3rd Sunday of Lent B
See commentary on John 2:13-20 in John 2:13-25.
Homily 1 - 2006
The First Reading started today with the words: I am the Lord your God. There is always a problem talking about Yahweh, our God.. Yahweh is the name we give to the Mystery we sense beyond our world of direct experience, giving it meaning, giving it existence. There are no adequate words to help think and speak about this Mystery, so the early Hebrews (and we following them) used a word already there – the word “god”. Most people had their gods (little different, in fact, from humans like us, except that they were more powerful). The commandments were clear: You shall have no gods except me. Yahweh isn’t a “small-g god”. Yahweh is Mystery that defies our naming.
The Hebrews had this sense that the most significant thing about this Mystery was that it was to do with freedom. They saw Yahweh as the one behind their own national experience of liberation: I am the Lord your God who led you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. We think that we like freedom: world leaders talk about it constantly – But we’re all frightened of freedom. That’s why we have “small-g gods”.
The commandments went on: You shall not make yourselves a carved image or any likeness of anything... In our modern world we don’t have three-dimensional idols – our “small-g gods” are national security, military power, wealth, bigger and bigger mortgages, good looks, popularity, etc.. We make them, in one shape or another, the goals of our national and personal lives; we become addicted to them. We surrender not only our little freedoms to have them; we sell our souls for them.
Since we are frightened of freedom – our own, and the freedom somehow associated with the Mystery we call “capital-G God”, we try to control the Mystery – to reduce it to something that we can understand and feel comfortable with. In their world it was carved idols, likenesses of what they already knew. In our world, we still try to domesticate God: “the God who is on our side” (a small and tribal god). If not by controlling, then how else do persons relate? How do we line up before this Mystery? The Hebrews had a glimpse of the answer, like through a fog. They thought of a jealous God. Jealousy, as distinct from envy, comes out of possibilities of love. The only alternative to relating on the basis of control is love - intimacy. They believed, we believe, that we can relate to the Mystery in intimacy, in love. Indeed every action of our lives is lived in the context of the Mystery, is lived in the context of love – offered or withheld - but never neutral.
But intimacy, like freedom, is scary – so we seek to somehow control or domesticate God by manipulation, by bargaining, essentially by magic. We seek ways, other than by love, to use God to meet our needs. You shall not utter the name of the Lord your God to misuse it, or, as many of us learnt it in the catechism, You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. (The Commandment had nothing to do with swearing, and everything to do with superstitious behaviour – with every devious way of approaching the Mystery, God - of praying even - other than the way of trust. Mistaking their real purpose, we had our fail-safe Novenas, sacraments we accumulated, etc.
We need to keep things in perspective. It is so easy to get wrapped up in our pursuit of the “small-g gods”, the ones I mentioned earlier – national security, military power, wealth, bigger and bigger mortgages, good looks, popularity, etc.. that we need to step back. More than simply keep things in perspective, we need to learn to enjoy freedom. So the commandments add: Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy... you shall do no work on that day. Perhaps not good for the GNP, but excellent for our sanity! The Hebrews even imagined a God who enjoyed a day off! And they saw leisure as an expression of our intimacy with Mystery that is freedom, that is love, that is God.
Homily 2 - 2009
Did you notice the first verse of today's Responsorial Psalm? It said: The law of the Lord is perfect, it revives the soul. It revives the soul..!! Is that how you would describe your attitude to the Ten Commandments? Equally pertinent, could it describe your experience of the Ten Commandments? For myself, it usen't to. But then, when I was first introduced to the commandments, I was only a young lad - and I learnt them as they were in the Catechism. Unfortunately, the Catechism gave only the abbreviated version. It was easier to learn them that way, but it made it almost inevitable to see them more like a lot of regulations. Regulations hardly revive the soul! However, when we see them in their original, unabbreviated version - as we have them in today's Reading - it is possible to get a different feel. Of course, as a young lad, even if I had the fuller version, I doubt that I could have experienced that different feel. I didn't have an ear for poetry; I tended to take things literally: and I hadn't matured enough to see the deeper truth behind the words.
We are dealing with ancient literature coming out of a culture that, in lots of ways, was still somewhat unsophisticated. Its insights into God were sometimes truly profound, but its language, its mindset, and its assumptions were often unsophisticated and unnuanced.
