St. John Lateran Basilica (32nd
Sunday)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Lay Carmelites/OLR, NOLA
Jesus
arrives in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. He goes to the temple
and finds a thriving flea market – a bazaar for selling sacrificial
animals, and bankers exchanging common money for temple cash. In a
rage, he pulls out his whip, and yells, “Take these out of here,
and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” John notes that
the disciples immediately recall Psalm 69.9: “Zeal for your house
will consume me.” And the Jews, they ask for a sign. Jesus tells
them to destroy “this temple,” and he will raise it again in
three days. Many years later, Paul, while questioning the ignorance
of the Corinthian church, teaches us that we are the temples of God
and that the Spirit of God dwells within us. He says, “Brothers and
sisters, you are God’s building…If anyone destroys God’s
temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which
you are, is holy.” How do we, the holy temples of God, turn our
temples into marketplaces, into buildings that serve commerce rather
than God? And, how do we drive out the unclean merchants and restore
our temples to their proper purpose?
In
an angelic vision, Ezekiel is shown that the temple is the center of
life-giving water and fruit, the heart of the nation to which and
from which the waters of the world flow, “Wherever the river flows,
every sort of living creature that can multiply shall live,” and
there will be God’s abundance. For our ancestors in faith, the
temple was more than a church, more than a place to gather. The
temple was the dwelling place of the Most Holy, the physical site
of Heaven touching Earth. No wonder then Ezekiel is shown the temple
as a source of life and abundance! And no wonder Jesus is furious
with the mercantile desecration of its holy purpose.
It
is not great leap to the 21st century and our own
contemporary desecrations of God’s holy temples: how do we profane
the dignity of the human person in name of profit and entertainment?
How do we collaborate with those who would set up shop in our
temples? Think about the ways our culture commercializes the body.
Think about our ever-failing social norms for sex, eating, drinking,
dressing. Think about how we are manipulated into lending our temples
to these marketplaces, selling our finest bodies to the lowest bidder
at the auction of fashion and fame. Think about how artificial
contraception has become “family planning;” how abortion has
become “an alternative to pregnancy;” how an unborn human person
has become a “product of conception;” and same-sex marriage has
become all about “marriage equality.” Every merchant knows that
manipulative marketing is all about perception, illusion, finding
just the right way to spin reality to make a buck or win a political
argument. Our temples are sold as inconvenient waste, the stuff we
throw out.
For
cash and the bottom-line, we are meat. For the culture of death—ruled
by Mammon—we are cattle and lab rats, control groups and
experiments. Those temples among us who are blind, lame, crippled,
poor, elderly, or unborn they are all just “targets for development
goals” or “the means of measurable outcomes given variables.”
What we cannot be and still be temples of the Most High is a means to
anything else but ourselves. Make me a means and I quickly become an
obstacle needing to be removed. Make you a means to an end and you
become a tool for manipulation. Turn the human person into a product,
a site of commercialization, and the body becomes a snack, a tiny
morsel to be gobbled up in an frenzy of self-destruction and
denigration.
Hear
Paul again: “Do you know that you are the temple of God, and that
the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple,
God will destroy that person…” Why? “…for the temple of God,
which you are, is holy.” You are, we are temples, where Heaven
touches Earth, sites of God’s abundance, moments of God’s
gracious outpouring of spirit and life; we are both the source and
goal of all that water, flowing in and out to feed life inside and
outside our walls. Let nothing defile the holiest of God’s dwelling
places: you, consumed by zeal for the presence of the Lord!
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