From very early
on, Christian theologians and spiritual writers made a comparison
between Jesus' cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem and Jesus' cleansing
of our hearts and bodies. St. Paul refers to the body as a "temple of
the Holy Spirit." Your self, your body, your whole person is meant to be
a temple, a holy place where God dwells and where prayer and union with
God is central. It's a beautiful image: rightly ordered, we become
temples of the Holy Spirit.
This image leads to an
important question: what goes wrong within the temple of our souls? The
same thing that went wrong with the Temple in Jerusalem--what's meant
to be a house of prayer becomes a den of thieves. All kinds of
distractions came into the Temple, money changers and corrupt
influences, those who turned people away from worshiping God.
Today, we should ask, what distractions and corruptions have come into the temple of my heart and body?
Lent is a terrific time to allow Jesus Christ to make a whip of cords
and come into the temple of our hearts, and, while there, to turn some
tables over, to flip things upside down if he has to.
What would Jesus chase out of your heart if he had a chance? If you let
him in, with all the wonderful fury displayed in the Gospels, what
would he cleanse?
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