The Third Sunday in Lent
March 15, 2009
Homily for the Anglican Usage Mass
of the
St. Thomas More Society
celebrated at
St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church , 1013 Wood Street
Scranton, PA
John 2:13-25
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen
When I lived in England seventeen years ago, I had occasion to visit several of the splendid cathedrals that are now the property of the Church of England, though they were built centuries before by Catholics. These cathedrals are reminiscent of Catholic churches, but there is one major difference. Where here we see beautiful stained glass windows, many of the churches I saw in England had plain glass, the stained glass windows having been destroyed by the Protestant vandals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All over England, Protestants desecrated Catholic churches by smashing the glass as a way to demonstrate in a physical manner their intellectual and spiritual rejection of the Catholic faith. They profaned the churches because they did not believe what each church represented.
The animal salesmen and moneychangers who Jesus drove out of the Temple in today’s Gospel profaned the Temple because they had ceased to believe what the Temple represented. Here was the presence of God among His people, the Jews. Here was where the Jews came to make sacrifices of thanksgiving and sacrifices for sins, but the moneychangers and salesmen saw only the opportunity to make money off of people fulfilling their religious obligations. The moneychangers were needed for the Temple tax which had to be paid. The salesmen were needed for the sacrifices which had to be made. But in the end, commerce trumped prayer to such a degree that the Temple was profaned, made into a marketplace, and Jesus was forced to rebuke the people for their unbelief.
The people’s lack of faith in God our Father is reflected in their lack of faith in Jesus, as they question whether He has the authority to do what He did. Their desecration of the Temple foreshadows the desecration of Jesus Himself, as the same ones who question Him now later plotted Jesus’ murder.
Therefore, we see that the desecration of a physical structure is always a sign of a lack of faith and of the intention to desecrate more than mere buildings. Indeed, whenever violence is directed at church buildings, violence is also directed at those who worship in these buildings. Many a priest was martyred in the churches of England, as he sought to defend the building from Protestant mobs. And even today we see that the violence that destroys the Catholic churches in Orissa State in India also claims the lives of faithful Catholics who are brave enough to stand up for the Faith that their neighbors hate.
We are blessed that we live in a country that has not seen widespread violence directed against Catholic churches and Catholic people in over one hundred fifty years, since the Nativist riots of the 1840’s and 1850’s when in places like Philadelphia Catholic churches were burned and Catholic people were murdered. We are fortunate that we do not often have to defend our churches from mobs, nor do we have to defend our lives from those who would take them from us just because we are Catholic.
We can see, though, that the second desecration, the desecration of Jesus, is far worse than the first. It was bad enough that the religious authorities of Jesus’ day permitted the desecration of the Temple in Jerusalem. It was infinitely worse that they played a part in the desecration of Jesus’ body, the Temple that Jesus promised to raise up in three days if they tried to destroy it. As terrible as it is to see churches desecrated, we shudder all the more when we contemplate the murder of Catholics by Protestants in 16th century England or by Hindu mobs in 21st century India. To desecrate a church is to attack a mere building, but to desecrate a body is to attack a human being, someone made in the image of God, someone for whom Christ died, someone so immeasurably valuable that God in Jesus Christ was willing to be desecrated in order that that person might live.
Consider, however, how often people in America desecrate their own temples of the Holy Spirit, how often Americans voluntarily do things to their bodies far worse than the desecration of the stained glass windows that took place in 16th century England. Though their bodies are functioning perfectly well, they medicate their fertility as if it were a disease. Though their bodies are functioning perfectly well, they submit to plastic surgery to alter their appearance. Though their bodies are functioning perfectly well, they imbibe so much alcohol that they can barely walk and talk at the same time---I saw a lot of that last night when I drove downtown at about eight o’clock. Though their bodies are functioning perfectly well, men consent to the mutilation of their vas deferens and women to their Fallopian tubes so to disable their ability to have children. I could go on and on, but all these practices are common enough to indicate how numb we have become to the common desecration of temples in which the Holy Spirit resides. And each desecration exhibits a lack of faith in the God who told us never to desecrate His Temple. Every desecration of a body is a desecration of Jesus Himself, who said, “as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me (Mat. 25:40)”. Every desecration of our temples of the Holy Spirit is thus a failure to use our temples as they were made to be used, in the same way the moneychangers and salesmen misused the Temple in Jerusalem. Rather than God being glorified, He is mocked, and we deny the first commandment and we fail to heed St. Paul’s counsel: “You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body (I Cor. 6:19-20)”.
I am certain that today in America, if Protestant or Hindu mobs attempted to desecrate Catholic churches, the Catholic faithful would defend these buildings with their very lives. Catholics in this country have not often let themselves be bullied, and I am sure they would not be bullied today. Yet, in so many ways, when it comes to our bodies, our temples of the Holy Spirit, which are far more sacred than our churches, Catholics not only approve the desecration, but also participate in it themselves.
If we are to bear witness to those around us, to people suffering because of the culture of death, we must defend the integrity and sacredness of our bodies as vigorously as we would defend the integrity and sacredness of this building in which we worship. We can do this in two ways. First, use this Holy Season of Lent to discern how we might be desecrating our bodies and then stop doing so immediately. Thus, we can fulfill the second way to defend the temples that are our bodies: we can courageously and with a clear conscience stand up for the truth about the human bodies as our neighbors profane their bodies in the myriad ways American bodies are so commonly desecrated. After we have put our own houses in order, we can gently remind others that the way to life cannot be found in the body’s desecration, but in its defense.