Third Sunday of Lent, March 15, 2009 (Cycle B)

Scripture Readings

First Ex 20:1-17 or 20:1-3, 7-8, 12-17

Second 1 Cor 1:22-25
Gospel Jn 2:13-25

Prepared by: Fr. Lawrence J. Donohoo, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• First Reading: The “ten commandments” of God, which inaugurate the divine revelation on Mt. Sinai,
are an integral part of the covenant between God and his Chosen People.
• Second Reading: The mystery of the cross addresses the particular religious preferences of Jews and
Greeks concerning the validation of divine revelation by calling these preferences to conversion.
• Gospel: In an action-packed sequence that begins with the Temple in Jerusalem and concludes with
the temple of his own body, Jesus demonstrates a divine agility in negotiating his way between the Old
and New Dispensations.

2. Exegetical Notes
• The textual placement in Exodus of the ten commandments gives them a commanding role in
introducing the revelation on Mt. Sinai and framing the subsequent articulation of more particular laws
regulating conduct with respect to God and human beings.
• The placement of the cleansing of the Temple at the beginning of John’s Gospel, in contrast to the
Synoptic placement at the end of Jesus’ ministry, has far-reaching implications for Christ’s ministry
and the obstacles it faces in this radically different setting. (see Cameron)
• “The outburst of Jesus does not arise simply because God’s holy place is being desecrated. Rather, the
Lord’s ‘consuming zeal’ flares at the trafficking of the dealers because it suggests that a fulfilled
relationship with God relies on a business transaction. . . .The sacrifice required has nothing to do with
slaughtering oxen. Rather, Jesus himself is the true sacrifice pleasing to the Father. To participate in
that sacrifice demands our willingness to be one with the Passion of Jesus through our wholehearted
commitment to personal self-donation.” (Cameron)

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• 2056 The word “Decalogue” means literally “ten words.” God revealed these “ten words” to his
people on the holy mountain. They were written “with the finger of God,” unlike the other
commandments written by Moses. They are pre-eminently the words of God. They are handed on to us
in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. Beginning with the Old Testament, the sacred books refer to
the “ten words,” but it is in the New Covenant in Jesus Christ that their full meaning will be revealed.
• 2061 The Commandments take on their full meaning within the covenant. According to Scripture,
man’s moral life has all its meaning in and through the covenant. The first of the “ten words” recalls
that God loved his people first: Since there was a passing from the paradise of freedom to the slavery
of this world, in punishment for sin, the first phrase of the Decalogue, the first word of God’s
commandments, bears on freedom “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of
Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
• 2083 Jesus summed up man’s duties toward God in this saying: “You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This immediately echoes the
solemn call: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD.” God has loved us first. The love of
the One God is recalled in the first of the “ten words.” The commandments then make explicit the
response of love that man is called to give to his God.
• 272 Faith in God the Father Almighty can be put to the test by the experience of evil and suffering.
God can sometimes seem to be absent and incapable of stopping evil. But in the most mysterious way
God the Father has revealed his almighty power in the voluntary humiliation and Resurrection of his
Son, by which he conquered evil. Christ crucified is thus “the power of God and the wisdom of God.
For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” It is in
Christ’s Resurrection and exaltation that the Father has shown forth “the immeasurable greatness of
his power in us who believe.”
• 583 Like the prophets before him Jesus expressed the deepest respect for the Temple in Jerusalem. It
was in the Temple that Joseph and Mary presented him forty days after his birth. At the age of twelve
he decided to remain in the Temple to remind his parents that he must be about his Father’s business.
He went there each year during his hidden life at least for Passover. His public ministry itself was
patterned by his pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the great Jewish feasts.
• 584 Jesus went up to the Temple as the privileged place of encounter with God. For him, the Temple
was the dwelling of his Father, a house of prayer, and he was angered that its outer court had become a
place of commerce. He drove merchants out of it because of jealous love for his Father: “You shall not
make my Father’s house a house of trade. His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your
house will consume me.’“ After his Resurrection his apostles retained their reverence for the Temple.
• 585 On the threshold of his Passion Jesus announced the coming destruction of this splendid building,
of which there would not remain “one stone upon another.” By doing so, he announced a sign of the
last days, which were to begin with his own Passover. But this prophecy would be distorted in its
telling by false witnesses during his interrogation at the high priest’s house, and would be thrown back
at him as an insult when he was nailed to the cross.
• 586 Far from having been hostile to the Temple, where he gave the essential part of his teaching, Jesus
was willing to pay the Temple-tax, associating with him Peter, whom he had just made the foundation
of his future Church. He even identified himself with the Temple by presenting himself as God’s
definitive dwelling-place among men. Therefore his being put to bodily death presaged the destruction
of the Temple, which would manifest the dawning of a new age in the history of salvation: “The hour
is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.”
• 994 But there is more. Jesus links faith in the resurrection to his own person: “I am the Resurrection
and the life.” It is Jesus himself who on the last day will raise up those who have believed in him, who
have eaten his body and drunk his blood. Already now in this present life he gives a sign and pledge of
this by restoring some of the dead to life, announcing thereby his own Resurrection, though it was to
be of another order. He speaks of this unique event as the “sign of Jonah,” the sign of the temple: he
announces that he will be put to death but rise thereafter on the third day.

