3rd Sunday of Lent
(Sunday 4th March 2018)
Cleansing the Temple of our Souls – (John 2:13-25)
“Take all of this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market” (Jn 2:16)
For those of us who have been baptised, through our baptism and confirmation we know we have become; “The Temple of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1695), and necessarily the dwelling place of the Holy Trinity. Its something we are tempted to take for granted all too often. Don’t we at times forget the dignity of what we have received, or allow ourselves to listen more to the voice of the world, or allow ourselves to fall sometimes into even habitual sin? Therefore as we have entered into this great season of lent, as Christ did battle with the devil in the dessert, we should want to rid our hearts of selfish desires, therefore lent is the time we desire to work on overcoming such evil desires.
In the world today some suggest the greatest sin is to upset people, they sometimes suggest in the gospel Jesus makes a mistake, He shouldn’t have been angry, He showed a moment of weakness. It was actually an act of strength and love He shows, because by driving the people out of the Temple, Jesus is showing the great love He had for His Father. Many of those who were driven out from the Temple were involved in evil works, or ungodly by the Church fathers. In other words we cannot allow evil to exist along with good, when we stand alongside Christ, we recognise more clearly our faults and sins of the past. We are called to imitate His love for God the Father. Therefore when we allow this love to grow in us, also we find ourselves like Christ maybe even getting angry, because we want to drive out from our lives all those ungodly practices, those things not for our good, those things that keep us from growing in love of God the Father.
We are called to imitate Christ in a particular way during lent, therefore we want to grow each day, indeed each week in our belief and love of God the Father. Then it necessarily happens we find ourselves breaking evil habits, or making various sacrifices to atone for our sinful past, because we need to drive out anything ungodly from our lives. Its obvious we have all fallen from the grace of our baptism, we have fallen from the grace of being called Gods adopted sons and daughters. Then we set about driving out from our lives those sinful actions, because we want only to imitate the love God the Father has for us His unworthy children.
Fr. Sean Crowley