Today’s readings: Exodus 20, 1-17; 1 Corinthians 1, 22-25; John 2, 13-25.
There are constitutive moments or experiences in every religion that mark its identity or foundation. The Exodus account today of the Mosaic law given to God’s people can be considered the founding experience of Judaism and of the covenant established between God and His people.
The 10 Commandments were carved in stone. On one hand they represented unchangeable principles. Yet on the other hand, they were guiding principles that gradually needed to be completed because they were not meant to exhaust once for all what served to make our humanity mature and reach out to new needs and demands.
Jesus throughout the gospels represents precisely this need to grow up beyond the letter of the law. In today’s account from John, he takes to task the temple religion which can so easily distort what religion stands for and alienate people from real needs. Interestingly enough, in the last verses of today’s text, John affirms: “Jesus knew them all and did not trust himself to them; he never needed evidence about any man; he could tell what a man had in him”.
We keep repeating throughout Lent that this is a season meant precisely to help us come to terms with who we are and with what we carry in us. God never imposes His law on us, if not with the aim of educating us, of helping us to make our own ‘exodus’ from phases or experiences in life that may be enslaving.
His law is meant to set the basic parameters. But our own growth, which always comes at a cost, makes us envision not God’s rules but God Himself and the life He gifts us with as added value.
As Exodus itself says, it was only after bringing His people “out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” that God sets out His Commandments. As long as we remain entangled in our own selves and in our own pain, it is difficult to rise up to new situations that present themselves in life. This ‘coming out’ is as important as it is liberating.
Blocked within our demands for signs or explanations, the preaching of a Christ crucified can make no sense at all. Unless we grasp our own humanity in depth with all that conditions or even hinders our true identity, it is to no avail to speak of God or of Jesus Christ as saviour. St Paul writes that Christ crucified is the power and wisdom of God. That is not just a truth of doctrine to be believed, but a truth that unveils and is grasped gradually in the daily faith experience of discipleship.
Outside all this, religion becomes only the cult of idols, pure religiosity at its most early and infantile stages. When religion stops in its primitive stage, it blocks people from growing and it becomes hardly distinguishable from superstition. The false image of God which many a time we project through the way we live our basic and primitive religiosity, leads only to profanate what is sacred and to mislead the true seekers of God.
It is in this sense that Jesus, in his time and ours, is a deconstructionist. Just as he challenged the temple religion in his time, in like manner he would deconstruct so much of what we still hold on to in our churches. Very often people leave the Church because in our temples it is always business as usual, and the temple for them is no longer the sanctuary where they can truly meet and worship God.
There are times when we become too complacent with mediocrity in our way of worshipping God. That mediocrity in Judaism even provoked Jesus’ aggression. Mediocrity and complacency in our liturgies devalue our beliefs and make of religion nothing but a parody.
One highly significant thing in today’s gospel account is that, unlike the other gospels where the same account is located towards the end, before Jesus is arrested, here in John we find it at the beginning of his gospel. John wants to drive home the message that unless we go beyond the temple religion, unless we deconstruct and unlearn much of what gave shape to our basic and incipient religiosity, we will fail miserably to grasp what religion is about and who the real Jesus is and how he can bring us to wholeness.