Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time

November 19, 2021

1 Mc 4:36-37.52-59, 1 Chron 29:10-12, Lk 19:45-48

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.19.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* In today’s first reading, we see the reconsecration of the Temple of Jerusalem on the first anniversary after its desecration by the soldiers and co-conspirers of Antioches Epiphanes IV. There were two parts to their work. Judas and his brothers said, “Let us go up to purify the sanctuary and to rededicate it.” The first was purification. The sacred author tells us, “They found the sanctuary desolate, the altar desecrated, the gates burnt, weeds growing in the courts as in a forest or on some mountain, and the priests’ chambers demolished.” They first needed to wash and ritually cleanse the sanctuary. They removed the statue of a pagan God upon the altar of sacrifices and tore down the defiled altar of sacrifices and stored the stones until a prophet would tell them what to do with it. They repaired the gates, priests’ chambers, the sanctuary and the interior of the temple, restored doors, ornamented the temple with gold crowns and seals, took uncut stones and built a new altar, they made new sacred vessels and brought the lampstand, the altar of incense and the table into the temple, and hung up curtains. The work of purification was thorough and a lot of work. Then they were ready for the rededication on the anniversary of its defilement. With songs, harps, flutes, cymbals, incense, holocausts and sacrifices of deliverance and praise, they celebrated the rededication of the altar and sanctuary for eight days with “great joy … and gladness.” The Jews have continued this eight-day celebration every year down to the present during the octave of Chanukah, which means “inauguration.”

* In the Gospel, Jesus goes to the sanctuary that was reconsecrated by Judas Maccabeus and his brothers and adorned even more gloriously a century later by Herod the Great. But when he arrived, he saw that it was being defiled not by Gentiles but by sins, and he immediately began the two-fold process of purification and rededication. It’s an image of Jesus with whom many Christians, especially today, are unfamiliar. The same Jesus whom Isaiah prophesied would “not break a bruised reed nor quench a smoldering wick” (Is 42:3), the same Jesus whom the psalms would call “kind and merciful” (Ps 145:8) the same Jesus who called himself “meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29), started to overturn tables, tossing money on the floor, and making a whip of cords to drive the sheep and the cattle out of the temple. And there is no contradiction between the image of Jesus as the kind, merciful friend of sinners and Jesus as consumed with zeal for his Father’s house, because out of love for sinners and his Father, he both really loved sinners and really the hated the sins that can kill sinners. What he was doing and its application to us can more easily be seen if we know two Greek words. The first is the word for “temple” or “temple area” that St. John employs in his depiction of this scene. The first is to hieron, which is a neuter form of the word that means “consecrated.” The temple was called “the consecrated place,” the locus totally separated to allow people to come to be with God and filled with him so as to be able to return from there changed by God and capable of changing the world with God. The second word is ekballein, which is the word used to describe how Jesus “drove out” the animals. It’s the same verb used when Jesus did exorcisms and drove out the temple. When we see these two words,