Let's have a look at how the section starts. It is written in the First Person - as though God were actually speaking and someone was taking it down in writing. It starts off: I am the Lord, your God. For all their unsophistication, the early Hebrews developed a profound sense of God as mystery. Out of respect, they would never use the Name of God - it was too sacred. So whenever the word occurred in a passage, they would say aloud the word “the Lord”. More accurately, the opening words would read: I am .... , your God. What was written was not the Lord, but a sort of name - that was not really a name at all. It was a verb; and it means: I am, or I am what I am, or I will be what I will be, or, simply, Being. Not a thing – one God among many, but simply, the act of being: unclassifiable, unnameable, so, beyond description, beyond comprehension: unknowable mystery.
The next line (left out in the catechism) then added: ... your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The Hebrews had this profound insight that this essentially unknowable God was a liberating God, a God who valued freedom - who led them out of the house of slavery. The rest of what follows needs to be read from that perspective - not as imposition from without (That would be slavery) but as the way to grow towards freedom, to take hold of freedom, as individuals - but also as “individuals in community”. Human freedom, even before God, was so important, so non-negotiable, so essential to becoming truly human, that the only way they had - given the limitations of their culture, was to express that non-negotiability in terms of “you must” and “you must not” - that is, as commands. To confirm the necessity, they added the ideas of reward and punishment.
As mature adults, we can recognise that that non-negotiability of the details that followed - the ten commandments - is derived not from externally and arbitrarily imposed and sanctioned regulations. Rather, it comes from our recognition of what sits harmoniously with, or, conversely, what compromises, our personal sense of who and what we really are - our sense of human dignity. That dignity finds its expression in what we call conscience: that mature sense of what's right and wrong, and the sense of being bound and obligated from within – from our own search of inner harmony.
That's as far as I want to go this morning - but I hope that it is enough to open up or to confirm a more nuanced insight into what we call the Ten Commandments. To the extent that we succeed, then perhaps we can claim with the Psalmist: The law of the Lord is perfect, it revives the soul.
Homily 3 - 2012
Our Gospel of the first Sunday of Lent had Jesus in the wilderness, where, as Mark put it, he was tempted by Satan and looked after by angels, and from where he emerged, after forty days, as a man with a mission, fired by his experience that the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Perhaps there is more to wilderness than the uncultivated, the unproductive, the empty. Things, important things, can happen there. Insights, essential insights, can take shape there. Energies, vital energies, can be accessed there.
The first Reading today gives rise to a number of interesting questions. Have you ever thought much about the Third Commandment? Let's listen to it again, as the Book of Exodus puts it: Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. … The seventh day is a Sabbath for the Lord your God. You shall do no work that day. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that these hold, but on the seventh day he rested; that is why the Lord has blessed the Sabbath day and made it sacred. You shall do no work that day …
What is so important about that that it becomes one of the Ten Commandments? The author of Exodus connected it to the example of the creating God. The day when God made nothing specific seemed, nevertheless, to be part of the creative cycle. Doing nothing is when things can happen, when activity can achieve its purpose, when the creative process can truly blossom. Indeed, it may even be that doing nothing is an essential part of coming alive, perhaps, paradoxically, of being truly productive. It may safeguard, perhaps even, make possible, our observing of the First Commandment: You shall have no gods except me.
Other gods, false gods, are not relics of the dim, distant past. They are as alive and well as ever; and their power to enslave and to deceive has not diminished with the centuries. They run our lives. Perhaps, it is only as we go into the wilderness, as we step back from the engrossing seduction of busyness, that we have any chance of recognising them. As the Gospel said of Jesus: There he was tempted by Satan. The unrecognised, but ever active, gods were seen for what they were; and the engagement with them became specific. Jesus heard their promises; he felt their attractiveness; but he also saw their deceptiveness and their thrust to enslave. There in the wilderness, angels looked after him. His encounter with temptation drew him close to the source of true beauty, of true satisfaction, and of truly liberating authority. As he expressed it himself: that source was every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
To become fully alive we need our Sabbaths, our wilderness – our time and space for stillness and for emptiness. And perhaps we may need to be aware that what our modern world calls leisure or the day-off or the long weekend can be as frenetic, as compulsive and as addictive as any other days – anything but the occasion for stillness, for reflection, for recreation, for re-energising and for getting life into perspective.
We need our Sabbaths, our creative pauses, our power-naps. Traditionally we have called them our times for prayer, for reflection, for contemplation; [for some of us, our times for retreat]. Call them what we like, they are God's gift to us, part of the never-ending process of creation, of coming alive, of breaking free. To see them them as impossible is to confess our enslavement to our false gods, and our unconscious, but disastrous, falling victim to their deception.
