Third Sunday of Lent Year B

Lectionary: 29

“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.

Visit any shrine in the United States, or in the world, and you'll find a gift shop. Whether it's Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu, consumers want souvenirs, tourists bring money, and the shrines are desperate for cash. 

The young and idealistic might complain about these shops full of kitsch, made in Hong Kong, China, or Taiwan, but they have to pay overhead and salaries; and they often support a local monastery or worthy cause; and not many visitors give large donations without receiving something in return. 

The temple in Jerusalem, visited and invaded by the Lord, was no different. Jewish pilgrims, coming from Spain, Italy, North Africa, or India brought funny money from all these places and it had to be exchanged for local currency which local merchants could use to pay their bills. If the ancient economy was like ours today, the tourist/pilgrim industry was not lucrative; only a few well placed individuals might get wealthy in the business. 

Jesus's disruption, although his opponents remembered what he did rather than what he said, was a prophetic act. Prophets are known for complaining loudly. But sometimes they write essays, songs, poetry, or manifestos; or they paint pictures and posters, or they build sculptures. And sometimes they silently act out their message. Jeremiah strutted through Jerusalem wearing nothing more than a loin cloth -- ancient BVDs -- to show how naked and helpless the city was without God's help. When Ezekiel's wife died he refused to wear mourning clothes; he said the day was coming when people would be dropping like flies and there'd be no time for the rites and rituals of grief. 

When Jesus invaded the temple, opened the cages and upturned the tables, he was predicting the temple's destruction, which arrived less than forty years later. He warned unfaithful Jerusalem that, regardless of their wealth or security, they could not survive a Roman siege without God's protection. And why should it survive since they'd made the Holy City and the House of the Lord into dens of thieves. They had failed to practice the holiness God demands of his people. 

Our first reading today present the Ten Commandments, the "holiness code" of God's people. We must be a people unlike any other, for we are holy before the Lord regardless of whether we act like it or the nations know it. Our way of life must be different. First of all, we worship God alone, and cannot be bothered with idols of money, success, security, pleasure, or comfort. Our hearts are focused on the Lord, and are not divided by other concerns.

Secondly, we respect human dignity and human life. We must not, and dare not, manipulate, coerce, or force people to do anything which violates their freedom or integrity. There is no expendable human life. We will not engineer a superior race with birth control, abortion, artificial insemination, or surrogate mothering. We will not remold our bodies or sabotage our sexuality to fit the latest fashions. We cannot use our sexuality to sell merchandise.

As God gives us children, boys and girls, we accept them, and teach them our ways of holiness. Should we fail to do so, the Lord's passion and death will have been in vain, and the Earth with all its human creatures and its godlike beauty will disappear in worthless futility. The universe has no need of us, and no use for us; only God thinks human beings are worth salvaging. 

But that cannot happen; first. because God will not quit on us; and second, because the Lord will punish us if that's what it takes to turn our minds back to him. 

Lent is a protest engineered by God against a world that is spinning off into empty, useless futility. It is our resistance to a world which would take us down with it. Our fasting, prayer, and almsgiving -- our entire way of life -- challenges the world to remember there is only one God; and God alone is worthy of our sacrifice. 

Should we fail to practice Lent, we invite the same horror that fell on Jerusalem in 70 AD, when not one stone was left upon another.