Friday, November 18, 2016 33rd Week in Ordinary TimeFirst Reading: Rv 10: 8-11 Gospel Reading: Lk 19:45-48
Jesus entered the Temple area and began to drive out the merchants. And he said to them, “God says in the Scriptures: My house shall be a house of prayer: but you have turned it into a den of robbers.”
Jesus was teaching every day in the Temple. The chief priests and teachers of the Law wanted to kill him and the elders of the Jews as well, but they were unable to do anything, for all the people were listening to him and hanging on his words.
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the
Assimilated Life
Experience)
All four evangelists write about the cleansing of the Temple. John (2:14-17) places it at the beginning of Jesus’ public career. Matthew (21:12f.), Mark (11:15-17), and Luke (19:45f) place it at the end of Jesus’ public ministry in order to relate the incident to Jesus’ statement that he will rebuild the Temple in three days if destroyed.
When Jesus said, “destroy this Temple and in three days I will rebuild it”, he was referring to his body that was to rise from the dead after three days. This statement however turned out to be prophetic. The destruction of the Temple happened indeed. Now, the Church stands as the new Temple where God takes delight in our worship. We are that Church.
Unfortunately, like the Temple, there are many “merchants” that bedevil us. Mundane preoccupations, eccentric value system, relativist outlook, carnal tendencies, hysterical self-centeredness, avarice, new-age mentality, and truant religiosity – these are “merchants” that trigger Jesus’ holy anger. (The foregoing enumeration forms the acronym “merchant”).
These modern “merchants” are interrelated. Mundane tendencies make eccentric value systems favorable to relativism. Relativism is inimical to Christianity because it justifies carnal indulgence and fuels hysterical self-centeredness and avarice. The net effect is truant religiosity characteristic of a new-age mentality. New age mentality gets rid of God because it worships “the God within”. If it matures into a form of spirituality it draws people farther away from the Church since it does away with doctrine, devotion and religious discipline.
Relativism drives God away from the Church faster than Jesus could drive away the “merchants” within us. Because everything becomes relative, the human person reigns as the measure of all things, replacing the moral system God has established in nature. Self-centeredness grows unhampered. It soars high into the unlimited skies of human avarice like the sprouting seed of the classic story of Jack and the beanstalk. –(Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM., MAPM., MMExM., REB., Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com.
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