Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

3rd Sunday During the Year – Year B

1st reading: Exodus 20,1-17
Psalm: 18b (19),8, 9,10, 11
2nd reading: 1 Corinthians 1,22-25
Gospel: John 2,13-25

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“Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up… spoke to him of the sanctuary of his body.”

By his death and resurrection, Jesus puts death to death. In the resurrected Jesus, death is dead, in the resurrected Jesus the mystery of Creation is accomplished. And this is even why the day of the Lord will change from the seventh day to the first day of the week, because in the resurrected Jesus, Creation, of which the Sabbath commemorates, is accomplished; From now on, giving thanks to God for his creation and enjoying his Creation is identically celebrating the resurrection of Jesus in the first days of new times.

But Jesus dies in his singular body, his personal body, and he resurrects of course in his singular body which the apostles will touch, but he also resurrects in his ecclesial body. You probably know the oriental icon of the resurrection, where we see Jesus in Hades, who blew up the doors of Hades, and takes Adam and Eve from their tombs.

meaning all captive humanity, to lead them in his ascension which goes from hell to sitting at the right hand of the Father. He leads humanity captive to death and sin in the movement of his resurrection to make it his body. And this is what we experience in the mystery of baptism. In baptism, we are thus united to the resurrected Jesus, and we could almost

say to Jesus “resurrected”, that is to say that we are drawn into this movement. And Paul will tell the Ephesians that the energy of the power of the force that God the Father put in Jesus to raise him from the dead and seat him at his right hand, it is this extraordinary power that he puts at work in us, believers (Eph 1,19:XNUMX). And that is all the power of the Holy Spirit.

So what happens in this gospel concerns us, since now, through baptism, we are members of the body of Christ; and Jesus, symbolically, comes to purify this temple sign with his own body. What he does in the Temple, he wants to do in our lives. What is he doing in the Temple?

He puts things in their place. Those who have been to Jerusalem can visualize things: first of all there is a very, very large esplanade which is surrounded by colonnades. To the south of this esplanade, a large basilica, a large building designed to be able to buy animals for sacrifice, to be able to change the currency so that there is no currency with the effigy of Caesar in the Temple. And in the middle of this esplanade, the square of the Jews. The esplanade is accessible to everyone, but the Jews go up from another place which brings them to the center of the esplanade, in the square of the Jews. At the heart of this square is the very building of the sanctuary inside which is housed the small Temple which contains the Saint and the Holy of Holies. Now, sellers began to invade the pagan square to expand their stalls; Jesus comes to send them back to where they should stand to make way for the pagans who will now be able to enter the Alliance. And the gospel mentions a very interesting detail: Jesus makes himself a whip with ropes - this means that it is not an attack of anger: he calmly prepares his whip, he is not at all “on fire” as we would say colloquially, but he is going to make a strong gesture. Then he chases away the sellers as well as the sheep and the oxen. He throws the money changers' money on the ground. He overturns their counter... On the other hand, he says to the dove sellers: get that out of here. The oxen, the sheep, the sellers will be able to run after them to catch up; money changers will be able to get down on all fours to collect their change. But if Jesus opened the doves' cage, they would not be able to catch the doves. And so Jesus respects everyone's property, but he asks them to put that in its place. So, in our own lives, Jesus does not want to strip us of everything: he wants us to learn to put everything in its place and, as Saint Joan of Arc would say, “God comes first” in our lives, and that material goods or the worries of life do not take the place that God should occupy in our heart, which is the first place, that of trust and love.

Is the first commandment “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” really the first commandment in my life?

So that we can experience this, so that we can let ourselves be stripped of what is out of place, Christ entered into the mystery of human death. In the Paschal Mystery, he gives up his life to go so far as to destroy death and draw us into the movement of his resurrection. This is why it is our only treasure. This is why Paul tells us: " We,

we proclaim a crucified Messiah, a scandal for the Jews, madness for the pagan nations. But for those whom God calls, whether Jews or Greeks, this Messiah, this Christ, is the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

And the Church, in her wisdom, three times a day in prayerangelus, asks that we be led “by the Passion and by the Cross of Jesus to the glory of his resurrection”. We are not fascinated by the Cross

without reason: it is because by contemplating the life of the Lord, we see that this is the path he takes to enter into the fullness of life. And so, with wisdom, we tell ourselves that if we take the same path, we will arrive at the same place, that is, at the fullness of life.

But one more detail must attract our attention. Jesus says: “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up”. Now in other places, the apostle Paul makes us understand other things, when he says to the Corinthians: “God, by his power, has resurrected the Lord and will resurrect us with him” (1 Cor 6,14:XNUMX), or when he said to the Galatians: “God the Father raised Jesus Christ from the dead” (Ga 1,1). So how can Jesus say: Je will I restore this sanctuary? Saint Augustine points out that everything is common in the Trinity and that what the Father does, the Son does also. But it seems to me that we must go further. Christ saves us by his death and resurrection. He brings us into the

movement of his resurrection through the sacraments of Christian initiation. But we must also not only welcome this grace, but put it into practice.

In a letter to Céline in 1892, Thérèse wrote this:

Jesus has such an incomprehensible love for us that He wants us to share with Him in the salvation of souls. He doesn't want to do anything without us. (LT135)  Jesus has such an incomprehensible love for us that he does not want to do anything without us...

And therefore, our own salvation, we must participate in it. We must participate in the salvation of our brothers. This is even what completely mobilizes Saint Thérèse: it is to “win souls” as she says, that is to say, to participate in the salvation of all men, including the greatest criminals… to work on it with Jesus.

If Jesus comes to put things in their place within us, we must work with Jesus to put things in their place ourselves, knowing that all this is the grace of God! But God's grace is not a magical act. God loves us too much not to share with us the capacity to convert. This love of God for us is first. This gift from God to us is primary and our life becomes a response to God. Then we can listen to the commandments. Then we can reread the Decalogue. He tells us how to respond to God's grace. He tells us how to abide in this grace.

This is also the logic of the Decalogue - and I clearly prefer to call it Decalogue which means the 10 words than to call it the 10 commandments, because the first word is not a commandment. The first word is “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” That is to say: I am the One who freed you; here's how to stay free. And the words that follow tell how to live to remain in this

grace of freedom, how to respond to God.

God loves us first, God saves us first. Salvation is not at the end of the Decalogue. It is not because we have observed everything well that we will be saved: it is because we are saved that we can then observe what God says, that we can, with Jesus, accomplish the law.

To do this, we must memorize these words of the Covenant. Do each of us know the 10 words of the Covenant by heart? If I gave you a sheet of paper, would you be able to return them in order? And if we forget what God asks, how can we live it…?

I tell you again: