TEMPLES – 3RD Sunday of Lent, Year B
A truth of the Christian faith is that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. This is a truth which is hard for us to always be conscious of. Perhaps we would rather not be too conscious of such an exalted truth about ourselves and others. Awareness and consciousness of being temples of the holy Spirit means we have to live with a deep reverence and respect for our persons and the persons of others. So this demanding truth affects everything we do, in, to and through the temples of our own persons, and also how we regard the persons of others. In spite of this truth and our awareness of it more or less, we can forget the dignity of our human persons, ourselves included.
We don’t have to look too far to find people with apparently no real understanding of the dignity of their own person or of others. Like the people we hear about in John’s Gospel who had forgotten what the temple in Jerusalem was for, and had begun to use it for all kinds of other purposes, many forget or don’t seem to know what the human person is for, and begin to use their and others’ persons for the wrong purposes. Some sell the goods of the body, some abuse the temples of their persons, some neglect their persons, and some don’t seem to care. Others don’t seem to know what is harmful to the temples of their own and others’ persons. Our nation has great problems with the abuse of food, drink, drugs and violence in its many forms directed against children as well as the elderly and the unborn. Special signs of a lack of respect for the temples of people’s persons are seen in the many teachings and practices against the teaching of the Scriptures in the area of sexuality. Our society, through the media, is exposed more to the pagan ways of sexuality than those of the Gospel.
In such conditions of the misuse of the human person, some sort of spiritual violence is needed to alter the conditions. The misuse of the temple in Jerusalem, which represented the presence of God with the people and was a place of prayer, had gone so far that Jesus had to use a form of violence to restore the justice and sacredness of the temple. We are told “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 chanters and overturned their tables…”. Then He ordered them out of the temple. “…stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” His reason for doing this, according to John, was the zeal He had for His Father’s house.
If each of us is a temple of the Spirit of God, we can ask ourselves what, in our persons or in the surroundings of our persons (the atmosphere and environment we live in), would Jesus drive out if He should walk through our persons and environment and see how we are living or failing to live in our persons? What abuses of our human person, the temple of His Spirit, would the Lord see? Sin would have to go. Attitudes opposed to the Gospel teachings would have to be driven out. The sinful ways of sensuality, greed, jealousy, unjust anger, revenge, and gluttony, which do so much to destroy the temple, would have to go.
When we see all the misuses and abuses of the human temple of the body and all the neglect it undergoes, and all the bad health and lack of wholeness which comes from abuse, we can see how this is an offense against the Lord. Jesus came as savior and life giver to restore, redeem and rebuild again the broken temple of the human person.
The Lord enters our temple precincts and out of love for us warns us to change and repent and stop harming the temples of His presence in people. The entrance of the Lord may come through His word, or through someone who speaks His Word to us about being temples of the Spirit and the dignity of the human person. The Lord may speak to us through studies and reports which show the effects of the misuse of the body and human person in numerous ways, such as too much food, alcohol, smoking, drugs, sugar, salt, and the lack of exercise. The Lord may speak to us in the studies which show how stress and unresolved anger affects the heart and nervous system. He may speak to us through the bad example of people who have partially or even totally destroyed their health and life.
The moral and spiritually bad habits of sins against the Commandments and the Law of Christ are ways we reveal a failure to truly know we are the temples of the Lord, and have turned our temples over to the commerce of sin and the ways opposed to the Gospel. When the Lord acts in some way, perhaps through sickness and disease, which can come from abuse of the body, we may ask Him: “What sign can you show us for doing this”? The Lord may simply remind us we are destined to rise from the dead, and we are the temples of His glory and Spirit. He doesn’t want us to forget. We can rebuild physical dwellings. It’s much more difficult to rebuild the temples of our own persons. The Lord’s death and resurrection, and His presence in us by the Holy Spirit, is reason enough to live by His teachings and to be careful that the life we live in our bodies is not a desecration of the temple of God. The purpose of the human temple and the temple of the whole Church is to glorify, praise, honor and worship God, and to live according to His Commandments of life.
Jesus, who is “…the power of God and the wisdom of God” as Paul tells us, wants us to live in temples ready for worship and prayer. May the Lord give us the kind of zeal for His Father’s house that He had. Only this kind of zeal can renew the Church. May we be able to say, “Zeal for your house will consume me”!