Friday, Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

In today’s first reading, Peter calls on the members of the church to ‘put yourself at the service of others’. In the gospel reading, Jesus’ actions in the Temple in Jerusalem suggests that the religious leaders responsible for the Temple in Jerusalem have not put themselves at the service of others. In particular, they have allowed commercial activities to fill the outer court of the Temple where pagans could gather. As a result, God’s house had ceased to be a house of prayer for all the nations. Instead, according to Jesus, it has become a den of robbers or bandits. The Temple is not serving God’s intention that all peoples, Jews and non-Jews, would gather there to give worship to God. It is likely that Jesus saw this Temple in Jerusalem as having no future in God’s plan for humanity. It could never serve as the focal point of the gathering of ‘all the peoples’. Like the fig tree, it was withered to is roots and could never bear the good fruit that God intended. Instead, Jesus himself would be the focal point of the gathering of all the peoples. He was in the process of forming a new community around himself, where Jews, Samaritans and pagans would feel at home. Saint Paul captures the essence of this new community when in one of his letters he says, ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’. In another of his letters, he refers to this new community, the church, as ‘God’s Temple’. This is the new temple Jesus came to build, not a temple of brick, stone and marble, but a temple of human beings whose diversity reflects the richness of God. We are all members of this new Temple, and we are called to rejoice in its diversity and to help preserve and enhance it.