3rd Sunday of Lent
What really matters?
I’ve stopped counting the number of engaged couples who have moaned to me about the all-consuming nature of planning a wedding. Their desire is to commit their lives to one another, not to host a huge event! But for almost the entirety of their engagement, the relationship is subsumed by details that seem far away from the heart of what they are doing: invitations, menus, clothes, decorations…
Jesus is protesting just such a dynamic in today’s gospel. The temple was supposed to be the place where God dwelt among His people. A place where people could go to pray: to ask for help, find comfort in sorrow, or simply just to spend time in his presence.
Yet from the moment they set foot within the temple precinct, the details seemed to overtake the relationship. They had to change their money for temple coinage. If they had brought their own animals for sacrifice, they had to be checked to make sure they were “without blemish”. Otherwise, they had to buy animals for sacrifice. Then they probably had to queue to get access to a priest to make sacrifice for them…
As human beings we seem to be naturally put together to set up systems to make our lives easier. There’s usually a good reason for the system, but after some time, we can find ourselves spending more time and effort on the system than on the good it was put into place to protect.
We see a similar dynamic occur over time with the ten commandments of today’s first reading. The ultimate goods that they set out to protect are named by Jesus in the gospels as love of God and love of neighbour. The ten commandments spell out some important ways to make sure that we are doing both. Then, over time, the Jews developed 613 laws which, if observed, guaranteed that you wouldn’t break the commandments.
Jesus consistently brings us back to the heart. God’s desire in bringing the people of Israel out of Egypt and giving them the ten commandments was to enter into personal relationship with them. This was also the point of the temple – that God would dwell amongst his people, that he would be accessible to them, part of their daily lives.
Jesus’ protest is really the same protest that I often hear from overwhelmed engaged couples planning a wedding: “Surely it doesn’t need to be this complicated! All these details are taking us away from the whole point!”
Each Lent, we are invited to come back to the heart of our relationship with God. As baptised Christians, we are all “temples of the Holy Spirit”. God literally dwells in us, so that he is immediately accessible to us, part of our daily lives!
But it’s easy to get distracted from this profound truth of who we are. Especially in today’s world, which offers us so many seemingly necessary details that fill our lives so that our living relationship with God is pushed to the periphery while the money changers and livestock sellers absorb our attention.
How to know what’s what? I’d suggest having a conversation with God about it. Ask him for some wisdom and insight about what things in your life are actively bringing you closer to him, and what are actively distracting you. Perhaps the latter culprit is not any particular thing, but the sheer amount of things that we try to fit in to our lives. Maybe the wisdom we need from God is about which things we can drop to create some more space to be present to Him.
Reflection questions:
1. How would you describe your daily relationship with God?
2. What would you like your relationship with God to look like?
3. What are the things that are stopping you from having that relationship?
Katherine Stone
This blog was originally written for the Diocese of Wollongong