4. Patristic and Medieval Commentary

• “But were signs necessary for his putting a stop to evil practices? Was not having such zeal for the
house of God the greatest sign of his virtue? They did not, however, remember the prophecy, but
asked for a sign, at once irritated at the loss of their base gains and wishing to prevent him from going
further. For this dilemma, they thought, would oblige him either to work miracles, or give up his
present course. . . . As it was, Jesus answered and said to them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I
will raise it up.” (St. John Chrysostom)
• “To take the passage mystically, God enters His Church spiritually every day, and marks each one’s
behavior there. Let us be careful then, when we are in God’s Church, that we indulge not in stories, or
jokes, or hatreds, or lusts, lest on a sudden he come and scourge us, and drive us out of his Church.”
(Alcuin)
• “Zeal arises from the intensity of love. For it is evident that the more intensely a power tends to
anything, the more vigorously it withstands opposition or resistance. Since therefore love is ‘a
movement towards the object loved, . . .an intense love seeks to remove everything that opposes it. . . .
[L]ove of friendship seeks the friend’s good; so that when it is intense, it causes a person to be moved
against everything that opposes the friend’s good. In this respect, a man is said to be zealous on behalf
of his friend, when he makes a point of repelling whatever may be said or done against the friend’s
good. In this way, too, a man is said to be zealous on God’s behalf, when he endeavors, to the best of
his means, to repel whatever is contrary to the divine honor or will.” (St. Thomas Aquinas)
5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars
• St. Lawrence, in the famous legend from antiquity, showed a remarkable zeal for the poor in bringing
them to the emperor as the Church’s “treasure”—a zeal that could only follow upon a dedicated
diaconal ministry of holy zeal on behalf of the poor.
• St. Dominic expressed zeal in the mode of dialectic argument, perhaps best recorded in his “all-
nighter” with the innkeeper. In this way he distanced himself from those who wrongly expressed zeal
through violence.
• Francis of Vittoria worked toward an expansion of the law in the conscience of Western civilization by
his untiring advocacy for the anawim of his time—the threatened native Americans of South America.
6. Quotations of Pope Benedict XVI

• “In the Ten Commandments God presents himself, depicts himself, and at the same time interprets
human existence, so that its truth is made manifest, as it becomes visible in the mirror of God’s nature,
because man can only rightly be understood from the viewpoint of God. Living out the Ten
Commandments means living out our own resemblance to God, responding to the truth of our nature,
and thus doing good. . .Living out the Ten Commandments means living out the divinity of man, and
 exactly that is freedom: the fusing of our being with the Divine Being and the resulting harmony of all
with all.”
• “Anger is not necessarily always in contradiction with love. . .[A] sugar-coated Jesus or a God who
agrees to everything and is never anything but nice and friendly is no more than a caricature of real
love. Because God loves us, because he wants us to grow into truth, he must necessarily make
demands on us and must also correct us. God has to do those things we refer to in the image of ‘the
wrath of God,’ that is, he has to resist us in our attempts to fall from our own best selves and when we
pose a threat to ourselves.”
• “‘Obedience is not secondary for Jesus, but forms the core of his being’ [Guardini]. . .For his power
there is therefore ‘no limit coming from the outside, but only one from the inside. . .the will of the
Father freely accepted.’ It is a power that has such complete control over itself ‘that it is capable of
renouncing itself’. . . Thus, Jesus’ power is power based on love, love becoming powerful. It is power
that shows us the way from all that is tangible and visible to the invisible and the truly real of God’s
powerful love. It is power as way that has as its goal setting people on their way: into the
transcendence of love.”