Can we make this Eucharist today a Sabbath for the Lord, our God?
Homily 4 - 2015
Lent started with Jesus calling us to repent. Scholars all agree that the word repent is a poor translation of what Jesus really asked. He invited people to change their minds, their way of seeing things – virtually to stand on their heads. The change he asked for was that people believe, [or, really, trust], the Good News of God. Jesus evidently assumed people have trouble doing that – trouble seeing God as Good News. Probably, all of us here would feel inclined to say, “I already see God that way. There is no need for me to change. ” I wonder.
Let us start our reflection today with St Paul’s Second Reading, I preach a crucified Christ. I preach a world’s saviour spectacularly killed by the world he came to save – the utterly powerless and dangerous enemy of both the religious State and secular State. Jews wanted a miraculous Christ, Greeks one who spoke sense, wisdom. Religions are usually into a God who is almighty; secular states into common sense, rationality – like economic rationalism and military realism. Yet Paul claims that Jesus redefines power and wisdom, and sees his redefinition as immeasurably preferable, God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. It is important to get it right, since we consciously or unconsciously justify our behavior according to our sense of God. Rather than “Lord God, heavenly King, Almighty God and Father”, should we better address our prayers, “O knowingly foolish and deliberately weak God”? Might that wean us off our addictions to power and common sense?
The Gospel sheds further light. John’s Gospel has Jesus say, “… stop turning my Father’s houses into a market”. And he meant it. The whole scene angered him to such an extent that he drove whatever animals he could out of the place, and didn’t mind if they knocked over the moneychangers’ tables in the process. What was that about? Pilgrims needed to purchase animals if they were to fulfill their obligations to offer the required sacrifices to God; and they needed to convert their foreign currency if they were to pay for them. In the same scene in the other Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke have Jesus quoting the line from the Hebrew Scriptures, “… you have made my house a den of thieves”. Significantly, in this passage from John’s Gospel, Jesus was not objecting to shabby financial dealings. He was challenging what the temple was essentially about, and upsetting a tradition that went back virtually forever. When confronted, he effectively said, “My own crucified and risen humanity will put you in closer touch with God than any temple ever could”. The mystery deepens.
Jesus called God his Father, and he called the temple my Father’s house. What he said was really a bit like, “There was no bartering, no keeping count, at home at mum and dad’s - just love” That is how things should have been with the temple – though, as Jesus saw it, that was obviously not how the temple operated. How were sacrifices understood? What were they meant to do? Sacrifices were the necessary means to get back into God’s favour, to even up the score. With their sacrifices, people, basically, were bartering with God. They would offer the required sacrifice; God would forgive them. They were paying the necessary price for their salvation - the bigger their transgressions, the more costly their sacrifice. It was essentially a business transaction.
Religions are still heavily into that, building up the credit needed to outweigh the debts, getting more graces, more merit, more whatever, to make up for our sins. Yet Jesus insisted that his God was a Father. Fathers are not accountants or bank-managers. They are not into power, at least not with adult children. Rather, they empower; and they do it by loving and trusting, encouraging and forgiving. What angered Jesus so deeply was that the whole system then, and that same mindset now, demean God and God’s love.
Might our sense of God need reviewing?
Homily 5 - 2021
You are comfortable, I hope, with the Gospel of John. John’s Gospel approached Jesus’ life differently from the other three Gospels. He drew on a few incidents, shaped them to suit, and then gave an in-depth reflection on their relevance and importance to the lives of Christian believers of the late first-century. He hoped that they would “believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing this, [they] might have life in his Name”.
Today’s Gospel passage is found in all four Gospels. John is the one who used it to reflect on the deeper mystery of Jesus, right at the beginning of his narrative. He used the magnificent Jewish temple as a symbol of Jesus’ own risen body, his crucified and glorious humanity, where the mysterious God would dwell. Through the risen humanity of Jesus, as the Gospel would go on to say, everyone could access God and “worship God in spirit and in truth.” In one of his epistles, St Paul extended the metaphor from John’s Gospel, and spoke of the concrete humanity of us human believers as “temples of the Holy Spirit”.
