On Sunday Evan Ellis and I will be launching the Bishops’ Social Justice Statement for 2010 which is on Violence in Australia and what we can do to be peacemakers. Given how strong this theme of anti-violence is in our Catholic tradition and our current efforts at peacemaking, Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple in today’s Gospel might seem a strange event.
For one thing, the Jesus who is so much against violence, who commands Peter to put away the sword and for all of us to resolve our differences, turn other cheek and forgive endlessly, is running around turning over tables and chastising people with a whip! Of course, it demonstrates that there can be righteous anger: we should be angry when innocent babies are killed or when pension funds are robbed, or when people are driven out of their own country and forced to search for asylum, or when such desperate people cannot find safety and welcome anywhere...
So, yes, there is a time for righteous anger and a certain energetic activity that comes with that; but would we work up such a sweat about a building? Jesus clearly cares a lot about sacred spaces. Though he was known to preach and pray on mountains, hills and waterways, he did very regularly do so in synagogues and the Temple, their cathedral. Today’s Gospel says taht at this stage of his life ‘he taught in the Temple every day’.
Jesus’ concern for the Temple was not about a superstitious attachment to a building. Rather it was His sense of piety – that is, grateful reverence for ancestors and all sources of our being. His own ancestors had built the Temple around the ark of the covenant, beautified and defended it, and hallowed it with their prayers; their enemies had sacked and profaned it; another generation of Jesus’ ancestors had won it back and rebuilt it with their blood, sweat and tears. God was honoured there and friendship with God sealed by that.
But now, it seems, the Temple was being profaned again, not this time by foreign powers, but by the people’s own apostasy, their own compromise with the world, with their rulers and neighbours, with the culture, with comfort and convenience, with power and privilege.
When Jesus takes possession of Temple he throws a challenge out to all Temple authorities and worshippers, taht is to you and me: are we betraying the blood, sweat and tears of those who gave their lives for our Church? Thuis very month of November we’ve remembered those who died to defend our liberty (on Remembrance Day) and those who were made saints by building up the Church in our land (at Mary MacKillop’s canonisation and on All Saints Day).
Do we, in the Temple of our hearts, risk another great apostasy, another great compromise with the world, our neighbours, the culture, with comfort and convenience, power and privilege?
Do we profane the Holy Place of our lives, our people, ourselves, by turning our own hearts, those houses of prayer, that dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, into a robbers’ den, into an altar to mammon, into a sanctuary for consumption, a synagogue of self-indulgence?
And if so, or if it’s sometimes so, now is the time to allow Christ back in to drive out all that is unworthy from our hearts.
Bishop Anthony Fisher