Temples of the Holy Spirit

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Luke 19: 45-48) is rather brief and presents two contrasting scenes that, on the first reading, seem to be difficult to relate to each other. In the first, Jesus takes a whip and drives the traders out of the temple, saying: my house will be a house of prayer. But you have turned it into a robbers’ den. In the second, we see that He teaches every day in the temple and that the chief priests and scribes, although they would like to do away with him, dare not touch him for the people hang on his words. What are we to make of these words, and how did these two scenes complement each other?

One way in which we might read these scenes is to consider that other verse of Sacred Scripture in which Saint Paul tells us that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. In this context, Jesus is no doubt as eager to drive out from our souls the evils of which He wished to rid the Jerusalem temple. For in the temple, there was a constant commerce in progress, and its transactions, its noise, and its distractions, were an offence to the sacred character of the holy precincts. These services that visitors to the temple had to pay for were ostensibly for the benefit of worshippers but in reality, they robbed the temple of its essence. Jesus took such offence at this crime that it is the only scene in the gospel where we witness His anger - an anger which is not remotely sinful since, as Saint Thomas tells us, there is such a thing as holy anger through which the just man is angry at injustice. We do not think about it very often, but the virtue of religion is a part of the virtue of justice for it intends to give to God what is owed to Him. From this perspective, the merchants in the temple have committed a sin against God by defiling the holy places.

If we then consider that through our baptismal consecration, we are made the temples of the Holy Spirit, we have the chance to perceive how undignified, how unworthy of our vocation, is the trade and commerce that happens within our own souls. For we are traders: we trade secret parts of ourselves for the esteem of others, and perhaps we even have trade agreements with our own egos to protect our self-respect, topping up our prayer lives in quantitative excess. Who was it who said, Never mind the quality, feel the length? Can it be just coincidence that, in English at least, the word trader is only one phoneme away from traitor? But both words come from the Latin tradere which means to hand over. It is, then, as William Wordsworth says:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

How do we lay waste our powers, except in betting and spending our affection on everything but the one thing necessary; betting and spending our attention on the riches of this world – the tangible ones and the intangible ones – that clutter the aisles of our inner temple, wasting our energies on the tinsel currency of a thousand satisfactions, rather than on the pearl of great price? His house should be a house of prayer, a house of unalloyed joy and festivity in His love, and too often it is a den where we gamble only for what we can grab of this passing world’s thinnest offerings? How did it come to this, and how can it ever be otherwise?

It is the second part of today’s gospel that offers some kind of answer to this second question. For what protected Jesus, surrounded as He was by the chief priests, the scribes, the A list celebrities of Jerusalem, and other vipers of that ilk, was that the people as a whole hung on His word. In the trade-filled corridors of the outer temple, the attention of the populace was not directed to getting and spending but rather to listening and attending to Jesus. We do not discover until Chapter 20 what He was saying to the people, but in a sense that is immaterial. Jesus could have delivered a sermon on drying paint that would have held them all transfixed. To whom should we go Lord? You have the words of eternal life. And if the people hung on His every word, what did those who truly loved Him do in His presence? Mary, the sister of Martha, as we know, sat in rapt attention, while her attention-grabbing sister played the role of overworked and underappreciated hostess – a proto-martyr before even St Stephen to a meal whose menu was forgotten before the night was out.

But Martha’s initial mistake in that gospel scene was not to complain to Jesus. It was rather to have lost her inner festivity; to have forgotten what a joy it was to have the Lord beneath her roof and thereby to become distracted by her own dissonant needs.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

What a difference it would make to the temple of our own souls if, instead of giving room to our inner scribes and Pharisees, instead of trading for all the intangible titbits that our worse selves crave, we could hang hour by hour, minute by minute even – every moment of our lives -  on the Word that we know is within us, listening to Him speak His words of love, mulling over them instead of over the costume jewellery of success, or reputation, or popularity, or power and command, or whatever sordid boon we happen to crave today.

And hanging on His word every moment of our lives, we could then make ourselves a little more worthy of being the temples where He and His Father delight to be with us.