When I was still teaching, I would ask my students if Jesus ever sinned. Inevitably, someone referenced the account from today’s Gospel. In these verses, we read how Jesus, “made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area” (Jn 2:15). Jesus is not sinning here, rather, he is acting in line with prophetic tradition. Jesus is making a bold spectacle to drive home the point that the temple is not a “marketplace” or a “den of thieves” but it is to be a place of worship and right praise to his Father.
We can see prophetic echoes from Zechariah 14:21 where he prophesied that there would be a time when there would no longer be “merchants in the house of the LORD of hosts” and Jeremiah 7:11 where Jeremiah asked, “Has this house which bears my name become in your eyes a den of thieves? I have seen it for myself!” Jesus not only places himself in the line of prophets and professes their words from God, he acts like them in make such bold statements. There is a difference though.
Greater still than the temple, is the people of God. Further down in the text, when those present ask for a sign to justify this act, Jesus said: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19). John makes the point clear that Jesus was pointing to his body as the temple of God and referring to his Resurrection to come. Jesus is the new temple and he is establishing a new covenant.
The temple, the house of God, believed to be the corporal presence, the very seat of God among his people, Israel, was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. This left a tremendous spiritual, political, and social vacuum. Two groups that were intimately tied to the sacrificial cult of the temple, the Sadducees and the Essenes, very soon after the destruction, ceased to exist as a sect within Judaism. The Pharisees, who already were moving to a practice of home worship that mirrored the worship in the temple, would survive and be the ancestral root of different expressions of Judaism today. Another sect would also arise as the followers of the new way of Jesus which became the Church, “God’s building” and “the temple of God”.
After Jesus’ death and resurrection, his rising after the third day, Jesus becomes the first born of the new creation. Those who are baptized do not just gather in a church, they are the Church, the temple of God.
Each one of us has a unique part to play in the Church. We are called to bear witness and practice, in our own unique way, our faith in our everyday experiences. We may be the only church someone ever enters and the only Bible someone ever reads. This call to put our faith into action is not an invitation to be overwhelmed by nor an excuse to assume a posture of elitism. We are no better than anyone else.
Pope Leo recently said to students participating in the Jubilee of the World of Education: “How wonderful it would be if one day your generation were remembered as the ‘generation plus,’ remembered for the extra drive you brought to the Church and the world.” May we all hear these words, seek and follow Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and allow his truth and his love to shape and transform our lives. When we are willing to encounter and walk together, we learn and grow from one another. We are also less apt to keep other at a distance and become more willing to draw close.
We need to resist all that contributes in any way to the dehumanization, division, hate, and violence by rooting ourselves in Jesus, the living Temple. In doing so, we will become aware that we ourselves are temples of the Holy Spirit. In spending consistent time in silence, prayer, meditation, study, worship, and service, we not only purify our temple, we better know God and his will, become conformed to and empowered by the love of Christ to be instruments of peace, contemplatives in action, and advocates for healing and reconciliation in a wounded and weary church, politics, country, and world.
Photo: God speaks to us in many ways when we give ourselves time to be still, breathe, and look up.
Spiritual Stepping Stones 