An Unusual Gesture to clean up our messes

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3rd Sunday of Lent - Daily Readings.

We move deeper into our Lenten Journey and this means we move deeper into our hearts so that we can prepare ourselves to celebrate Easter. As we follow Jesus and we make this Gospel passage our own, we must ask ourselves: "What do we tolerate in our lives that is keeping us down, separated from God and from the life He wants us to have?" Tolerance is on everybody's mouth nowadays and usually is used to feed into this crazy "Live and let live" ideology as it is applied to everything and everybody, paralyzing our growth (both as individuals and as a society) and turning everything into a mediocre life. 

How many of us would really allow one ant to go around our kitchen sink without being concerned that very soon a whole colony would move in? We know that in our life the situation is the same: one bad habit gone unchecked will turn into sin, etc. This is indeed a wake up call. 

Tolerance, like Judgment (see last week's meditations), is an ambiguous term: we know we are supposed to be tolerant but we also feel that there ought to be some boundaries. But where? We must realize that there are things in life that can be tolerated if they are not sinful and morally wrong. I don't like popcorn, but I tolerate it when people eat it because I consider them to be more important than "my issue." It's not a sin to eat popcorn and my friends are free to eat it. I don't have to be intolerant towards them and it would be really wrong of me to expect that they would change that just to make me feel better. There are other things that are morally wrong and sinful and it is expected of me to do something about it. 

Jesus teaches us how to handle all these things. First of all, He is not in the Temple area to pick up a fight. He was there because it was the Passover. He, like many other Jews, noticed something and did something about it (unlike all the other ones who were there).  The lesson for us is clear: we don't pick up a fight but when we are challenged to take a stand, we do it and we do all we can to right the wrong. 

The motivation of Jesus heart should also be our motivation. The disciples remembered this action and they associated it with the verse: "Zeal for your house consumes me." Jesus was motivated by zeal for God's house. This zeal fired him up, ate Him up, shaped all that He did. We should keep this in mind: every stand we take should be motivated by the same love and zeal for God's Church and God's people that Jesus had. All our actions are shaped by God's love; we should never act outside of these bounds. 

"Stop making my Father's house a marketplace." All the people who were selling in the Temple area were not doing anything illegal. They were supposed to be there: it was their "ministry," to provide people with all they needed for the sacrifice. But obviously Jesus sees something else: maybe they were really in an area that was supposed to be free of vendors, or maybe they were surcharging. They were there because their presence was tolerated. Maybe at the beginning there were just few table and then it all turned into a circus.The point is that we have to take Jesus' challenge seriously; take a look at what we tolerate in our life and, after examining it according to what the Gospel teaches us, have to decide where we need Jesus to clean up the mess or not. 

We do have a tendency of relating to God as a "vending machine." Our prayer is nothing more than a business transaction: "Dear God, I am going to give you something (going to Church, light a candle, giving up chocolate, etc.) and you are going to give me what I want. Through Christ our Lord. Amen."

Jesus reminds us that we cannot go anywhere in life if we keep this mentality, most especially if we apply it to God. God is not for sale and His grace is free. As we continue our journey of Lent, we must take a look at how we relate to God. When we relate to God in this way only, we turn our heart into a marketplace.

If Jesus were to come into the Temple of our bodies, which room, which area of our life, would He clean up first? Would I let Him in, or ask to come back next year?