A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus entered the temple. That is in Jerusalem. There was only one temple, and now there is no longer any temple. Even though you see that word used occasionally, they are synagogues.
So Jesus entered the temple of Jerusalem, a magnificent structure, and began throwing out traders, people who were commercializing it. And he said to them, my house is meant to be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves. Jesus was teaching in the temple area from day to day. The chief priests and scribes meanwhile were looking for a way to destroy him, as were also the leaders of the people. But they had no idea how to do it.
For indeed, the entire population was listening to Jesus and hanging on his every word. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. The great problem of running a church, I mean, the building, is to keep it a church. When our blessed lord came in there and threw out the traders or as other texts have it, the money lenders, the money changers, whatever.
He said, my house is a house of prayer, of worship. That's what the word prayer here means, worship. It just doesn't mean a prayer of petition. It means a prayer of worship. And the first thing about worship is God, not me.
And our blessed lord says, my house was meant. Notice he didn't say his. But it was intended to be a house of prayer. But de facto, it's become a den of thieves, he says. Well, that's the problem.
To keep the house of the lord, the house of the lord. To keep it a a mansion of worship. That's the problem. But the problem is almost the same in our daily lives, is to keep our own daily lives centered on God. The problem is about the same because we are in the world and Christ said, but you better not you better not be of the world.
Because if you're of the world, you're not of me. Our blessed lord made no bones about that. He there is nothing in the New Testament in it that as far as our blessed lord's own words are concerned, now that's important to note, which tells me that I've got to try to get out of this world. I know that there are people who have interpret, taken text out of the New Testament and have acted on it. As I say, in the time of Saint Jerome, the time of Saint Augustine, in the fourth, the third, and the fourth centuries, there was a tremendous exit, exodus of men and women who went into the Nile Valley over there in Egypt to live the lives of hermits, giving up everything because it was proposed to them that that was what you had to do when you accepted Christ.
In other words, you had to leave what everything you had, leave your job, leave your family, leave everything, and heist over there to the Nile Valley and live as a hermit. Christ never said that. What our blessed lord said was, you are in the world. He didn't use these words, of course, but he said, you must not be of it. He said, my kingdom is not of this world.
And if we belong to his kingdom, we are not of this world. Now that's the constant struggle we have. Men and women living in this world, being conceived, being born, growing up, needing parents, parents trying to take care of their children, and they're they're being pushed and shoved and put under pressures from all angles to do what they think ought to be done, to serve the God that they accept. But in trying to serve the God and doing what they feel is their duty, it's easy to forget God. Very easy.
And that can happen to the even to a contemplative nun or a contemplative monk in their Monastery. It could easily have happened, and believe me, there's plenty of evidence it did happen to those hermits that went up there into the Nile Valley. It wasn't So you can't escape the problem, you see. As long as you live, you are a in a sense controlled by the agencies, the needs of living. As long as you live, you have certain responsibilities and certain duties.
I mean that for everybody. A person in a wheelchair over in Carl Manor has still responsibilities and duties of some sort. They are still servants of God. But it you see, the problem is to keep God in focus and to realize that everything that I'm doing ought to be focused on God. Like the rays of a very powerful searchlight that aren't diffused all over the world, you know what kind of a flasher like flashlight or a spotlight that is.
Now this same problem you see carries over into the into this building we call the church. Now I'm talking about a building now with a small c. I'm talking about a building which houses people. With where where human beings come together and remember they come in that door as individual people, putting one foot in front of the other, walking down this aisle, sitting down in a pew. They're individual human beings.
Every single person comes into this church with leaving leaving behind in a sense all that they are all that's out there, but you see they're bringing a lot of it right in here too. How can they not do it? How can we not do it? We're human and we come to worship God as human beings. And therefore, we bring into the church everything that we have as human beings to worship God, to give him honor and praise and glory.
That all makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. The problem is keeping it that way. It's very difficult to keep the church from being a meeting place, a convention hall, a concert hall, a union of musicians, a place for choirs to operate, for glee clubs to celebrate. It's it's very difficult to keep a church from being any of those things.
It's a constant struggle, and yet the struggle has to go on. We use the things of this world, but the trouble is we can so come to be their slaves that instead of there being tools, instrumentalities, channels for our worship of God, they become the gods. So you see, when our blessed Lord booted out the money changers I like that. See, these are this is supposed to be an improved translation. I it is in spots, of course, but some of it just goes out of its way to be obtuse.
But anyway, when our blessed lord goes into the temple of Jerusalem, this magnificent, and really it was thanks to a Roman emperor I mean, a Roman procurator. Remember, didn't last. By sixty AD, there wasn't a stone left upon a stone of that temple, and it's never been rebuilt. They tried it a couple of times, but didn't amount to anything. It's never been there.
It's never been even remotely rebuilt, not even remotely. And one of the strangest things in that I have is that after the after the Jewish people have recovered because it's that's on the Western Bank, you understand. But it's it's in their hands now. There's not been a word mentioned about trying to restore the temple. So there's no sacrifice.
There's no practicing priesthood. There is nothing there except a gorgeous Muslim mosque. Matter of fact, there are two of them up there. It's it's Muslim territory. The Jews have the weeping wall, but that's way down as you all know it when you've been there.
But the point is this, what our blessed lord is saying, keep my temple as a place of worship of god. It's a place of giving god social worship. And with the Catholic church, that means in its best supremest meaning, the holy sacrifice of a mass without a duly ordained priest at an altar, not a supper table, not a community dining area. It is an altar. Altar means sacrifice, or sacrifice means priest.
This is the focus of Catholic worship, and anyone who reads Vatican two will find it almost on every page. There's been no change in that, that the holy sacrifice of the mass is the center of Catholic worship. And this and Vatican two tie in every one of its documents, every one of its documents. Where it refers to it, it refers to it as the holy sacrifice, the eucharistic sacrifice, or some such phrase. Practically never does it refer to it as celebration or a supper, or as a communal supper.
All of these words which we have come to use because as you realize, the idea of the mass as sacrifice has been downplayed. In some instances, all you know about it it's it that it's a focus of people coming together and breaking the bread. Take you use your own dining rooms for that or your kitchenette. You don't have to come to church to do that. And so, you see, this is a frightfully important.
The church I'm I'm talking about this building now where people come together. It is a frightfully important factor in our religious life. Don't ever underestimate it. Social worship is is necessary. We need it.
We need to we need one another in order to give God due worship. The problem is in trying to give so much to God, we forget him. He gets lost in our singing, in our playing around. There's the problem of keeping God first. That is a difficult situation.
It's not easy, but we have to try to do it. Otherwise, we're turning God's house into a house of thieves because we are stealing, we are robbing God of his due. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, Holy Spirit. Amen.