It all happened in a matter of seconds. One second, I was scurrying down the stairs, carrying my laptop, iPhone, paperwork and the memory card that contained all the video recordings I had just finished. It was the end of a long day, and I was looking forward to finishing up the project and getting home, anticipating rush hour traffic. The next thing I knew I was sprawled on the floor, stunned, my body in shock, with a very unhappy right ankle. Most of you know the rest. Through the power of adrenaline, I managed to finish my work, drive home, get to urgent care and learn I had fractured my ankle. Suddenly my world was turned upside down. All week I’ve been faced with doctor’s appointments, physical therapy, navigating the world of workers comp – the hardest of all being finding myself unable to drive, dependent on others to get me to around. I met a new friend called Uber. More significantly, some wise friends have encouraged me to take this as a wakeup call, a sign of my body telling me to slow down, reassess my habits and the balance of work, rest, and recreation – which I recognized is woefully out of whack.
Have you ever had such a wake-up call in your life? A diagnosis that came to you out of the blue? Perhaps similar kind of accident? An encounter with someone or something that encouraged you to reassess where you are in life? Maybe just a significant life change: a new job, moving to a new place, welcoming a new child, say goodbye to a treasured friend or family member, a death, a marriage a divorce? We all get them at some time or another. As we go through these changes our spirit gently – or not so gently – gives us that wake-up call – urging us to reassess our lives, our values, our current spiritual practices. It may seem brutal at the time, but our Loving God is working hard to get through our sometimes-thick heads that we need to be doing something different that pushes us to grow stronger in the spirit and renew the vision God has for our lives.
It seems to me our scriptures today give us examples of wake -up calls.
In our Old Testament lesson, God introduces to the Israelites the Ten Commandments, a succinct list of guidelines that they were called to follow in order to be God’s covenant people. It’s interesting to note that God didn’t introduce the commandments while they were still slaves in Egypt. Nor did he wait until they entered the promised land. God waited until after he overthrew the status of slavery and had brought them into the wilderness place. There without the distractions of life as slaves or dealing with encounters with the Canaanites- the inhabitants of the promised land - God forced them to be still. To be in a space of we call “in between time.” A time of “not yet.” Here, where he had their undivided attention – God laid out his expectations. The habits of living that God expected of his covenant people. Like us, the Israelites understood something significant was happening to them. This God was asking them for more than sacrifice of an animal or two. They were called to an overturning of their very habits of life – the mindset of being slaves - to incorporate a new code of conduct. Can we imagine how startling this must have been to the Hebrew people: for 430 years they had been owned, subjugated, stripped of their names, denied their humanity, robbed of their history, and put at work to build a society not their own. Now they were free. The question was -what did living like free people look like?
As we know from the scriptures, they had a difficult time living up to God’s expectations. It took centuries of one step forward, two steps back, one step forward – for them to get it through their thick skulls just what this amazing God was about. Like us, God had to keep sending them wake-up calls to remind them of who they were, what their identity was as a covenant people of God.
Once the Israelites settled into the new land, a Temple was built that became the focal point of the covenant - a place to offer the animal and plant sacrifices as well as a place to pray. It is hard to overstate the central importance the Temple plaid for the life of faith for the Jews. But over the years the temple itself became an idol to the Israelite people. Religion had become a business, a very profitable business which schemes laid a heavy financial burden on the ordinary person and filled the pockets of a privileged class. Sound familiar? What’s the saying? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The prophet Malachi (3:1-5) had predicted that the Lord would suddenly come to his temple to deal with such things. And Zechariah (14:21) had foretold that on the day of the Lord, there would no longer be any merchant in the temple precincts.
So came the wakeup call from our lesson from John: Jesus overturning the money changer’s tables. This passage of Jesus overturning the tables appears in all four gospels – making clear that Jesus was introducing a shock to the system – his wake-up call that initiated the messianic era – where the people needed to learn the sacrifice that God desired was a contrite heart, a loosening of the chains of the oppressed, treating people fairly. Jesus in his overturning the tables in the temple, was overturning a new form of slavery that had crept in – a slavery to religion as business. To the temple as an idol.
Unlike the other gospels telling of the tale, in John, the story of Jesus and the money changers comes at the beginning. So, the tearing down of the temple marketplace serves as an initial wakeup call that define the ministry of Jesus. I am the temple. I am the home of God among mortals. I am the fulfillment of the law. This is how John’s readers are to understand who Jesus is.
As we approach the middle of Lent, what wakeup call does God have for us? To reexamine our values and spiritual practices. To dig deep and explore whatever we are enslaved to. To reengage in the Lenten practices of prayer, fasting and giving. To rediscover balance in our lives, by incorporating more deeply the values of the ten commandments. By embracing Jesus, the new temple, to whom we are called to offer all sacrifices of prayer and service. And to remember - as the scriptures remind us, that our very bodies are also temples of the holy spirit. So may our wake-up call today lead us to care for ourselves, for one another and for our neighbors – living as a covenant people, a free people, chosen and loved by God through Jesus our Lord. Amen
https://integratedcatholiclife.org/2015/03/dambrosio-scripture-reflection-ten-commandments-cleansing-temple/
https://trumbullcc.org/multimedia-archive/on-being-free-the-ten-commandments-and-the-cleansing-of-the-temple/
https://www.catherineofsienachurch.ca/cleansing-of-the-temple-fr-david/