Today's readings: Exodus 20, 1-17; 1 Corinthians 1, 22-23; John 2, 13-25.
It was daring for Jesus to take people to task for the way they normally used the Temple. John intentionally put this incident right at the beginning of his Gospel just as much as there is a reason for us to go through it again in the midst of our Lenten journey. From the Exodus reading to this account in John, it is clear that the Law and the Temple were two major factors that gave identity to God's people in the time prior to Jesus.
What John narrates as factual can also be easily understood in its deep metaphorical meaning. Even today, Jesus is struggling hard to drive us out of the temple, to make us open our eyes to what can easily degenerate to false religion.
For the Jewish leaders at the time of Jesus, the Law and the Temple had become a dead end. And it has been a major problem ever since Jesus, even in our days. It is always a clear and present danger to translate God's Word into law and to confine His presence to the temple.
As today's Gospel shows, Jesus was disturbing the peace. Already in the Old Testament, Jeremiah had prophesied against the Temple, and Isaiah had already harshly criticised the way people understood the law. Even today, Jesus comes to disturb our peace, to invite us to let go of our stereotypes in religion and in our way of dealing with God.
It is mostly the way we project God to the world that creates problems for our faith in our highly secularised culture. The Jews demanded from Jesus an explanation for what he was claiming and doing. Likewise, people today demand an explanation from us for what we claim to believe. We are asked to articulate the reason for our hope. But we can easily misinterpret that task.
As Paul writes to the Corinthians, "while the Jews demand miracles, the Greeks look for wisdom". On the one hand we've built a long history of apologetics seeking to convince the world about God's truth, while on the other hand, we've projected for too long a miraculous religion, which keeps people from growing up.
Faith that is not shaped by the power of preaching risks "terminating in indifference in the educated classes and in superstition in the poorer", said John Henry Newman in 1859. In 21st century Christianity, indifference and superstition are still major challenges.
Jesus drives people out of the temple to reveal his true identity. But paradoxically, for many, the true identity of Jesus remains concealed in spite of religion. Jesus is demanding. But he is demanding only for our sake. We need to face the truth in life, otherwise the truth may catch up with us unexpectedly when it may be too late to do anything about it. Many church-goers may still be living in a cuckoo's nest, convinced that religion is unrelated to present historical realities.
Lent is a time to interpret the Scriptures correctly and to truly discern the times. If the Church is not a community that reads the bible in today's context, if the Church now does not rise to the occasion, both spiritually and politically, it would end up being just an irrelevant institution hungry for the little power it may still dream of having. We need to be focused, otherwise we continue to be lost, disoriented in a world that lacks orientation.
The more the temple takes centre stage, the more we crucify people. The more we focus on Christ crucified, the more we understand crucified people.
What is so simple in the Gospel seems so complicated to our mindset. Christ crucified reverses everything: the temple is destroyed and Golgotha becomes the real temple. It is in the real sanctuary where Christ shed his blood to wash away our sins, and where we can find our way back home.
Otherwise our religion remains lost in idolatry, worshipping the false gods we create in our own image and likeness.