Turning the Tables
I was 15-years-old when I was caught with something I clearly shouldn’t have had. I will leave it to your imagination … for we all do stupid and sinful things when we are 15. Sometimes we do many stupid and sinful things …
My Mom discovered it. My Dad was the one to bring it to my attention -- in the car. Seatbelted in place. No choice but to listen.
Here’s what strikes me about that moment, forever etched upon my heart. My father could have yelled. His anger could have been off the charts. Truthfully, my parents had every right to be disappointed and hurt and angry-beyond-words. (In fact, I am sure they were.)
Instead, my Dad spoke to me in a way that my embarrassed and prideful self could hear, one that was compassionate-but-serious; loving-but-firm. My father was clear: I was wrong; my behavior had to stop.
That afternoon on Marshall Road, stuck inside an old ‘80’s Mercury sedan, my father flipped the tables of my life and showed me another way.
As a kid, I always imagined this Temple scene with Jesus as one in which the Lord enters with heavenly vengeance: weapons drawn, so to speak, in the form of a whip that could drive a wagon train across the endless prairies. Worshippers flee for their lives; animals scatter in chaos. Almighty God – the God of Wrath – has finally come to make things right.
Perhaps this really was the case. Jesus – the Son of God and the Transfigured One – could have displayed such power in order to awaken souls immersed in sin and cleanse his Father’s House. Such zeal would consume him.
However, as I reflect on that scene in light of what fatherhood is meant to be, I wonder if Jesus’ approach among the moneychangers was one in which truly righteous anger, tempered with mercy, drove his heart and actions that day.
Anger for anger’s sake – and anger driven solely by selfish hurt – never heals or changes anything. Anger driven by love in order to set things aright has the power to change the world.
That’s why Jesus came into the Temple that day: to heal. To call back sinful hearts to living in the light of truth. To rescue the poor.
Make no mistake: the moneychangers were fleecing the Temple visitors who came to offer sacrifice to God as part of the Passover ritual. The merchants who should have known better were forgetting the entire purpose of their one task: to help others worship the Father properly, as God demanded.
How Jesus’ heart must have been breaking when he saw such injustice being done to the vulnerable, all in the name of religion.
How his Sacred Heart must still break today.
This, then, is a time to pause and ask ourselves as a Church: where would Jesus come to us now, in this present age and in this Church, and use the cords and flip the tables?
As painful as it was for all of us these past few decades, thank God he came into the Temple of our Church and brought to light the sinfulness of the priest sex-abuse scandal and the blind-eyes of the shepherds who should have spoken out. “Never again in My Church,” he cries out, both in righteous anger and with a desire to heal his Bride, nearly destroyed by the sins of her clergy.
But we can’t rest on our laurels. Where else does injustice exist here within our faith? Where would the Lord be asking us to do the hard work of cleansing the injustice that still exists?
Are we treating Catholicism like Walmart, picking and choosing only those things that are comfortable for us to accept? (I like this teaching … but I will ignore that one.)
Are we truly listening to the voices of those who feel as if they don’t belong here? Are we reaching out to the lost? Have we opened these very doors to the stranger, the unloved, the broken and those who suffer in so many ways? If not, why not?
Would Jesus be flipping tables in Elkton and North East (or wherever your parish may be) in order to wake us up?
And, quite frankly, the same question must be asked of ourselves as individuals, too: how are we acting like the Temple moneychangers?
Am I cheating anyone? Am I excluding others from my life out of hatred or jealousy? Am I honoring the dignity of those around me? Am I treating myself with Godly-respect? In a word, am I doing my best to use God’s commandments as a guardrail to holiness? Am I striving to live as a son or daughter of God?
The season of Lent really affords us this sacred time to allow the spiritual house-cleaning that needs to be done in our lives and hearts. Each of us in a moneychanger in need of a little table-turning.
To this day, I thank God for that moment in the car where my father wasn’t afraid to direct his justified anger in order to save my soul. He could have ignored it. Or his rage could have been such that I rebelled even more and turned away completely.
Grace at work, however, opened my heart and set me free (as much as I may have hated it in the moment).
Be open to that grace. Go to Confession. Let the tables of sin be turned over. Let your heart – the temple of the Lord -- be cleansed so that zeal for His House will consume you, too.
Everything that the Lord did in the Temple that day was to reveal to us that he would be the only Sacrifice that would truly set us free. He is the true Temple and the Lamb of God who takes away our sins. He is the One who gave his life so that we aren’t chained to hell, in time or in eternity.
We will as a Church and as individual disciples have to answer for the ways in which we sinned; for the ways in which we allowed injustice and hate to continue, often guised under the shadow of religion.
And to this I say: let the tables be flipped if it wakes us up to healing and mercy. Let the Lord enter – the same Lord who understands our human nature and only wants to love us back to wholeness and holiness. He is, after all, a loving Father who only wants to set his children free.
It may feel like an uncomfortable ride in an old Mercury as it is happening, but truly – it’s all grace!