3rd Sunday in Lent

I don’t know about you, but when I go shopping, I get stressed – because I am usually trying to balance two things – I want to purchase good quality merchandise, but I want to find it within the limits of my budget. So I want to get as much quality as I can, and pay as little money as possible for it. In short I am looking for bargains. Every one loves a bargain and sometimes we can become so obsessed with finding bargains that we forget why we came to the shops in the first place. We just see the sign “SALE” and we lose all common sense – because we are infected with the virus of wanting to save money, with the thought of having scored something valuable without paying full price for it. And so there is something in commerce that brings out the selfish side of us.

This is why commerce can tend to militate against the fundamental gratuity that underlies our religious faith. When we step into a church, we need to leave behind all thoughts of trying to get as much value as possible with the least amount of effort on our part. Why is this? Well because God has given us everything, we should not be looking to bargain with God – God gives us that which is of incomparable value, for free – before we even ask for it, before we can even start negotiating. We come into Church saying – ok Lord I’ll give you two hours on a Sunday and you give me your blessings and love, half expecting God to say to us give me four hours on a Sunday and my blessings and love are yours. Instead what we hear God say to us is my blessings and love are yours regardless of how much time you give me on a Sunday, even if you give me no hours on a Sunday. However, if you really want to experience the love I am always giving you, then you’re going to have to go all in, 100%, no bargaining, no looking to skimp on effort – all in. I’m going all in, so you have to also.

This is why Jesus decided to disrupt the trade in the Temple that day. He chases out the goats, oxen, pigeons and money traders not because Jesus is against commerce per se, but because it has obscured the gratuity of God’s gift of love and mercy. I think that whenever we talk about money in the Church we get this same uneasiness. This is a good uneasiness because we are trying to put a value on that which cannot be valued. Jesus’ action in the Temple is not to put a definitive stop to the trade – I’m sure that order was restored to the market place within a matter of days, if not hours. Jesus’ action was symbolic and falls into the same category of prophetic action of the great Old Testament prophets – like when Hosea married a harlot symbolically enact Israel’s unfaithfulness to her husband Yahweh. Jesus knows that he cannot change the whole institution of the Temple, but his symbolic action would leave a deep impression on his disciples, and it is still remembered and recounted till this day – acting as a warning to us not to attempt to commercialize the free gift of God’s grace.

In the Greek original of John’s gospel, there are three words that are used to describe the Temple in the passage that we hear today, and paying attention to them will help us to understand the point that Jesus is trying to drive home. The Greek word that is used most frequently to designate the Temple is the word “heiron” – which designates the stone structure. But notice that Jesus does not use the word Temple when he first reprimands the sellers – instead he says “you have turned my Father’s house (oikon tou patros) into a house of commerce (oikos emporiou).” Jesus very deliberately steers away from the word heiron and instead uses the word oikos, meaning household, which is actually the root of the word “economy.” I think that it is important that we note that the entymology of our word “economy” is intimately tied to the notion of a household.

A household is a community of people who live together and create an “economy” through their shared relations. We know that where there are people gathered, there is the opportunity to make money. Facebook knows this lesson well, and they have played the patient game, gradually amassing a virtual assembly of billions of people, allowing them free entry into this assembly, and once assembled now hitting us with advertising and selling our data. Where people gather there is money to be made. The authorities at the Temple knew this well also and organized a thriving business around the hordes of people that would flock to come to the Temple. However, the Temple authorities, just like Facebook, instead of seeking to create an authentic sense of community in this economy of the Father (oikos tou patros), became singularly focused on the profit to be made from trade (oikos emporiou). Jesus’ lesson here is that where people are gathered, especially gathered in the name of the Lord, the first responsibility of those who gather them is to create authentic community.

This is why he invokes a third Greek word for the Temple when he says “Destroy this naos and in three days raise it up.” Now the word naos was only used by the Jews to refer to the most sacred part of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. This was the only place on earth where God’s special presence “the shekinah” was believed to dwell. When Jesus uses the word naos he is not talking about a structure of stone, he is designating the presence of God that has now come to dwell in his body, a presence that he entrusts after his resurrection to the Christian community to guard and keep sacred through their celebration of the Eucharist. Our duty as Christians is to now go out into the world and seek to sanctify the oikos emporiou (the capitalist marketplace) and transform it into an oikos tou patros (the sacred economy of God) through building authentic community that puts people before profit. Questions for reflection:

1. Do you make a concerted effort to abstain from commerce on Sundays, to avoid going to the shops or dealing with money or work on the Sabbath?
2. Do you attempt to make deals with God - trading religious observances for blessings?
3. Do you regularly experience the gratuity of God’s grace on a Sunday, or when you enter a Church, are you able to leave behind your thoughts of business and work?