I think we need to pause to take in what they say, to reflect with faith-enlightened eyes, quietly to contemplate and embrace the mystery of Jesus and of ourselves, to learn to realise and to rejoice that God indeed dwells in ourselves and others. What does it say of our human dignity? What fascinates me is that Jesus referred to his risen humanity using the metaphor of a destroyed and rebuilt temple. It was the crucified Jesus who later stood risen before the disciples — not the once crucified, but the still-crucified, the always-crucified, the still-bearing-his-wounds, Jesus risen. And like him, indeed with and in him, it is we, the knocked-around, still-unfinished, often disfigured human persons that we are, who are “temples of the Holy Spirit of Jesus”.
Monday will be “World Women’s Day” when people around the world are invited to pause and take note of, and truly to celebrate, the human dignity of every woman. It has taken virtually a revolution, a still-in-process revolution, for the various human cultures around the world to address the issues realistically — a work still in progress. Even the Church, our largely top-heavy male Church, is still struggling to work out and joyfully to embrace the practical consequences of the fully human dignity of every woman. It is so hard to see things differently — yet that is what Jesus challenged us to do when he insisted that we all “repent” and change the habitual, in-grained, rusted-on attitudes we inevitably absorb from our culture.
Our TV screens this past week have been full of issues topically highlighting the practical difficulties that arise when encountering cultural change. Conclusions differ. Emotions run high. As individuals, we are all entitled to our personal opinions. As disciples of Jesus we are called to base our approach on a firm respect for the dignity of those with whom we disagree. We may feel strongly. That can be quite appropriate. But emotions will not solve our problems. Along with a non-negotiable respect for whomever we are talking to, we need quite consciously to seek to listen to those we disagree with. We may even learn something, see things somewhat differently, fine-tune our thoughts. If we want them to listen to us, we need to control ourselves so that we speak calmly, and as reasonably as possible.
Homily 6 -2024
Throughout most of John’s Gospel, we are dealing with three quite distinct timelines which John seeks to intertwine as fruitfully as he can. There is the historical timeline of Jesus’ public life, and then the timeline of the Gospel text, written for readers of John’s Gospel about sixty to seventy years later, and then there is our timeline two millennia after that, as we scratch our heads trying to understand things from a quite different culture from those earlier times.
Jesus obviously caused a certain amount of mayhem one day in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The basis of his concern was: “Stop turning my Father’s house into a market”. He seems to have felt quite personally indignant, personally hurt. Not surprisingly, he was confronted by a group of people who challenged him to state his authority for doing what he had just done. As is usual in John’s Gospel, John built on the incident to introduce a meditative comment on the significance of Jesus’ life for the benefit of his readers [and also for us now in the year 2024]. By the time his readers first read his meditative Gospel, the Jewish Temple had already been destroyed, about thirty years earlier, by the Roman army.
John started his meditation with a cryptic comment put on the lips of Jesus, addressed to those who had challenged his authority: “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Gospel then explained, for the benefit of its readers: “He was speaking of the sanctuary that was his body”, and added, “When Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples … believed … the words he had spoken”. For Jews of the time, the temple’s destruction was an enormous blow, calling for a radical readjustment. For John’s Christian readers, the destruction was ultimately insignificant. They had in their midst, here and now, the far more wonderful presence of the Risen Jesus among them, accessible through prayer — as do we readers still, so many years later.
Perhaps, the idea of Jesus, of Jesus’ humanity, as the “new Temple”, may not say much to us. But it could be good for us if it were to allow it. It is worth recalling the sense of Temple for so many Jews of Jesus’ time, as the preferred residence on earth of God, where God was in some ways most accessible. We are familiar, from the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth and infancy, of Simeon and Anna, two beautiful exemplars of Jewish spirituality, for whom the Temple had meant so much. Even Mary and Joseph took the Temple rituals quite seriously. Obviously they meant much to them both. I wonder what it was.
Let me read a few verses from one of the Hebrew Psalms, that Jesus himself would have sung on occasion: “How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord, God of hosts. /My soul is longing and yearning, / is yearning for the courts of the Lord…/The sparrow herself finds a home/ and the swallow a nest for her brood./They are happy, who dwell in your house, for ever singing your praise. / One day within your courts/ is better than a thousand elsewhere.”
How many of us would feel something like that in regard to our relationship with Jesus? Today’s Gospel can be an invitation to us to read again Jesus’ Last Supper Discourse to the Disciples. And what better time to do it than now during Lent? Give ourselves the chance to hear Jesus say to us personally:
“If [you] love me … my Father will love [you], and we shall come to [you] and make our home with [you]”. 14.23
“Make your home in me, as I make mine in you”. 15.3