WHAT RELIGION IS OURS?
All the Gospels echo a bold and provocative gesture on Jesus’ part within the court of the Jerusalem Temple. It probably wasn’t all that spectacular. He jostled a group of sellers of pigeons, overturned the tables of some money-changers, and tried to interrupt activity for a few moments. He couldn’t do much more.
However, that gesture full of prophetic power was what led to his detention and rapid execution. To attack the Temple was to attack the heart of the Jewish people: the center of their religious, social, and political life. The Temple was untouchable. There dwelt the God of Israel. What would become of the people without God’s presence among them? How could they survive without the Temple?
For Jesus, however, it was the great obstacle to welcoming God’s reign as he understood and proclaimed it. His gesture put into question the economic, political, and religious system that is maintained from that «holy place». What was that Temple? Sign of God’s reign and God’s justice, or symbol of collaboration with Rome? House of prayer, or storehouse for tithes and first fruits of the peasants? Sanctuary of God’s forgiveness, or justification for every class of injustice?
That one was a «marketplace». While around «God’s house» was accumulating wealth, in the villages was growing the suffering of God’s children. No. God would never legitimize a religion like that. The God of the poor wouldn’t be able to reign from such a Temple. With the coming of God’s reign it was losing its reason to be.
Jesus’ activity puts all of us his followers on guard and obliges us to ask ourselves what religion we are cultivating in our temples. If it is not inspired by Jesus, it can become a «holy» way of shutting ourselves off from God’s project that Jesus wants to promote in the world. What’s first isn’t religion, but God’s reign.
What religion is ours? To let grow our compassion for those who suffer, or to allow ourselves to live tranquil in our own wellbeing? Nourish our own interests, or put ourselves to work for a more human world? If it looks like the religion of the Jewish Temple, Jesus won’t bless us.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
