To Reverence the Temple

In a past article the topic of "the body as a witness" was covered, speaking about how the our bodies are not simply vessels for our "true selves" but rather the body is an important witness to the stories of our lives. Those things internal, those things external, these are all part of your story, the legend of your life. Do not be ashamed of the road you've taken to end up where you are. Your journey can be the map Christ uses through you to guide others along a better path. The strength you gain from hardship, this can be used to protect and defend others from the harms of life.

But I am not here to rehash that previous discussion. Read that article if you wish. What I have been intending to do for a while is write a sister-article to that topic regarding reverence, and that is what I have come to do today. That is, to reverence the temple of your body. I do not mean that you should care for it by dressing modestly, or you should eat certain foods - that is a conversation for another time with another person. No, I mean that you should care for yourself well. On the other end of things I do not mean in the sense of today's self-care culture of babying yourself into docility and losing tolerance to anything which causes discomfort. Care for yourself, in the way that Christ cared for the house of His Father.

For over a month I have been reading only the passage from Matthew's Gospel on Christ's cleansing of the Temple. I have learned much which I wish to share with you now. Because it is a short passage I will have you read it now, then we will go through it line-by-line to see what can be gleaned from it and I will show you why it inspired me to write this article. Below is Matthew 21:12-17.

12 Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer”; but you are making it a den of robbers.’ 14 The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’, they became angry 16 and said to him, ‘Do you hear what these are saying?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Yes; have you never read, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself”?’ 17 He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

We are all familiar with this passage, I'm sure. It is talked about often - for the purpose of righteous anger, to show that Jesus was not the gentle hippie so many picture Him as, to show the authority which He has which gives Him the right to discipline those in the Temple, and more. I will not speak on any of these. Instead, I want you to look at this passage through two lenses: the first lens is that Christ is the one coming to purge those influences from your temple (you as a whole person), and the second lens is you being the one thrown out of the Temple. Let us begin.

12 Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves.

Christ comes in and drives out those who were selling and buying in the Temple. Those who came with the intention to make sacrifice before the Lord, some who I think we can assume meant no disrespect, they were driven out as well. Why? Because of their disrespect - not because God is prideful and won't tolerate disrespect, but because He knows that there are consequences within ourselves if we do not treat with respect those things and people which are deserving of respect. If we do not feel the consequences for our wrongful actions right away then we are likely to continue acting as we had been.

Think of yourself - you are deserving of respect. Your body deserves respect. But are you treating yourself well? Do you push yourself too far as a norm, operating on the edge of what you're capable of doing? Do you allow yourself to rest? Or, perhaps you rest too much in comfort and so allow yourself to come into disrepair. Are you careless with what food you put into your body? Or, do you only put what is "good" in your body and remain constantly strict with your intake? Are you drinking enough water in your day? Or do you only allow yourself water and boycott all of the other good drinks which God has given to us?

The point I am making here is this: perhaps you are doing something which you believe to be good just as those in the Temple believed they were doing something good in obtaining a sacrifice in the temple - but it is not good. I do not want you to be filled with anxiety over this, wondering if you are on one end of the extreme or the other - to be on either end of an extreme is not good. I want you to reflect on two questions instead. Are you so strict with yourself that you do not allow yourself to enjoy what is good as you should? Or, are you so lax with yourself that you neglect to care for yourself as you should? I can guarantee that each of us can answer both of those questions with a "yes" in one area of our lives or another.

For the last note on verse twelve, notice that Jesus turned over the tables of those who sold doves. Why was this mentioned specifically? Doves were the sacrifice of the poor, those who could not afford a lamb were allowed to substitute it with doves. These men selling doves were doing a service to the poor. These men had the best of intentions, yet what they did was wrong. They wished to do a good thing, but they went about it in the wrong way. These men, and perhaps you as well, could believe that you are doing a good thing for yourself or for another but are in truth going around what God wants for you. I will say no more on this, I just wish you to reflect on it.

13 He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer”;     but you are making it a den of robbers.’

Keep in context the previous verse and what we've uncovered from it. This place which is good, you have made it bad. This holy space, it has been desecrated. The good you seek to do, when you seek to do it through your own avenues apart from God, the act inevitably perverts and you desecrate what you intended to honor.

The image we often see when we think of Christ driving those out of the Temple is a bunch of men with pointy features and angry faces driven onto the street. Recall that history is almost never so simple as the idea we conjure up in our heads, it is not always that those who are our "enemies" and those we read about in Scripture are simply evil and depraved. Scripture does not say "and these men were all bad with evil intentions in their hearts" - no, it says that what they did was wrong, not that they meant to do wrong. I am sure some of those merchants saw this as an opportunity to exploit those in need, but I find it hard to believe they were all like this.

