Third Sunday of Lent
/Dominica III in Quadragesima B
3 March 2024
We learn from our Lord in the Gospel about the dignity and value of the temple, the house of God. It is sacred and holy, which refers to “being set apart”. That which is not set apart, that which is common, that which is mixed with ordinary things is profane. The temple, the house of God, is not to be profaned by making it just another place that is not set apart for God. We learn that the profane is not to intrude into the sacred.
As we learn that the temple, the house of God’s dwelling, is set apart, we also learn something quite important, that the temple is not merely a place of stone. It is, rather, the Body of Jesus. And further, we learn from St. Paul elsewhere in the Scriptures that by faith and the consecration of baptism, Christians are removed from the merely profane and are set apart, made holy, made temples of the Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 3:16-17; 12:27). With a biblical outlook we are to have zeal for the Church, zeal for the temple of the Lord’s Body, and to have zeal for the temple that our bodies have become. It doesn’t take any effort to let ourselves exist in the profane. No, that happens daily and easily. It takes effort to have zeal to recognize the holiness of the temple we have become and to live accordingly. Furthermore, it takes effort to transform the way we live in the profane so that something of the holy, something of God, is brought into our daily activities outside of these sacred walls. After all, when we gather here and are nourished by God’s Word, and the grace of the Holy Eucharist, and fortified with common prayer, we are then sent out at the end of each Mass, sent out to be on mission in the world to make more disciples.
The first reading gave us the Scriptural listing of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments establish relationship with God. They establish what it means to be set apart as belonging to God. They are the markers of leaving aside the profane and being holy. We should consider the setting of the first reading: It is the Exodus. God’s people have been set free from slavery. They are on their way to freedom and the Promised Land. We are fairly familiar with the biblical story of God desiring to set His people free from Egypt. But sometimes we don’t consider the finer point of what they were being set free for… When Moses told Pharaoh of God’s instruction to let His people go, Moses informed Pharaoh that they must be set free to go out to meet God in the desert to serve Him, which is biblical language for “to worship Him” (cf. Ex. 7:16; 8:1; 9:13), that was why, not only the Hebrew people, but all their flocks too, had to make the journey, so that they would have animals available for sacrifice in worship of God. The story of the Exodus and being set free, is a story of being set free for that proper relationship with God that is marked by worship. In the account of the Ten Commandments, the people are gathered at Mt. Sinai. There they receive the Ten Commandments. It’s worth reflection that in giving the Ten Commandments, God is doing something almost like giving building materials for building a temple, a place of worship. Except, foreshadowing the lesson of the temple-in-the-flesh from today’s Gospel, God is not giving literal brick and mortar. Rather, he is giving those structures that will set the people apart from the profane to be temples. He is giving those structures that are “moral” brick and mortar, that establish proper relationship with Him and that make His people living temples.
Contrary to the structure created by the Commandments, there is an attitude in our time that proposes that freedom is radical autonomy, that freedom means there are no limitations on our desires and choices, no obligations to which we must be obedient. This wrong idea can infect our attitude toward the Commandments and moral teaching, if we aren’t careful. It’s a popular idea one encounters everywhere. I was at a hearing recently at the Oklahoma State Department of Education and one citizen stood up to speak in public comments and said quite plainly that there is no such thing as objective good or evil, that there is no such thing as objective truth, or beauty, or goodness. Such things are only individual opinions or personal tastes, the person said. This false idea in our time is an extreme notion that rejects boundaries and limitations if they are not things we ourselves choose. This attitude is present in the ideology of choice and the pro-abortion agenda that rationalizes the killing of unborn children. This attitude is present in the lose sexual moralities (whether hetero or homo) proposing that the only consideration in sexual ethics is what makes the self feel good. Despite the harm of sexual acting out before marriage, and sexual perversions, this wrong attitude says it is only a person’s intention that is the measure of morality. That is, that all desires and actions are equal so long as the person doesn’t mean harm and, after all, the individual desires are how “love” is defined anymore. It’s why we end up with senseless slogans like “love is love”. To the modern mind infected by secularity, there are no boundaries. And that’s just not reality. And so, we end up with the rejection of observable physical reality, like the body and the binary reality of male and female. Though less salacious, this attitude is frankly also present in the way the duty of Sunday worship can be dismissed and treated as if it is only a minor sin to skip the worship of God at Holy Mass. The rejection of the obligation of proper worship is a rejection of the boundaries that God has placed on time, on our week, and it is a choice to remain profane and enslaved, by being apart from God, not fully alive as temples, as living stones.
The Lord demonstrated zeal for the temple. He was clearly angry at what he saw going on in the temple, after all he took time to make a whip in order to drive out the moneychangers. (That makes the Lord’s angry reaction a pre-meditated act, not an abrupt outburst.) Some scholars suggest that he was mad that money changers were cheating people with bad exchange rates. Others suggest that the Lord was mad that there were even moneychangers at all. But the fact is that we don’t know that, the biblical text doesn’t say. What we do know is what the text plainly says when Jesus turns over the tables. He says “stop making my Father’s house a marketplace”. Stop making it a place of trade. What we know is that the Lord was angry that this activity was taking up space in the place that had been set aside to be holy. It was profaning and taking up space that should have been kept apart so that people would have room to come inside the temple, to pray, and to worship. The Lord was angry that something set apart to be sacred was being profaned. And, we can’t forget the deeper and more important lesson for our life as consecrated, anointed disciples: the body has been made a temple and we can’t lack in our zeal to keep it holy and to avoid profaning it by being complacent about sin.
The Ten Commandments are like moral brick and mortar for our temples, the temples of our bodies. The Ten Commandments are the boundaries that God gives so that we have proper relationship with Him and truly belong to Him. The Ten Commandments are the foundation by which we, the baptized, truly become living stones in the temple of Jesus’ Body, of which he was speaking in the Gospel. In this holy season we have a privileged opportunity to recognize just how run down by daily living we can become such that we lack zeal for the Father’s house. We have the opportunity in Lent to correct course, to turn over the tables of complacency and to chase out the moneychangers of our busyness and work, and all the things that get more attention from us than we give to the good of our souls. By the cleansing of confession, or by preparation for baptism for those in RCIA, we are given grace to become more truly what we were made to be: namely, living stones in the temple of God, members of the Body of Christ, and temples of the Holy Spirit.