20 November 2020

Friday of the Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time

In today’s Gospel reading from Luke 19, Jesus demonstrates his authority by cleansing the Temple and restoring it as “a house of prayer.” As the Son of David and the Eternal Son of the Father, Jesus has every right to cast the money-changers and merchants out of the Temple. It is worth imagining the commotion and confusion that Jesus’ action would have caused! Yet this commotion was necessary and fitting in order to make the Temple once more the house of prayer it was meant to be.

As Saint Paul tells us, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19). As such, Jesus has every right to enter our hearts and “clean house,” since in the final estimation we belong entirely to God. But our Lord will not do so completely against our will; he wants us to cooperate with his grace. How will we respond to Jesus’ entry into our lives? Will we be like the authorities in the Gospel who are “seeking to put him to death” because they regard Jesus as a threat, or will we respond like the people who are “hanging on his words” because they recognize his life-giving mission? Today, let us pray for the grace to let Jesus rearrange our lives as he sees fit, no matter how inconvenient it may seem to us in the moment, confident that all he does in us will make us more the temples of prayer and praise we are created to be.