Homily: Cleansing

Year B / Lent / 3rd Sunday

Readings: Exodus 20.1-17 / Psalm 19.8,9,10,11 (R/v John 6.68c) / I Corinthians 1.22-25 / John 2.13-25

Cleaning up and clearing out. 

My Jesuit community in Boston would do this twice a year. After the trees have shed their autumn leaves and after the mounds of snow have melted, we would clean up our house and garden more thoroughly and clear it out more intentionally. We cleaned up and cleared out to spruce up our home, and to rearrange it so that we could live happily. We also threw out what we no longer used, what was passed the expiry date, and what was potentially harmful to our wellbeing, like overdue food cans and drinks.

Some of us called these actions “spring-cleaning.” Others called them “makeovers.” But everyone agreed it was a necessary chore for our wellbeing. Perhaps, “cleansing” is a better word to describe the intention behind our cleaning up and clearing out.

On this 3rd Sunday of Lent, we find Jesus cleansing God’s Temple that had become a market place. He cleaned up the Temple by driving out the sheep, oxen and doves that were being sold. He cleared it up by chasing the moneychangers and merchants out of this holy place. 

Jesus’ cleansing action invites us to reflect on what these weeks of Lent can be for our own Christian lives.  

The Apostle Paul teaches us that we are God’s temples (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). We are to be holy for God’s holiness to dwell in. Yet, because we are so human, and so surrounded and penetrated by the “things” of this world, don’t we find ourselves distracted by, and attracted to, the inappropriate? 

This is why Lent is a good time for us to ask God for the zeal for the “holy” within and around us. And the Lenten practices of prayer, almsgiving and penance are good Christian exercises for us to focus on “appropriate” relationships, involvements, attractions that come from God and that can lead us back to God.

The Ten Commandments that we hear about in our first reading come from God. They are God’s ways for Moses and the Israelites to be in covenant relationship with God. By themselves, the commandments seem law-like: they are cold, rigid and severe. But when we begin to appreciate these commandments within the context of covenant relationship, we can see how they are God’s invitation to the Israelites to share in God’s holiness. The commandments then express God’s desire to be in relationship with them. So these commandments are not laws one must dutifully follow, as they are graced ways to live the holy lives God calls all to.

The Ten Commandments have been handed down to us in faith. Like the Israelites, they invite us to live holy lives with God in Jesus. This is how we can enjoy our covenant relationship with God. What Lent offers us is time to examine how we are living out the Ten Commandments. Are we simply obeying them as laws? Or, are we living them as part of a relationship? Do we obey because we have to? Or, are we living them to help us remember and reverence God? 

If Lent is a challenging time, it is because it forces you and me to ask, “Am I going through the motion of living my Christian life?” If our answer is “yes,” then we have to honestly admit that our obedience to God is hypocritical.

As human beings we struggle to live this covenant relationship with God faithfully. Many a time we fail, we fall, and we regret. We come to confession to say “sorry” and to ask God for forgiveness. And God never condemns us. In fact, God’s loving mercy forgives us. God embraces us back, again and again, into God’s love because God knows that we’re not yet quite there, not yet quite grown up as Christians.  

This is why Jesus’ coming is our salvation: Jesus shows us how to live in God’s ways, ways that the Ten Commandments teach. This is how God frees us from sinfulness for salvation. In Jesus' action of cleansing the Temple, you and I have the promise of how Jesus will cleanse us who are God’s temples too. 

Often we fail to be God’s temples because we are playing games that make our obedience to God’s commandments a sham. We’ve all heard the expression, “games people play.” It comes from Transactional Analysis (TA), which is a form of psychotherapy. TA focuses on personal growth and change through the games people play when interacting with one another. These games are the scripts we craft so that we can play out how our lives should be, or how we want others to see us, or what we want our interactions to be like.

Isn’t this true of how we sometimes act in the family, at work, in school, and even here in the parish? Aren’t we sometimes playing games in these moments?  And aren’t these interactions empty of intimacy, of a heart that loves, of our whole being in relationship with another?

Jesus cleansed the Temple to teach the Jews the importance of cleansing themselves for intimacy with God. He wanted them to stop playing those games of buying and selling sacrifices, of going through the motion of worship and ritual, of making their prayer a sham and their lives a hypocrisy of love for God and neighbour. By cleansing the Temple, Jesus challenged the Jews to enter more intimately into relationship with God: not by playing by playing games, but by reverencing, praising and serving God in intimate relationship. 

Today, Jesus is inviting you and I to do the same: to stop playing games and to enter more intimately into relationship with God. Relational intimacy is what TA discounts. In fact, growing in our relational intimacy with one another and with God is what makes us more human and a lot more Christ-like.

Jesus came into the temple not so much in anger, but to say, “The game is over.”  No, he says, to more “scripted” behavior, that is, no more performing just for the sake of doing something. Yes, he says, to doing things as loving responses to God. This is why our practices of fasting, praying, almsgiving in Lent must be joy-filled: they bring us more intimately into God’s love and more fully into God’s life. 

If Lent is indeed our “coming-to-life” again as Christians and as the Church, then, you and I must open the doors of our lives. We must throw them open to clean up and to clear out what we have to in order to let the holiness of God enter. 

What kind of cleansing then must you and I do to make our relationship with God and others more intimate and more personal not only in Lent but always?

(Inspired by L. Gillick)

Preached at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Singapore

Photo: from the Internet