Our Lenten House Cleaning, Third Sunday of Lent (B), March 3, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Third Sunday of Lent, Year B
March 3, 2024
Ex 20:1-17, Ps 19, 1 Cor 1:22-25, Jn 2:13-25

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, we encounter a Jesus with whom many of us, especially today, are unfamiliar. The same Jesus whom Isaiah prophesied would “not break a bruised reed nor quench a smoldering wick” (Is 42:3), the same Jesus whom the psalms would call “kind and merciful” (Ps 145:8), the same Jesus who referred to himself as “meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29), started to overturn tables, toss money on the floor, and make a whip of cords to drive sheep and the cattle out of the temple precincts. There is no contradiction between the image of Jesus as the kind, merciful friend of sinners and Jesus as consumed with zeal for his Father’s house, because it is precisely out of love for his Father and for sinner that he really the hated sin that can kill sinners. The same Jesus who, in order to take away our sins, would later become like a sheep led to the slaughter silent before his shearers (Is 53:7), who would meekly allow his creatures to betray, slap, mock, spit upon, crown with thorns, and crucify him, in today’s Gospel, in order to purify the Temple and those in it, would, as Good Shepherd, drive out thieves and marauders (Jn 10:8). It’s crucial for those of us who are Jesus’ disciples, who love him, who want to follow him, to know this side of Jesus, too, because it will help us to appreciate ever more what his earthly mission was, so that we can allow him to accomplish his saving work in us and form us to continue his saving work in others.
• What he was doing and its application to us can more easily be seen if we know two Greek expressions used by St. John in today’s Gospel. The first is the word for “temple” or “temple area.” It’s to hieron, which is a neuter form of the word that means “consecrated.” The temple was called “the consecrated place,” the locus literally “separated” from the world where people would come to be with God and filled with him so as to be able to return changed by God and capable of changing the world with him. The second word is ekballein, which is the word used to describe how Jesus “drove out” the animals. It’s the same verb employed when Jesus did drove out demons in exorcisms. Understanding these two words, we can now grasp more precisely what Jesus wants to do in us: he wants to exorcise whatever in the temple — and whatever in us — is not fit for consecration to God. That’s what he wants to do each Lent.
• He needed to do such an exorcism because the Temple in Jerusalem, built to be the dwelling place of God on earth, constructed and consecrated to be the place to encounter God in prayer and worship, had become something very different. It wasn’t so much the fact that animals were being sold and money exchanged in the temple precincts — the outer, so-called “courtyard of the Gentiles” — that bothered Jesus. It was two things associated with this selling of animals and exchanging money.
• The first was that the moneychangers and animal sellers were notoriously overcharging the people. The temple had become, as Jesus named it today, a “marketplace” or, what he called in Matthew, Mark and Luke, a “den of thieves” (Mt 21:13; Mk 11:17; Lk 19:46). When people came to the temple, they needed to sacrifice an animal to God, the size and value of the animal being determined by their personal means and the type of sacrifice being made. Rather than carry or accompany an animal like an ox or a sheep or even a cage with pigeons with them for the many miles’ uphill walk to the temple — which was a considerable inconvenience and burden — most would buy one at the temple. But because there was such a demand, especially at the time of the Passover, the merchants had the market drastically to overcharge the people who needed the animals. Others who would try to save money by bringing an animal of their own often had to get the animals inspected by Temple officials who needed to verify that the animals they had brought were unblemished, as the Mosaic law stipulated. These inspectors often were on the take of the animal sellers to find blemishes that weren’t there and disqualify the affected animals. The poor who had saved their money over the course of the whole year for the trip to the temple, therefore, one way or the other, had to pay these enormous prices. While they were there, they also had to pay a temple tax, which needed to be given in one of two types of acceptable Temple currencies. That meant that most everyone had to exchange money and the moneychangers could take an exorbitant commission, which again penalized the poor most of all. Jesus was outraged that people were coming into the temple to rip off the poor. That was the first thing that incensed him.
• The second was worse. Even though God in the Old Covenant had commanded animal sacrifices both as a way of helping his people learn how to love him with all their mind, heart, soul, strength and resources by sacrificing something precious according to their means, as well as a means of expressing gratitude to God for his blessings, the Jewish mentality had become so distorted over the centuries that many began to look at their relationship with God as something contractual or even magical. “As long as I sacrifice this animal to God,” some began to think to themselves, “everything will be all right. God will be happy.” Too many people had started to look at the temple as a “marketplace” where they would go to “buy God off” with animal sacrifices, and to view God almost as someone who needed to be placated by bloody gifts. God had said many times through the prophets, “It is a contrite heart I seek, not animal sacrifices,” it was repentance and conversion he sought, but they hadn’t gotten the picture. So Jesus gave them all a lesson they would never forget — and we would never forget. Jesus wanted to return first the temple and then his people to the true worship of God. He wanted the temple to be not a marketplace but his Father’s house, a place of prayer, not a den of thieves. And so Jesus through his prophetic act and righteous indignation sought to help his beloved people recover a real notion of what their relationship with the Father should be based on.
