even the Church herself, as important and essential as she is not the end point – is only the beginning.

She is not where we rest on our laurels, but where we roll up our sleeves to do the necessary work.

Jesus always reminds, gently and not so gently, that it is not the routine habit that matters but the depth, the truth that lies beneath and beyond the ordinary response -

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so we might have life.