Most of us have heard the saying “the love of money is the root of all evil.” As I reflected on today’s Gospel, John 2:13-25, St John’s version of the cleansing of the Temple, that is the first thing that popped into my head. We all know this story. Jesus goes to the temple where he finds money changers and people selling animals for sacrifice. He becomes very angry and drives out the animal sellers and their animals and then overturns the tables of the money changers and spills their coins. He is confronted by the Jews who ask, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” And he answers them with an allusion to his death and resurrection, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
This seems to be a fairly straight forward story. But it is more than a story about the desecration of the temple. It is a story about greed, corruption, injustice and exploitation. What was going on in the temple was a scandalous rort. The money changers, the animal sellers and the temple officials were ripping people off at every opportunity. The temple charged every Jewish person over the age of nineteen a temple tax of one half-shekel (two days wages). The temple tax could be paid only in temple currency. The money changers charged exorbitant commissions equal to the temple tax e.g. a 100% commission and then they would charge on every half-shekel of change they had to give. The animal sellers, in cahoots with the temple officials, had a monopoly. The temple officials would accept for sacrifice only those animals purchased within the temple. The temple animal sellers changed 15 to 20 times the market rate. All of this reprehensible activity made fulfilling one’s religious obligations an onerous exercise.
So Jesus had every right to be angry. This brings me back to the adage about love of money being the root of all evil. The actual quotation is from St Paul’s 1st Letter to Timothy, “Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction. For, the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains. But you, man of God, avoid all this. Instead, pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness” (1 Timothy 6:9-11).
Sadly for our world, human nature has not changed much in the last 2000 years. Greed, corruption, injustice and exploitation still run rampant. And we struggle to “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness,” because our society does not value these virtues. In Evangelii Gaudium our Holy Father, Pope Francis tells us that “We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption” (55).
And so, on this Third Sunday of Lent; let’s join with Pope Francis who suggests that we make this Lent a time of “asking where our hearts are directed. Let us ask: where is my life’s navigation system taking me – towards God or towards myself? Do I live to please the Lord, or to be noticed, praised, put at the head of the line…? Do I have a ‘wobbly’ heart, which takes a step forward and then one backwards? Do I love the Lord a bit and the world a bit, or is my heart steadfast in God? AM I content with my hypocrisies, or do I work to free my heart from the duplicity and falsehood that tie it down?” (Pope Francis’ Homily for Ash Wednesday 2021).
Compassionate God,
we often turn our hearts
into houses of pride and greed
rather than into homes of love and goodness
where you can feel at home.
Destroy the temple of sin in us,
drive away all sin from our hearts,
and make us living stones of a community
in which Your Son Jesus Christ,
our Lord, can live and reign
for ever and ever.
Amen.
