Where Is Your Temple?

"Since the Passover of the Jews was near, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money changers seated there. He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves, He said, 'Take these out of here, and stop making my Father's house a marketplace'  At this, the Jews answered and said to Him, ' What sign can you show us for doing this?' Jesus answered and said to them, 'Destroy this temple and in three days, I will raise it up.' The Jews said, 'This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and you will raise it up in three days?' But, He was speaking about the temple of His body. Therefore, when He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this, and they came to believe the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken." -[John 2: 13-25].


In this Scripture, we see very a different Jesus, one who is very angry, and righteously so. Instead of the peaceful, gentle shepherd cradling a lost lamb, we see a Jesus who is fiercely protecting the sanctity of the Temple. For, the Temple has become a tawdry marketplace, where moneychangers extort hefty exchange fees for foreign currency, in exchange for local currency required for Temple for offerings. Similarly, sellers are hawking various animals to be used in sacrificial offerings at the altar.

Today, we face a far different problem. The Temple is not infected with commerce and the greed of secular materialism. In fact, the Temple has been largely outpaced by commerce. To say this another way, the Temple has become virtually obsolete, eclipsed long ago by the commercial world.

When I was a child, practically everyone I knew went to one church or another.  If you met someone new, the first question asked would be, 'What parish are you from?' Your church was your home, it defined you, it cradled you.

When I was 14, my grandmother died. Suddenly, my parents stopped waking me up early to go to church on Sundays. I would wake up too late for Sunday services, confused and disoriented. I asked, 'Are we going to church?' I was told, 'No, we don't do that any longer.'

In my teen literalism, I thought that by taking church away, that my parents were taking my Faith away. I thought they could take God away. It did not make any sense to me -- Suddenly, did we no longer believe? Was all that sacred music and Scripture just so much nonsense? Had we been faking it, or going through the motions, all along? For whose benefit? Wouldn't God know?

I remember asking, 'If we don't go to church, what should I do instead?' I was told, 'Do your homework. You need A's to get into college.'

Suddenly, the sacred in our lives was gone. Enter the world of competition for grades, college admission, and eventually job interviewing.

I remember entering high school when I was 14 going on 15. Every high schooler struggles to define herself-- Is she athletic? Is artsy? Is she intellectual? Popular? That struggle seemed all the harder, because my spirit-self had been confiscated.

When I was a junior in high school, my brother decided to help me define myself- the way that HE thought I should be. For my birthday, he gave me a pale yellow and teal striped sweater. He instructed me to wear it with pale vanilla corduroys and matching shoes. He wanted me to be "cool". When I wore this combination, my brother would praise me enthusiastically. He even thought I was cool enough to say hello to in the school hallway.

But I felt like an Imposter.

It was only years and years later, that I read Matthew 6: "Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your body, what you will wear. Is not the body more than clothing? . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin." I began to realize that I was NOT the sum total of how I looked on the outside. What mattered was my inner spirit. But where would I find that?

After college, I went to graduate school to study business law. I wanted to believe that the Law would bring structure to my world, and help me make orderly sense of who I was and how I was to behave.

When I finished graduate school, and began work in financial services, though, I began to see troubling signs that the Law was being bent and stretched so much because of Greed, that the Law had become just an annoying standard to work around.

It was not until years and years later than I read Martin Luther King. Jr., in his book, "Strength To Love." He said, "In a sense, the history of man is the story of the struggle between good and evil. . How can evil be cast out? . . . Men have usually pursued two paths to eliminate evil and thereby save the world. The first calls upon man to remove evil through his own power and ingenuity in the strange conviction that by thinking, inventing and governing, he will at last conquer the nagging forces of evil. This idea, sweeping across the modern world like a plague, has ushered God out and escorted man in, and substituted human ingenuity for divine guidance."

I hated to see that the Law, which I had spent years dissecting, and analyzing and which I had put great Faith in -- was only as fragile and imperfect and subject to corruption as Man himself!

This whole passage from King reminds me once again of Jesus driving out the human, commercial influences from the Temple. We human beings cannot possibly believe that our ingenuity, our commerce and power alone can save the World! If we believe this, then we have turned ourselves into gods and made God Himself obsolete.

I continue to ask myself, "Where is my Temple?"

Yes, I do attend church weekly now! But I can fully understand, as an adult Christian, that Jesus' presence is not limited to the church building. When He says, "Destroy this Temple, and in three days, I will raise it up", He means that HE is the Temple. His body was "destroyed" by Crucifixion, but in three days, He rose again.

If Jesus' Temple is nowhere -- after all, after His Crucifixion, His body was never found -- then Jesus is everywhere! He is on the Internet. He is in the prayers in my weekly Prayer Group. He is in my fellow parishioners at my weekly Bible Study. He is in my classmates at Biblical School. He is in the breezes that caress my face when I open a window! He is in my son's smile.

AND no one can take the body of Jesus away from me! He is in the Eucharist, which I receive each Sunday.

Most importantly, He is not in the clothes I wear, the degrees I hold, the car I drive.  No, these I do not worship. Jesus is very close to me. He is IN my Heart!

[Related Postings: "Anger In the Temple", March 10, 2012].

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