Third Sunday of Lent

Fr Dominic’s Homily

Today’s gospel is set during the Jewish Passover. If you remember this Jewish feast celebrated and recalled the exile in Egypt and the escape of the Israelites from Pharaoh and so we know that this feast took place in spring.

And this connects this Gospel passage with us today as we are also now are well into the season of spring. As the Bishop reminded us on Wednesday in Cheddar the word lent actually comes from the old English word for spring.

So we hear that Jesus was going into the temple where he found the people selling sheep and pigeons and the money changers with their stalls. So these were the people who sold animals for sacrifice in the temple. At this time of year over a million Jews would arrive at the temple to celebrate this feast of the Passover.

The Passover was when the angel of death passed over those houses that had the cross of lamb’s blood on the door sill sparing any first born from death. This was the final point at which Pharaoh and his minions suffered enough to let Moses and the Israelites go into the desert where they wandered for 40 years before finding the Promised Land which is where the Temple in Jerusalem was built.

So the market stalls and the money changers weren’t in themselves a bad thing. They were providing a service for all those travellers who had come from far and wide to celebrate the feast and pay homage to God in the temple.

Remember that Roman coins weren’t allowed in the temple because they had the image of Caesar on them and so they had to be changed for the temple coins. Caesar was seen as a false God and so these coins were banned.

There was probably a bit of extortion going on here and there in terms of varying deals for coin exchange. But again they were not bad in themselves.

So why did Jesus get so angry at what was going on? Surely he knew what was going on and it wasn’t a surprise to him that these market stalls were there?

Well it was because they had moved their position. These people were supposed to be on the periphery of the temple but they had decided that day to move further into the temple grounds into the so called outer court of the temple itself where various denominations were allowed to come and pray.

Jesus loved the temple and spent much of his time there. He couldn’t just stand by and allow it to be desecrated. So he set about to purify and cleanse the very area where people were supposed to be praying. He made a whip out of chord – probably camel hair - and used it to drive them back to their proper places.

When the Jewish authorities heard about this came down to see him and ask why he was doing this? They asked him what sign he could give to justify what he had done.

Remember that these Jewish authorities were Judeans from the South whereas Jesus and his disciples were Jews from Galilee in the North and so there were constant tensions between these two groups.

And how does Jesus answer their question? By answering with a kind of riddle for them “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in 3 days”

They are amazed at his answer and say that it has taken 46 years to build this temple… This is a very weird answer because actually the temple was started a thousand years ago. The reason why they say 46 years is because this is the reign of the latest King Herod the Great.

Now he was a very evil King who knew about the prophesies of the forth coming Messiah who would glorify the temple. So he spent 46 years making the temple as glorious as possible so that he could claim to be the Messiah himself.

Here we now at last have the actual Messiah who has come to glorify the temple in a different way.

The temple represents the dwelling place of God. Jesus in himself is the true dwelling place of God. By going through his passion and death he will glorify the temple of his own body and of course rise again on the third day.

The Jewish authorities however were too blind to see this. They simply couldn’t understand who Jesus was.

Let us ask the Lord to fill our bodies as temples with the Holy Spirit so that his holiness may renew us and transform the way we think, act, and live as sons and daughters of God and understand more fully who the person of Jesus is and what he has done for us.