Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Third Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 7, 2021
If last Sunday’s Gospel from Saint Mark, especially the words take up your cross and follow me, was the Lord’s command to the disciple, the call to individual responsibility and self-giving love, then this week’s reading from the second chapter of Saint John’s Gospel is Jesus’ response to the religious system, the corporate community. The lectionary wisely includes both kinds of encounter during Lent. We take up our individual cross in solidarity with a community. We end systemic and communal discrimination when we individually realize that we are complicit in it and decide to stop it.
The repentance asked of us in Lent is both to us as individuals and as members of systems of belief and practice. Jesus’ every act is motivated by and the expression of pure love. That love is action in service to our deepest need at any moment; in tenderness when we are among the sick and outcast, caution when we are entrusted with status and power, and even rebuke when we use our power to exploit and abuse in the name of God. We are culturally conditioned to be in touch with our personal sins, but the communal and systemic sins often hide within norms slowly accepted. The love of Christ works toward the purpose of waking us up and orienting us toward what is true and beautiful about God and ourselves. Just as Jesus’ love is never passive toward the lonely and outcast, so it is never neutral toward attitudes and practices of religious oppression in God’s name. Without hearing the call to awaken and sincere turning, we slide slowly into creating a god to serve us, that suits our agenda, that preserves our security and status. If we persist in our pride, we set that god in the marketplace of our possession. Then we are rattled awake when the tables are suddenly overturned and the currency of our self-preservation start flying.
The titles of stories in the Gospels, long having become commonplace summaries, fail us today. The “Cleansing of the Temple” is a misnomer. No word remotely close to “cleansing” appears in the story. The verbs are actually much more interesting than mere cleansing, and stronger: drove out, poured out, overturn. Jesus was actually making a mess rather than cleaning up a mess. His behavior is not intended to tidy up a slightly unseemly violation of Temple etiquette. He disrupts the business of the Temple itself. The story might more accurately be called “the closing of the Temple”. If the money cannot be changed and animals cannot be purchased, then sacrifices cannot be offered and the purpose of Passover, of the building itself, comes to a screeching halt.
The people are going about business as usual. This is all just what happens at Passover. Yet Jesus sees into the spiritual heart of people and a place. The Temple, the meeting place of heaven and earth, the presence of God to God’s people, to all people, was intended to be an outward and visible sign of God’s covenant faithfulness, the sacrifices and rituals an expression of the obedience and thanksgiving of the people for God’s salvation. Jesus is angered by the desecration of a place that has forgotten its purpose, grown casual about the God who has authored that purpose. Rather than the remembrance of God’s mighty acts, of God’s steadfast faithfulness, it has descended into the mere mechanical routine of sacrifice.
Jesus is inherently skeptical toward institutions. He knows that power in the hands of a few or one bends towards complacency and corruption. He knows how strong is the lust toward legalism, judgment, and self-preservation that stifles the presence of the Holy Spirit. He knows our sin takes the form of making places and objects and rituals ends in themselves. How easily the outward and visible can replace the inward and spiritual. And yet we need and must have structures to contain our growth. There is no inward and spiritual grace without the outward and visible sign. Zeal, then, is the honest willingness to see into how the outward is becoming inward, how things and words and customs are being held reverently and humbly.
The closing of the temple is about replacement rather than abolition. Heaven has indeed come down to earth. God does and will meet us. But not in a building, but in Christ now in our very bodies. The root of sin is the avoidance of accepting the gift of being God’s temple, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit within us. The cry to repent that arises from the wrecked tables and frightened animals and scattered coins is to life, in Christ, as God’s temple. To repent is to bring back into myself the central place of God’s dwelling and accept the invitation to be incarnate. Jesus is saying, do not outsource to any person, practice, building, ritual, or institution the role of being God’s temple for you. Do not give away your identity, avoid your responsibility, seek to appease God with sacrifices, worship the worship – and thus not worship God as the very place where God dwells. Where our lives have become routine, abstract, disembodied, repentance is coming home to ourselves as wondrous, sacred beings. All the stones of all the churches ever built over two millennia cannot contain, will never possess, the value of each of our bodies.
Amen.
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