Jesus cleanses the Temple in today’s Gospel reading. The Temple represents a division instituted by religion, specifically the division between Divinity and the natural world. Gods were once believed synonymous with the forces of nature. Those forces could be deadly and were feared. So too the gods assigned to the forces were deadly and feared, being the driving force behind the fury of a storm and the raging of a flood. When humans began to survive and conquer nature, nature diminished in its ‘god’ standing. ‘God’ became the being who did the conquering. God thus became the heavenly projection of the earthly men conquering nature. These men were War Lords ruling over and defeating ungodly nature, places, and people.
Yahweh from the Old Testament is one such god, a conquering War Lord deity. Believed to dwell in the heavens above nature, Yahweh led nomadic rulers and their armies against ungodly nature, places, and people. Yahweh’s invented existence was projected onto two stone tablets describing the tribe’s Law. It was projected there by Moses. Moses was an earthly tribal War Lord who helped invent the tribe’s heavenly War Lord and coerced people to worship him and obey his Law. Moses placed the tablets of the Law in the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark traveled with the people, specifically on their war raids. After much of the tribe’s violence and destruction done in the raids were over and the people were settled, the Law was then housed in a larger dwelling, the Temple. The Temple now represented the dwelling place of God. It was believed a holy and quite distinct dwelling from the unholy world and its common people. The idea of ‘God,’ or the sacred as something set apart from a profane creation and its creatures stems from War Lords and their religion, Militarism. Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, explored beliefs about sacred and profane. He also wrote of a third realm, the numinous. It too, however, appears to be an additional element in the War Lords’ religion of Militarism. The numinous is a person’s experience of the god sensed as a feeling of fear and entranced captivity by a force believed outside us. When we encounter Jesus in the Temple story, we are encountering a new experience – not of force, either of nature or of War Lords – but of power. Jesus’ revelation of power frees humanity from Temples and things outside us such as fear and any sense of captivity. Jesus gives witness to a powerful inner, intimate Presence within creation, both the earth and humanity – and a transcendent Presence beyond creation into mystery. There is alive in the physical world an affirmation of humble communion and shared vulnerability. Within our humble, vulnerable nature is power and it is a vital power, an energy for life to create, love, and heal. It is a power that does not need War Lords or their temples. Indeed, is the power that replaces them. It is this humble vulnerable power to heal that is at work when Jesus cleanses the Temple of its War Lords and their violent religion of Militarism that practices blood sacrifice of animals. Cleansed of Temples we live a vulnerable communion of immanence and transcendence; we share a living energy deeply within, fully shared, and profoundly transformative across all creation. Divisions between the sacred and the profane melt away.
To paraphrase Pierre Teilhard in the Divine Milieu: ‘By virtue of creation, and, still more, of incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.’
Prayer: May we experience mystery in all creation and in the hearts of all creatures.
Question: Do we not know that the Spirit of God dwells in us?
November 9, 2014 Gospel John 2:13-22 Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome