THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT, YEAR B

Exodus 20:1-17/Ps. 18:8-11/1Cor. 1:22-25/John 2:13-25

In the first reading, when God had freed the Israelites from the Slavery in Egypt; he entered into covenant with them through which He promised to make them His own people, to lead them into the Promised Land, and to protect them from their enemies. The Israelites were to reverence Him and Him only as their Lord, and they were to obey the moral and cultic laws which He laid down for them.

This explains in our first reading why the Ten Commandments which God gave to His people through Moses, which He wrote on the two slabs of stone, as the heart and core of all the laws, precepts, rules and matters pertaining His ways and teachings.

The ten commandments have a clear structure to them when we study them carefully. The first three concern our relationship with God and the following seven our relationship with each other. The first three commandments call on us to allow the one true God to be God of our lives. Therefore, beloved for us as Christians, the one true God has been fully revealed in the person of Jesus; God and Jesus our Saviour, is to be given our primary loyalty.

 One of the ways we show this loyalty is by honouring the Sabbath, our Sunday. On Sunday, when we gather for worship, we are publicly acknowledging that God has first place in our lives. The commandments suggests that giving God first place in our lives finds expression in a certain way of relating to others, such as caring for family members, particularly parents, safeguarding human life in all its forms, reverencing the bodies of others, respecting the property of others, and honouring the truth in our dealings with others.

Beloved, again to be truly filled with God’s love is for us to show that same, selfless and most generous love towards our Lord, first and foremost, in loving and focusing ourselves on Him at all times, in loving Him with all of our strength and might, and doing whatever we can so that by our love, we may truly dedicate and commit ourselves to Him, loving Him as just how He has loved us so generously.

One thing worth noting is that Jesus Christ became enraged because when he entered the Temple, he recognized that, the temple authorities never gave their primary loyalty to God. God was not being truly honoured or worshipped as God, and God’s people were not being respected or cared for. God his Father’s house of prayer had become a market place where the poor, in particular, were being exploited. In the other gospels Jesus uses the expression ‘den of robbers’ for the Temple authorities. They wickedly overcharged their customers, charging those pilgrims a premium for their services and goods, earning lots of profits and benefitting therefore from others’ sufferings. They had turned the temple into a marketplace, defiling its sacredness.

 It was this wickedness and sin against God and their fellow mankind which the Lord Jesus was particularly angry against, as He told it all loudly for all to hear, not to turn His Father’s House into a ‘den of robbers’, referring to all those corrupt and unscrupulous merchants and money changers, and the Temple officials who grew rich out of all those wicked actions. Jesus recognized that the Temple authorities had lost touch with what was best in their tradition, as expressed in the two great commandments and in the ten commandments.

Beloved in Christ, Jesus points to himself as the true Temple or sanctuary, ‘Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up’. Unlike the physical Temple, he embodies what was best in his own religious tradition; he brings that tradition to full flowering. He shows us by his life, death and resurrection what a life shaped by the two great commandments, a life shaped by the ten commandments, looks like. He loved God with all his being, and this love of God overflowed in a self-emptying love of others, including his enemies. That is why our fundamental calling as Christians is not so much to follow a set of commandments, but to follow the person of Jesus Christ, to grow into his image and likeness, to allow him to live out his life in us through the Holy Spirit. This will require true repentance, self – examination and a willingness to rid ourselves of anything that will defile our bodies and souls.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, just as the Lord has rooted out and chased those wicked people out of the Temple of God, let us all be reminded that especially during this time and season of Lent, we should also root out from ourselves all the wickedness of sin and evil, all the things which had ensnared us and kept us away from God and His truth. Let us this season to cast the distractions and impurities that hinder our relationship with God, and to rededicate ourselves to lives of virtue, righteousness and love. We must remember that our body, heart, mind, soul and our whole being itself is like the Temple of God, and we must always keep it pure and worthy of the Lord at all times.