Today’s Scripture Readings

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ The Jews then said to him, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

Jesus embraces the heart of the Old Testament. Jesus continually goes from the Temple and the Torah to the very people that the Holy Scripture of the Jewish people pointed them to, the widow and orphan, the leper and the outcast, the poor and the powerless. The Jewish people even had a special word, ‘the Anawim of the Lord!’

Jesus embraced this spirituality centred on an intimate love relationship between God and God’s people and especially those on the margins of society. This was the Kingdom of God or the Reign of God that Jesus refers to. Hence, the anger that came from deep within in today’s Gospel when the most holy of places honouring this relationship between God and those marginalised has become a place of profit and exploitation.

Note the beautiful intimacy where Jesus refers to the temple as ‘my Father’s house.’ Yes, Jesus has fallen in love over and over again with his Abba Father God and this falling in love has driven him, impelled him to embrace the very people, the poor, the powerless and the oppressed, that are so close to God’s heart.

Only recently Notre Dame in Paris was re-opened and today the Church celebrates the Basilica of St John Lateran. All of these places, as well as our own Cathedral of St Stephen or St Peter’s in Rome, are beautiful. But their real beauty lies in their ability to draw our eyes ever inward to our God and outward to God’s poor in compassion, brotherhood and sisterhood and solidarity. Then we can put our cords away!