Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, B, Vigil
March 2, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
The text that guided the homily was:
- This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in the Gospel this Sunday, when we will encounter a Jesus with whom many of us, especially today, are unfamiliar, a Jesus who speaks to us through a powerful, prophetic gesture. 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, tossed money on the floor, and made a whip of cords to drive the sheep and the cattle out of the temple. 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 out of love for sinners and his Father, he really the hated the sins that can kill sinners.
- The word St. John uses to describe how Jesus drove out the animals is the same verb used when Jesus did exorcisms and drove out demons. Jesus was doing an exorcism of the temple in Jerusalem. The Temple had been built in order to be the dwelling place of God on earth, a place to encounter God in prayer, but it had become something very different. It wasn’t so much the fact that animals were being sold and money exchanged in the temple precincts 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 ripping off the people. The temple had become a “den of thieves.” 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 a large 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 the Lord.
- The second was worse. Even though God had commanded the animal sacrifices as a way of helping them learn how to love him with all their mind, heart, soul and strength 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 they 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 the place to go to “bribe” God with their animal sacrifices. They had started to look at God as someone who needed to be “bought” by these bloody gifts. God had said many times through the prophets, “It is a contrite heart I seek, not animal sacrifices,” 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 a place of prayer, to be His Father’s House once again, and he wanted to help his people recover a real notion of what their relationship with the Father should be based on — a contrite, merciful and loving heart.
- When asked why he was doing what he was doing, Jesus pointed to another temple, the temple of his body, which he said would be destroyed but rebuilt in three days. Jesus himself became through the incarnation the true temple, the true locus of divine worship, the genuine place where God dwells on earth. But Jesus’ plan for that rebuilt temple wasn’t coextensive with his flesh, but with his Mystical Body. His plan was to incorporate us into that Temple. When we’re baptized, we enter and become part of that temple. We become members of Jesus’ Mystical Body, and ourselves become dwelling places of God, where Father, Son and Holy Spirit truly 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?” After Baptism, our body and soul become a temple of the Holy Spirit, meant to be a holy dwelling place of God, where God speaks, is praised and glorified. This is the temple that Jesus wants to make sure is clean, a real house of prayer, a real place where God is worshipped.
- The Church has us ponder this reading on the Third Sunday of Lent so that each of us can grasp that Jesus wants to give this far more important temple than the one built by Herod, the temple of our body and soul, a thorough cleaning. Zeal for us consumes him. He wants to drive out of our bodies and souls anything not fit for God. He wants to cleanse of our sins. He wants to extirpate any of the seven capital vices, to purify us of all impurities. He does this out of love for God and love for us — and out of hatred and 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 more than we value God, as we put work above prayer or even above Mass on the Lord’s day, as we place our security in the material things of this world than we do in God’s providence. Our temples may not have sheep, oxen and lambs, but we may live like animals, living according to our instincts and lower appetites, rather than living as mature, loving, self-disciplined sons and daughters of God. Jesus wants to clean us this Lent of everything that doesn’t belong in his dwelling place. Through almsgiving, he wants to drive out our materialism and unite us to his spiritual poverty so that we may treasure his kingdom. Through fasting, 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. Through prayer, 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.
- Every Lent, Jesus seeks to reconsecrate the temple he has created us to be by incorporating us anew in the destruction and rebuilding of his own body, the true temple, raised on the third day. As catechumens and elect prepare for Baptism and as the rest of us prepare to renew our baptismal promises at Easter, Jesus wants to help us make our interior a place of true prayer. He wants to fill us with his own zeal out of love for the Father and others. He wants to stoke in us righteous anger toward the sins that desecrate the temple of his presence and to allow him, through a good confession, to cleanse and restore our temple back to its baptismal splendor. Those are the results of the consequential conversation he wants to have with us this weekend.
The Gospel reading on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Since the Passover of the Jews was near,
Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves,
as well as the money changers seated there.
He made a whip out of cords
and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen,
and spilled the coins of the money changers
and overturned their tables,
and to those who sold doves he said,
“Take these out of here,
and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
His disciples recalled the words of Scripture,
Zeal for your house will consume me.
At this the Jews answered and said to him,
“What sign can you show us for doing this?”
Jesus answered and said to them,
“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
The Jews said,
“This temple has been under construction for forty-six years,
and you will raise it up in three days?”
But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
Therefore, when he was raised from the dead,
his disciples remembered that he had said this,
and they came to believe the Scripture
and the word Jesus had spoken.
While he was in Jerusalem for the feast of Passover,
many began to believe in his name
when they saw the signs he was doing.
But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all,
and did not need anyone to testify about human nature.
He himself understood it well.
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