• The Prophet Malachi had described centuries before the purification Jesus would accomplish when he entered the Temple. We hear the passage often in Advent and Handel featured it prominently in The Messiah, but it is particularly appropriate to the Lenten cleansing Christ wants to give the Church and each of us. Malachi writes: “And suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek, and the messenger of the covenant whom you desire. … But who will endure the day of his coming? And who can stand when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire, or like the fuller’s lye. He will sit refining and purifying, and he will purify the sons of Levi, refining them like gold or like silver that they may offer due sacrifice to the Lord. Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem will please the Lord, as in days of old, as in years gone by.” Jesus came with fire to refine his holy place and his holy people, to bleach both, to make both new so that we could offer fitting sacrifice to the Lord: not the sacrifice of animals, but the oblation of ourselves in union with Christ.
• When asked why he was doing what he was doing and what sign he could show of his authority, Jesus pointed to another temple, the temple of his Body, which he said would be destroyed but rebuilt in three days. Neither his critics nor his disciples understood then what he was saying, but the disciples would understand later after that temple to which Jesus referred would be destroyed on Good Friday and raised from the dead on the third day. Jesus was indicating that his sacred humanity is the true temple, the sanctuary where humanity and divinity meet, the locus of authentic worship and the supreme consecrated place. But Jesus’ plan for that rebuilt temple was not just coextensive with his flesh but with his Mystical Body. His plan was to incorporate us into that Temple! When we’re baptized, when we’re consecrated in the womb of the Church and die and rise in the saving waters, we enter and become part of that Temple. We become members of Jesus’ Body, and ourselves become dwelling places of God where Father, Son and Holy come to abide. This is what led St. Paul to say in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:19-20). Through Baptism, our body and soul become a temple of the Holy Spirit, a holy dwelling place of God, where God is welcomed, where he speaks, where he is loved, praised and served. This is the temple that Jesus wants to make sure is clean, a real house of the Father, a real place of prayer, where God dwells.
• The Church gives us this reading on the Third Sunday of Lent because each Lent Jesus wants to give this far more important temple than the one built by Herod a thorough cleaning. It’s important for us to reflect on this point. Our body and soul is so much more valuable to Jesus than the Temple of Jerusalem, which was considered one of the wonders of the ancient world. That’s how precious we are to God. Zeal for us consumes him. He wants to drive out of our bodies and souls anything unfit for God. He wants to drive out our sins. With the refiner’s fire of the Holy Spirit and the fuller’s lye of the Sacraments of Baptism and Reconciliation, he wants to purify us of all impurities. He does this out of love for God and love for us — and out of holy hatred and righteous anger toward the sin that kills us and separates us from God. Our temples may not have money changers, but our hearts may value money and material things more than we value God, as we put work above prayer or even above Mass, as we place our security in the things of this world than we do in God’s providence. Our temples may not have sheep, cows, doves and lambs, but we may live like animals, following our instincts and lower appetites rather than living as conscious, mature, loving, self-disciplined sons and daughters of God. This Lent, Jesus wants to cleanse us of everything that doesn’t belong in the temple we are. He wants to drive out our materialism and unite us to his spiritual poverty so that we may treasure his kingdom. He wants to drive out our hedonism and unite us to his consecrated chastity so that we may indeed love God and others as he loves his Father and us. He wants to expel our radical individualism and idolatry of autonomy and bind us to his holy obedience so that we may together with him consecrate ourselves to the Father’s saving will in all things until death. But he doesn’t want to have to do this work in us by violence like he cleansed the Temple of Jerusalem. He wants us to cooperate in that holy house cleaning.
• For some in our community who have been preparing for the Sacrament of Baptism, that purification will take place at the Easter Vigil as Christ will power wash their interior in an indelible way and make them his Temple. For the rest of us who have already been baptized, that cooperation must take the form of the Sacrament of Confession, when Jesus through his priests raises his hand not to snap a whip but to impart an absolution that thoroughly cleanses our soul and returns it to his baptismal splendor. So if you have not yet made a good, indeed great, confession this Lent, or, if since your last confession, your temple has again been sullied by thoughts, words, deeds and a neglect to love, today’s Gospel is the invitation Christ and the Church extend. Please respond to this invitation and come. I hear confessions every day of the week except Saturdays.
