OMELIE / Omelie EN

07 mar 2021

07/03/2021 – 3rd Sunday of Lent - year B

07/03/2021 – 3^rd Sunday of Lent - year B

Reading 1 EX 20,1-17 Psalm 18/19 Reading 2 1COR 1,22-25 Gospel JN 2,13-25

What idea do we have about God? How can we imagine Him? No, we do not want to imagine God, we would risk to build an image for ourselves, or even worse, an idea which does not match. We can and we need only to listen to Him, welcome His word and then obey Him: afterwards, only after obeying, we will know how great are His love and His wisdom, we will be able to meet Him offering Him our praise and our desires, we will be able to answer Him by giving Him our availability to make His desires come true. The Word given to us while we continue our journey towards baptism, which the catechumens are preparing for, is showing us one of the most important moments of the life of the people of Israel: God is revealing His rules. These are the basis of the man’s personal and social life in the way God has “dreamt” him in order for him to be truly “in the image, according to the likeness” of His.

From those ten Words we start getting to know our God. We know Him not as a stranger, as an object we look at from outside, but as someone who is part of our life, involved in our existence, who has placed Himself within us, or, even better, who keeps us in His heart. We know Him with the desire with which a bride knows her husband. We know Him jealous of a jealousy beautiful and enjoyable, because He wants us to correspond his love exclusively. His jealousy is not selfishness, but worry that we might let ourselves be cheated by others, by whom wants to attract us only for exploiting us, deluding us and cheating us. We know Him as a child knows his father and his mother, with the same tenderness, but also with the same inadequacy. Our knowledge of God is never at the same level, it is never complete, never exhaustive, is never finished.

Jesus, arriving in Jerusalem, realises that the temple looks to the pilgrims who are going to it like a very odd show: it has become a market for the animals to offer as a sacrifice to God. The faithful who enter it do not see a demonstration of the God of Israel’s selfless love, but the desire for gain of those who should be the mediator between them. Whoever show up to pray get the impression that God’s love needs to be purchased, and that the man cannot meet his God directly, but only through his wallet. God’s image resulting is the image of a merchant or of a friend of the rich: a disgusting image, but above all false.

Jesus, knowing He is the Son of God, and therefore that He has authority in that Place, wants to make sure that whoever enter the holy temple are able to know God as Father, and recognise His tender, faithful and amazing love. With peace, but also decisively and firmly, He drives the merchants away, the money changers and, above all, their merchandise. He is like Moses, when firmly he took action in order to destroy the golden calf, which was giving the people ideas about, we might say, the power of money, the idea that with money you can do anything and that money brings happiness: a worse lie does not exist. Gold is not the answer to the man’s needs. And not even physical strength or power, of which the calf is a symbol.

Jesus though knows too that in the stone temple, even if it is a work of art and beautiful, the man will never meet the fullness of the Father’s love. Enjoying fully His love is possible only in Him, in His life offered with love and because of love. He is the true temple of God, the place in which we meet the perfection of the eternal and faithful love of the Father. When this Temple of meat will be rebuilt after His death, the death which scares everyone, then every man will be able to get close to Him every day in order to enjoy being loved and being able to love. Jesus crucified and risen is really richness and “power and wisdom of God”!