A priest was watching a photocopier work and he thought to himself, “This is what a parish is supposed to do – make other copies of Christ.”
As we continue our journey of discipleship, we have so far covered two topics. The first was how we are called through our Baptism to be disciples of Christ. The second was a disciple is one who accepts the love of God, God’s amazing love. It is good to define our terms again about what a disciple is. A disciple is one who engages in the mission of Christ. What is His mission? It is twofold: Love God with our whole being and our neighbour as ourselves. The second part is to make disciples of all nations.
This week in our journey we will look at God’s passion for us and how He wants to affirm that we are temples made in the image of His very self, but He may have to clean that temple.
We hear many stories about the nice Jesus and how He never offended or challenged anyone. How He never got excited. Well, it is true that Jesus was and is very kind to repentant sinners, but He was definitely hard on those who didn’t think that they were in a state of sin.
In today’s Gospel, we have the cleansing of the temple. It is really amazing to see this passion of Jesus but even more amazing is that no one was really able to contend with him. Not only did He drive them out, He also stayed there to make sure they did not come back. So fierce was Jesus that the temple guards and police did not attempt to arrest him. That is passion, that one man would hold off the army of soldiers and guards. When He was fierce, He was really fierce. Jesus had passion for His Father’s house, a place where His Father was to be worshipped, not greed and sin. Jesus is just as fierce for your soul and mine as He was for His Father’s house. He desires passionately to cleanse them and He even died to make that possible. We have gotten to these hard places in life because we are not living in the honesty that God has called us to. Most of us don’t want people to see what we really are. We have Facebook to show people what we want to be and not who we really are. We are almost afraid of who we are. It is actually the ugliness of sin that makes us feel that way. Just as Adam and Eve did once they had sinned against God, they hid. We all hide because of sin, but this is why we need to embrace Jesus in His passion for our house. In truth, we are more concerned about looking good than actually being good.
It is amazing to think how many treasures there are out there that are disgusting or unrecognizable when we first come across them. People have chanced upon things that are worth millions. One fellow I heard found a Harley Davidson in a junk yard and when he went to buy parts for it found out it had belonged to Elvis Presley. Do you know that each and every one of us is a great find, that we are of unimagined value and are a temple of God? Like the temple of today’s Gospel, it was the Holy House of God and yet it was full of sin and animals, full of greed and pride and so Jesus cleaned it out with great passion, like He wants to do with us. It is like the Samaritan woman that finds Jesus at the well. She really is a treasure, yet no one would not think of her as one. She had been married five times and perhaps was even with another man. Yet Jesus finds her and she meets finally the man who can see who she really is, a treasure, a temple, not a tool. You and I thirst for that, for someone to really love us for who we are.
I find it very interesting as a priest in Confession because whenever I hear, “Father, I am a pretty good person,” I know to be prepared to hear some really serious sins. You see, we don’t often want to look really closely at our lives because we are scared of the truth. We need to look though and look honestly at our lives, our wounds with Jesus so He can re build us and help us discover who we really are. This is called an Examination of Conscience and we must be doing this to become a disciple.
We are often led into great trouble because of money, just think of the sellers and money changers in the temple. I am sure they did not set out to be corrupt but they were corrupt. They were stealing from people, conning people who were required to worship God. We think we would never get that way, yet if we look honestly in our lives, money has made us make poor decisions, things that we would never do we have done for money. Often in society we are in debt because we want to look good and show people something that we are but we are not doing well. It is expensive to be who you are not.
I remember in high school growing up how much of a challenge it was to accept that my family wasn’t rich. I tried so hard to pretend we were well off but we weren’t. Why did it matter? Because I wasn’t satisfied with whom I was. I did not see myself as God did. I let worthless things define me when I really had it made. You see the poorest we can be is spiritually poor because it makes us feel like we are not worth anything. If I could go back and change anything, I would not choose to be rich but I would choose to know the love of God and pray for the grace to be myself.
This is Jesus’ greatest passion: to love you and to clean our temple and to stop making our temple a den of thieves. Stop allowing a world that doesn’t love you and me to define us. You see, if we put our worth into money it will always be stealing our worth. Sin makes us want to hide and not be ourselves. What is sin? Sin is missing the mark. Any participation in sin harms us and makes us vulnerable to spiritual bankruptcy. God has made a law and that law guards our dignity, to help us to claim who we are and know who we are through a proper lens. Formally the sins are categorized under the Ten Commandments. If we follow them, we can keep our house clean and live honest lives where we know who we are. We can’t, of course, follow the Commandments of the Church without grace.
The Commandments seem rather harsh, like a health inspector walking in your house and telling you to clean up your place, but you don’t care about health and you only do it because it is the law. This is the shift we have to make when being a disciple, that we understand that the spiritual health inspector isn’t punishing us but looking to bless us, looking for ways to show us our dignity and restore God’s image in us. Jesus wanted the people of the Gospel to experience the blessing of the temple, not to be condemned because of their work in the temple. Today I challenge you to look at yourself. Go and make a serious examination of your conscience. Ask God to be able to see yourself rightly to remove sins from your life.
The reason they had to have money changers in the temple is because the regular money had an image of a false god on it and it had to be exchanged for something that didn’t. Money is the currency of the world. It is how the world trades and determines value. But it is meant for things, not for people, and all money has an image stamped on it to help determine its value. You and I have an image stamped on us, the very image of God. That is what is meant to determine our value. Today we are reminded that God wants us to be cleansed from the false worth of the world, to cease being defined by the thing that was made to define things and to be defined by the true image stamped on us. You see, we were religious consumers because we had the wrong thing defining us. Now we know we are an image of God and that image is a disciple. Find your hidden treasure, your hidden disciple, and clean your temple this Lent.
Each day we should examine ourselves daily on three things:
- See what pleased God and ask for more.
- See what sorrowed God and ask for the grace to overcome it.
- Ask God what He is calling us to do each day.