• The first reading today was explicitly chosen to help us prepare for that sacramental cleansing and to teach us how to keep our Temple pure and pristine. The Decalogue was the means God gave the Israelites in the desert to live out their consecration to him and to remain faithful to their end of the Covenant with him. Consecration is a separation from the worldly, from the mundane, and the Ten Commandments help us to live together in holiness with God and others. Jesus would say in the Gospel that “all the law and the prophets” — and the Ten Commandments are at the heart of the law — “hang on” the two commandments of loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. The Ten Commandments are a commentary on love and consecration. The first commandment shows us how to cut ourselves off from idols to be God’s. The second how to sanctify our speech and images. The third how to consecrate the Lord’s day and indeed our whole week and life. The fourth how to honor God through honoring the parents through whom he gave us life. The fifth how to separate ourselves from the hatred that can lead to murder. The sixth and ninth how to cut ourselves off from the lust that leads us to consume others for our gratification. The seventh and tenth how to rejoice in what others have rather than covet or steal it, like the money changers would seek to take the money of the poor in the temple. And the eighth to cut ourselves off from the diabolical temptation to enter under the standard of the “father of lies” by uniting ourselves with Christ who is the Truth incarnate. The Christian moral life, which has the Decalogue as its foundation, is a means of union with God, of living out and strengthening our consecration. Today is an opportunity for us to rededicate ourselves to this pathway of love. It’s also an occasion to take note of the ways that we have not lived up to the Covenant of Love with God, the way that our moral life and soul have been stained, and to come to God for the cleansing he came into the world to give.
• The other means that God gives us today to help us to live our consecration as well as to examine our conscience is the epistle, taken from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. It’s the way of the Cross, living a truly cruciform life. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus tells us very clearly that unless we deny ourselves, pick up our Cross daily and follow him along the path of self-sacrificial love, we cannot be his disciple. His prayer to the Father during the Last Supper, in which he consecrated himself so that we may be consecrated in the truth, was a way of saying, “I sacrifice myself so that they may be sacrificed in the truth.” To enter into Jesus’ consecration, we must join him on the Cross. St. Paul is one who did so. He would write in his letter to the Christians in Galatia, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me, because the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2:19-20). The Cross is what allows us to become truly consecrated, separated from worldliness, in the world but not of it (Jn 17:14-15). But that type of consecrated existence with Jesus is wildly countercultural and contradictory to modern expectations. St. Paul points to that in today’s second reading, where he declares, “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Christ crucified was a scandal to the Jews because the Messiah, the son of David the King, was popularly expected to kick out foreign powers, not be executed by them on Calvary. He was a folly to Greeks because the Greeks believed the greatest wisdom was the knowledge how to stay alive, and Jesus was ignominiously assassinated in the most gruesome way possible. Neither couldn’t understand how the crucifixion was anything other than a colossal failure and foolishness; worse would be anyone who wants to unite himself to that seemingly idiotic immolation. But St. Paul says to those who are called, Christ crucified is the power and wisdom of God. Long after the bodies of those who crucified him were rotting in tombs, Christ’s body had risen and he was alive — and by his crucifixion had saved from eternal death those who entered into his death. Long after the clever Greeks who were Jesus’ contemporaries were forgotten, Jesus’ teachings not only remained but were forever validated, because they showed the power of God’s own love and how God can and does draw good even out of the worst of evil. As St. Paul says, “The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”
• It’s key for us, first, to grasp that for us to enter into Jesus’ consecration we need to yoke ourselves to him on the Cross. We need to transcend human respect and worldly wisdom to see in this sign of torture the means by which we can, like Jesus, learn to love so much as to bear even torture. We need to look at it as the gift God gives to make it possible for us to begin to love like God loves and to flip human logic right side up, by seeing love, not self-preservation, as the most important thing we could know. The second thing St. Paul helps us to examine today are those times when we have lived as enemies, rather than friends, of the Cross of Christ (Phil 3:18), so that we might bring that worldliness to be cleansed by Jesus, too. The Lenten penances of prayer, fasting and almsgiving help us learn to live by the Cross of Christ. In prayer, we sacrifice our time for God and begin to live, as Jesus calls us to, as a house of prayer. In fasting, we crucify our appetites so they might be fully aligned to God rather than slaves to pleasures of the world. In almsgiving, we sacrifice of selfishness and materialism and make of ourselves, and what we have, a gift of love for others. There are many who in Lent fail to live it in a cruciform way, sacrificing very little, and therefore changing very little. Today St. Paul and the Church help us to grasp how to find in the Cross and in going all out in terms of our prayer, fasting and almsgiving, we can be strengthened by the power and wisdom of Christ crucified and, through them, enhance our consecration.
• Tonight the same Jesus whose hands gripped the cord to drive out the money changers and who wrists were later nailed to a Cross to free us from our sins now extends those hands and gloriously scarred wrists to us, inviting us to trust in him, to take his hands, to yoke ourselves to him, and to become with him a hieron, a consecrated abode of God, a holy Temple, a place where his words of eternal life resonate and are put into practice. Jesus is the power and wisdom of God and wants us to live by that power and wisdom full-time and full-throttle. He wants to restore us fully to who we are. We thank him for loving us so much as to hate whatever in us can separate us from him and for making it possible for us to have him wash our souls just like he washed the feet of the apostles during the first Eucharist. As we prepare to receive him and enter into communion with him, we ask him to share with us his holy zeal for his Father’s House and make us, as we celebrate this Mass and beyond, a true and consecrated house of prayer.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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