“Jesus made a whip out of cords and
drove them all out of the temple area…” (John 2:15)
When I was a kid, “The Incredible Hulk” had TV series and
during the opening credits. Dr. Bruce Banner, who morphs into the Hulk when
angry, famously tells a reporter: “Don’t
make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when
I’m angry.” My father liked to use that
line when we were growing up whenever we started misbehaving. Anger in and of itself is not sinful. When that anger turns to rage and we resolve
to hurt others and become vengeful and spiteful is when we start descending
down the slippery slope of sin. We see
Jesus in today’s gospel get angry when he encounters his Father’s house filled
with merchants and moneychangers. He who
never sinned makes a whip and casts them out.
The Jews are baffled by this action and as always ask for a sign to
justify Jesus’ actions. Jesus tells them
to destroy the temple and watch him rebuild it in three days. Obviously, we know, as St. John clues us in,
that he was talking about the temple of his body which would be destroyed and
raised up in three days.
The catch here is that Jesus is not only alluding to the
temple of his body but to the temple of our body as well. St. Paul tells us that our bodies are temples
of the Holy Spirit, but we desecrate that temple whenever we fall into
sin. Just as he purified the actual
temple in the gospel, he stands ready to purify the temple of our bodies. He stands ready to enter our hearts and drive
out all sin, evil, vices, addictions, and any darkness that impedes us from
being living temples of the Holy Spirit.
The problem is that Christ won’t force his way into our hearts for he
gave us free will. We have to open the
doors of our hearts and prepare to be totally transformed by his merciful love
because when Christ cleans house…he cleans house! Another problem is that we may want Christ to
purify certain areas of our lives, but we may want to stay attached to a
certain vice, a certain sin that we fall back on. This cannot be the case for us during
Lent. If we are going to let Christ
purify our hearts then what occurs in us has to be a radical and complete transformation. It has to be the type of change that people
notice and ask: “Why are you so
joyful? Why are you at peace? What changed?” Well, what changed is that when we hand over the
keys to our lives to Jesus and let him be the guide, then our lives change
dramatically. We do become living
temples of the Holy Spirit. Christ wants
to destroy the frail temples that we are carrying around now and raise up
something worthy and acceptable to present to his Father. Again, he won’t force the issue. We have to let him in. We cannot be the same person on Easter Sunday
that we were on Ash Wednesday. If that
happens, then what was the point of Lent?
May the glorious morning light of Easter Sunday find us completely
transformed and ready to rise with the Lord to a new and more abundant
life.
