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We are looking for persons able to transcribe the audio portion of our town meetings.
Please call the rectory if you can help.


3rd SUNDAY OF LENT (B)

  1. John the Evangelist wrote his Gospel the way Julius Caesar composed his treatise on the Gallic Wars – namely – in three sections. First comes John’s Prologue, much quoted in the Liturgy at Christmastime – “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”; then comes the Book of Signs; and finally the Book of Glory on the paschal mystery. The Lord Jesus, of course, did not tell anyone to write anything. The apostles were to make disciples in all the nations, teaching them to observe all that Jesus had first taught his followers. The writings of all four Gospels were intended for a public for whom the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection were matters of history, a public removed in time and in geography, as we are ourselves, from the Gospel events. In other words, John’s Gospel was written for people like ourselves who never knew the Lord Jesus in the flesh but have been invited to believe in him and in his presence among us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Why does John’s Gospel speak of the second part as the Book of Signs? This means that the various historical events that we read about, the wedding feast at Cana, the cleansing of the Temple, the multiplication by Jesus of the loaves and fishes, the cure of the blind man, the conversation with the Samaritan woman, are treated as signs of deeper meaning which only faith can grasp. Today we try our hand at what today’s Gospel records – the Cleansing of the Temple.

  2. During the Lenten season the readings from Scripture make us aware of the growing storm, the deteriorating relationship between Jesus and certain Pharisees, partisans of Herod, and some of the priests and scribes associated with the Temple. In our Gospel narrative, these various folks are referred to as “the Jews”, an unhappy and misleading collective noun for a small number of temple officers and sympathizers who were out to destroy Jesus and his mission. In their eyes, understandably, Jesus seems to be acting against essential institutions of ancient Judaism with reference to the Mosaic Law, with reference to the Temple in Jerusalem and even to Israel’s faith in one God whose glory no one can share.

  3. The historical facts of our narrative are clear. Jesus goes to the Temple in Jerusalem. What he sees there and what made him angry and upset was not something at least unusual – because the buying and selling in the temple was, it would seem, the standard procedure whenever the paschal feast was being celebrated. Nevertheless, Jesus drives out the sellers of sheep and oxen along with the money-changers and says to those who were selling doves – “Take them out of here and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace”. The Temple authorities were upset and begin questioning Jesus’ authority – “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus replies – “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again”. The authorities thoroughly misunderstood the words of Jesus and presumed he was talking about the temple building which took over forty-six years to build. The Evangelist John tells us that he was speaking about his body.

  4. The cleansing of the temple is an event in history and also a sign with deeper meaning seen only by the light of faith. At the conclusion of his Gospel the evangelist John writes – “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book. But these are written that you, readers and hearers, might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and through this faith you may have life in his name.” The cleansing of the temple constitutes a self-revelation on the part of Jesus. His actions in the narrative stem from his consciousness of his being God’s true and eternal Son now made flesh for our salvation. His being God’s Son is the very reason for his dramatic actions. He has the obligation to safeguard the holiness of the Temple, just as he has the obligation to bear witness to the holiness of God, to the awesomeness of his heavenly Father’s transcendent mystery. For ancient Israel the temple was the holy place where God dwelt among his people, where God’s people gathered to worship. It was the House of God and should not be made a marketplace. By his words and actions, the Lord Jesus is telling his first followers that from the time of his death and resurrection he himself will take the place of the temple. He himself will become the place where the worship of God will take place in spirit and in truth. As one commentator suggests – “At a time when there was no longer to be a temple in Jerusalem (it was actually destroyed in the year 70 A.D.), the 4th Gospel would assure believing readers that they would experience the presence of their crucified yet risen Christ as their new temple.”

  5. “In our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God. Not just any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai, whose grace and power we recognize in Christ Jesus crucified and risen.” Through the above quotation, our Holy Father is telling us that “the real problem at this moment in our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearing, with increasingly evident destructive effects.” Our Gospel passage today gives dramatic expression to the mystery of our transcendent triune God at work in Christ and in the Church reconciling the world to himself. The age old question that faces every generation is – Did God make us in his image and likeness, or do we make God in our image and likeness?