Christ rebukes the unrighteous and calls them to righteousness. Christ rebukes those who believe they are righteous and calls them into true righteousness. This is your calling as well, to not be "good" but to be like God. As Christ came to do the will of His Father in Heaven, (John 6:38) and we are called to imitate Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), so should we do the will of the Father. What is His will? Not to do things which we see as good, but to do what He has declared to be good and right. We are not to be as those merchants who may have thought they were doing good, but in fact were offending God and drawing others away from Him.

14 The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’, they became angry 16 and said to him, ‘Do you hear what these are saying?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Yes; have you never read, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies     you have prepared praise for yourself”?’

This is a larger portion from the Scripture passage and I wish to address this whole section as one theme. We have seen in the past rebukes of Christ for healing the ill and the broken, and each time they came after Him it did not go well. This time the Pharisees see Christ healing again and we know they are upset by this by fact it is mentioned in the passage, but they do not address it. Instead they say He should put a stop to the children calling to Him "Hosanna to the Son of David." Notice this, and see how they are looking for something to be upset about, resorting to something new to try and trip up Jesus.

Here we see that, as always, the gripes from the Pharisees are not legitimate and are borne out of something like envy, rigid rule keeping, or other such things. When they normally try to get Christ with saying "you should not be doing any kind of work on the sabbath" they instead resort to other means to tear Him down.

Then we have Christ's response, which is to shut down these critical men who are upset at a good thing such as glorifying God. The moral of this portion of the passage, I believe, is that you should not concern yourself with the criticisms of those opposed to you when you are doing the will of God. Christ appeared in the Temple to bring about the Father's will there, and when others came to say "Hey! This other thing is offensive!" He dismissed them.

You should not allow yourself to be distracted from what is good, from what is of God. Those who come to you telling you to be sensitive of other's sensibilities, you should ignore them when it comes to residing in the will of God. Of course that is not to say that we should be blunt and tactless, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" is both a command and a warning from Scripture. We are to love others, and to love someone is to tell them the truth, and we must not sacrifice love for niceness. But also, we must be tender in how we give love to others, in how we share truth with them - tender, but allowing for passionate veracity at times as well.

17 He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

Notice this verse. The first thing to reflect on is that Christ corrected their wrongdoing, then He gave them space. He showed them their wrongdoing but did not dwell on it, He did not lord it over them, He gave them the space to reflect on what they did wrong. The ways in which you fail and that you do wrong, you should examine that and take correction, but do not linger upon it. Do not wallow in what you've done that is wrong, because He will not hold it over your head. Do not dole out condemnation when the Lord is pouring out His mercy.

There is also a different way to understand this verse. Jesus separates Himself from those doing wrong, He takes Himself out of the situation. He corrects, then He leaves. The struggles that you have, the struggles that you see your friends working through, bring Christ into them and then step out. An extreme example would be a friend who enjoys going to a strip club, or an alcoholic who likes going to bars - you meet them there to call them away, but you do not take a seat with them where the sin is taking place. With love bring truth, then step away from the wrongdoing. I do not mean step out of friendship with this person (there are times when this is right to do, and times where this would be wrong to do) but rather step away from where the sin is.

In reading through this passage you see that it could be understood in multiple ways. I wish you to reflect one for a moment. The old house, the old Temple, was a place of penitence where you made the sacrifice for the remission of sins, and the place where the priests consumed the sacrifices on feasts. The new house, this new temple, is us, as 1 Corinthians says we are temples of the Holy Spirit. Just as those people two thousand years ago and even further back than that dishonored God's dwelling place, so do we continue this practice today.

Treat yourself not as you deserve - no, rather you should treat yourself as God says you deserve to be treated. I do not mean pampering, nor do I mean excusing yourself of all wrongs, but what I do mean is treating your temple - you, yourself - with honor and love by driving out all the perverse and evil things in your life which draw you away from Him. These habits, these relationships, these thoughts and words which put distance between us and Him, we all need to do away with them. Seek out what He wishes for you and reside in that, do what is hard because He commands you to, because He knows you can reside in Him more wholly after doing so. God is not cruel, He is not mean, He chastises those whom He loves (Hebrews 12:6) and we should hope that He does - I would rather feel like God is chastising me than think He is ignoring me. He is a Father, and He wants us to be with Him, and so each time that we turn away from Him by sinning He has to reorient our hearts back towards His great Heart. All He wants is to love us, and even if it seems dramatic when He is flipping over some tables, he is doing it because He can't stand seeing us be cruel to ourselves.

Written for VME Catholic, by Ethan Hall