Today’s readings: Exodus 20, 1-17; 1 Corinthians 1, 22-25; John 2, 13-25.
Religion is about love. If there is no love nothing makes sense in religion. But in our restless wandering, what does love mean and what do we love? In trying to understand what religion is about, we need to ask ourselves St Augustine’s question in the Confessions: “What do I love when I love God?”
The opposite of a religious person is a loveless person, writes John Caputo in his book On Religion.
In his first letter, St John writes “Whoever does not love does not know God”. Love is the measure.
This is the needed premise for understanding the Ten Commandments which we find in the Exodus account in today’s first reading. The giving of the law in Exodus is as important as the exodus itself. One cannot be separated from the other. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no gods except me.”
The Ten Commandments, which are the moral law, are to be taken on a far deeper level than the specifically Jewish civil and ceremonial laws. As Christians we are in no way bound by the laws given in Leviticus regulating worship, but the Decalogue expresses God’s changeless demands for all peoples. Their value is perennial. They are God’s blueprint.
The heart of the law remains love. This means that in the light of the Spirit given to us, there is a new way of relating to the law. The law is not there just to be obeyed, it is not just a verbal command.
Throughout the Scripture, particularly in different Psalms, there is emotion expressed where the law is concerned. The good Jew loves the law. Law and love are not enemies but allies.
Through Christ’s atoning death we are freed from our impotence to obey the law, from our slavery to sin. This is our new relationship to the law. So it is not true that Judaism is a religion of law, not love, and Christianity a religion of love, not law.
Although the Ten Commandments seem to be just a list of commands and prohibitions, yet what is at the basis is simply the purity or purification of religion.
Strictly speaking then, if and when we go deep down in the meaning of the Ten Commandments, they are not merely meant to prohibit this or that.
They are instead addressing the heart, indicating the way for us all to create time and space in our daily living and in our lifestyles where adoration is possible and hence where we can really connect with our inner and true self and with God.
In truth, we can say the focus of the commandments is in the words “You shall have no gods except me”.
This is exactly what the reading from John’s gospel today is recalling. Jesus is shifting talk about the sanctuary that took 46 years to be built in the midst of the city to talk about the sanctuary of the inner self, the sanctuary that was his body, dismembered and put to death but risen and rendered mystical.
Religion has to do with the mystical. Otherwise it would reduce itself to the ephemeral, to what is shallow not uplifting. In the gospel this is the real and deep meaning of Jesus’ words, “Stop turning my Father’s house into a market”. A remarkable warning indeed for the manner we often deal with the religious.
In the aftermath of secularisation, when we struggle to understand the contemporary spiritual revolution and why religion is giving way to spirituality, the purification of religion becomes a top priority.
The account of Jesus driving everyone out of the temple, which in Matthew is located towards the end of the gospel, whereas in John it figures at the beginning.
It is only religion purified that can set the scene in our heart for a true and meaningful meeting with Jesus.