7. Other Considerations

• If we are to recover a genuine understanding of the moral covenant, of the moral covenant of the Law,
we must work to retrieve its revelatory power. The revelation of the Ten Commandments is expressed
in the imperative mood. 1Like the interrogative and exclamatory, the imperative announces itself by
expressing itself in a unique linguistic form—the command. A genuine imperative is a relevant
imperative if we feel challenged or confronted or made uncomfortable. Where a particular law is no
longer a challenge, it is either due to a human heart that has already submitted in obedience or has
hardened beyond the capacity to be moved. The Law, whether the Ten Commandments or the New
Law or Christ, is saying something important about God and ourselves–something that we can learn
through our reaction and beyond our reaction. Revelation in the imperative mode is thus a concomitant
revelation of the human heart.
• 1Revelation as law occurs not simply through a divine word, but through the human response to it. In
imitation of the Lord who manifests himself, we manifest ourselves before the Law through
obedience–or disobedience. What the Law reveals, as St. Paul teaches, is my own capacities and
incapacities to fulfill it. Standing before the Law that commands me, it reveals me to myself, and so
my actions reveal my (in)capacity for self-revelation. We thus realize that this part of revelation is
something that we must live in order to understand. The keeping of the Law gives us access to its
revelatory power. But even our failure to live it reveals us to ourselves. And by obeying, we come to
see the wisdom of the Law and its Lawgiver. By disobeying, we come to see the folly of sin and its
promises.
• The commandments are arranged according to three major topics that concern the incomparable
holiness of God, the keeping of the Sabbath, and human relations. The Sabbath precepts act as a
intermediary between the “divine” precepts and the “human” precepts insofar as they regulate human
conduct with respect to the divine worship.
• 1The long history of the Jewish and Christian peoples’ engagement with the Law shows not only their
own development, but the development of the Law itself. For if the Law is kept, then the Law will
change as situations change and its subjects become increasingly able to refine it. Thus the older codes
of the Pentateuch are updated in later writings of the Pentateuch to reflect changing social and legal
traditions. Today our conscience is jarred when we hear references to slavery in the Old Law. Or think
 of Jesus’ overturning the Mosaic legislation on divorce by harking back to the second page of
Scripture and retrieving the original natural law that should govern the commitment of man and wife
to each other. The Law is behind us, but it is even more ahead of us.
• The proclamation of Christ crucified, which is a scandal to the Jewish and pagan attempts to gain
some kind of foothold over the divine things, is a revelation that can only be seen by being accepted.
• On the one hand, Jesus gives indisputable primacy to the Temple as the sacred space for worshiping
God; on the other, he prophesies the destruction of the Temple in other passages, and even here shifts
the conversation to the temple of his own body. Compare with Mt. 23:37-39, where Jesus explicitly
links the destiny of the Temple with himself.
• The “law and order” character of the revelation of the Ten Commandments, coupled with an initiative-
diluting prescription of penalties, is to be vividly contrasted with the “violence” of the Gospel where
Christ throws caution to the winds in the pursuit of his Father’s honor. Also, contrast the
“powerlessness” of Christ in St. Paul’s theological portrait with the muscular Christ of the Gospel of
John. A time to be weak and a time to be strong. . .
• Jesus’ zealous defense of true Temple worship provides an indispensable interpretive key for
understanding his prophecies concerning the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. In short, he is
greatly saddened.
• Zeal is distinguished by righteous indignation in arising out of obedience and courage: an obedience
that truly listens to the divine voice for guidance, and a courage that executes the perceived divine will
with graced energy. Such zeal is not afraid to enlist the power of the emotions when they are subjected
to the will and the will in turn is subjected to divine guidance.
• Paradoxically, zeal is fostered by the life of quiet prayer in the mode of listening, a patient
development of the moral virtues, a constant striving to 1overcome sloth and selfishness, and a
constant vigilance in avoiding everything that dulls the human spirit.

Recommended Resources
Benedict XVI. Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI. Edited by Peter John Cameron. Yonkers:
Magnificat, 2006.
Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach - Cycle C. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 2000.
Thomas Aquinas, St. Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels. Works of the Fathers. Vol. 2.
London, 1843. Reprinted by The St. Austin Press, 1997.