Nov 19: As with the Temple, So with the Church

El Greco: Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple

Friday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Gospel: Lk 19:45-48

"Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, ‘It is written, 'My house shall be a house of prayer;' but you have made it a den of robbers (NRSV, Lk 19:45-46).’ "

Lord God, for your Son Jesus the Temple was the center of the people’s worship. And so Jesus was unrelenting towards the money changers and merchants operating in the Temple precincts, whose activities he saw as blasphemous. Father, your Church, which Jesus has left to us, is our center of worship. Each of us has his own prayer life, but it is as Church that all of us, a people, gather to worship you. Over the centuries, just as we as individuals have so often failed the challenge to live truly holy lives, the Church as the gathering of the faithful has also failed, allowing itself to be taken over by the “money changers and merchants.” Not that the problem has always been a matter of economics or even of political power. Each age seems to have brought its own temptations to which we have all too often succumbed, the crusades, the excesses of the Inquisition, conflict with the positive sciences, to name a few.

During this past century, Lord, your Church began a period of aggiornamento, not only of updating but also of reform. For the first time the Church began to recognize itself as not only having a history, a story, but also of being an historical reality called to interact with the world, helping to transform the world by its mission of evangelization, but also, in the process, of being transformed itself.

Father in heaven, you alone are absolute. You are one and unchanging, beyond spatial and temporal limits. But your Church exists in the world which is conditioned by space and time. It is limited by the here and there, by yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Lord God, you speak one word to each of us, spoken from all eternity, but heard in time and rehearsed as best we can in the Church. The great temptation of the Church in many ages but especially in our own era is not that of economic greed or political power. It is rather to deny that we are a people in history, a people on pilgrimage toward you, our only true future. The temptation is to sense, in this way or that, that we have already arrived at our goal, that the truth, because it has already been spoken by you, Lord, once and for all, is now totally within our grasp. The temptation is to take a formula of the Church, often solemnly stated, as the final expression of your absolute truth rather than one more stage on the journey, one more sharing in the absolute truth which is you alone. The temptation is to conclude that since the Church, Lord, is your gift to the people, that the form which it takes in this age is its final form and that further and new expressions of life and ministry rooted in the gospels are not possible.

Yet new understanding of your truth and new forms of ministry are only to be expected as we in the Church continue to move forward to you. We ask you, Lord to bless us on our march.

Lord, as we read the Gospel, we are sometimes confused by the force with which Jesus struck out at those undermining Temple worship. With your help may we recognize the seriousness of our finding a clearer understanding of what the Church is, the form that she must take for our time and the gospel message as it needs to be spoken in today’s world. And then, we pray, Lord, that, with minds open to the Spirit’s guidance towards new and further change, we will find in you the courage to place ourselves in your service.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.