A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus entered the temple. That is of course the temple in Jerusalem. There was no other temple. And in the temple precincts began throwing out traitors saying, scripture has it, my house is meant for a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.
Jesus was teaching in the temple area from day to day. Meanwhile, the chief priests and scribes 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 of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. This is a very vivacious scene that we have this morning. It's very difficult for us to form even remotely an adequate idea, a picture of what the Temple Of Jerusalem was. Now I'm not talking about architecture.
Although it was simply magnificent. Remember the temple that our Lord knew was being built and it was started in twenty BC by Herod, the Roman. And he was building it twice as big as the original Temple Of Solomon, twice. And in order to make it that big, they had to shave off the top of Mount Sinai, Mount Moriah. And that's how they build up the sides with with foundation work to in order to extend the summit so that it would be spacious enough to accommodate a temple twice as big as Solomon's.
This was actually the third temple. Now, it wasn't finished until sixty four AD, And Christ died roughly around 33. And of course, and in seventy AD it was totally destroyed by Titus. So the temple that our Lord saw was pretty well finished in its massiveness, in its spaciousness, in its enormous areas. Now that part of it is static.
But remember it was the only temple. It was the only place of sacrifice. Synagogues were not places of sacrifice. Synagogues had no altar. Synagogues were simply meeting places.
And apparently they weren't they they began to come in, we don't know for sure, but roughly around the first century BC. So that the the whole focus of sacrificial priestly worship of God, and the only place you could offer sacrifice was in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah in the temple of the Lord on the altar of holocaust. Now there's the point. You had holocaust, you had cattle, you had sheep, you had poultry, you had pigeons, you had grain, you had wine, And all of this stuff had to be slaughtered. It must have been a bloody mess around there.
And this was going on day in and day out, week in and week out, because it was the only place you could offer sacrifice. When a woman had a child, she had to go up to Jerusalem and offer sacrifice. So whenever you you read anything about sacrifice, you don't think of the synagogue. There were no sacrifices in synagogue. There are no sacrifices.
There are no altars. There is no practice of the priesthood today in any synagogue. In all of Judaism today, there is no temple, there is no altar, there is no sacrifice, and there is no acting priesthood. It stopped in seventy AD and has never been revived. But what the point I want to make out, you see the center of the temple was the holy of holies which was which was an empty room.
Then you had a sanctuary where the priests alone could go. Then you had a much bigger area of worship. But then outside of that outside of that, you had this huge area where all the cattle and the birds and all the rest of the stuff that you that you offered in sacrifice where you had to buy it. You couldn't offer sacrifice unless you had it, and you couldn't have it unless you got it, and you got it either by raising it yourself or buying it. So there had it there so that there was commerce there.
There had to be commerce. And it must have been an extremely, what shall I say, colorful place. It was the meeting place. It was where people came especially the men because the women did most of the work in those days. But the men were the intellects and they they would come in the temple area, you know, in order to discuss how to make it a better world.
So this this was the heart and the soul of the the life of Jerusalem. It must have been a spectacular place. And as I say a stinking place. In many ways a repulsive place. When you think of all the blood going around, think of I don't know whether any of you here have seen a cow or a bull slaughtered.
It's a mess, and here it was going on all the time. Calves, sheep, lambs, pigeons. And so that you had a buying and a selling and the bringing in of the animals and the sacrificing of the animals and all the rest of it. And then they were being roasted in all this aroma going up into the air. And it's into that that our lord remember, our lord is associated with the temple.
That's where he taught. That's where you met people. That was the that was the Jewish forum. See, Jerusalem had no forum except the temple. And there was at the at the present time, there are two mosques up there, you know.
Remember, that area now is in in the hands, in a sense in the hands of the Muslims. Now, our Lord walks in there and he kicks out the traders. Not traitors, but traders. The people who were busy buying and selling these animals, I guess. Why was he Why did he do that?
As I say, you couldn't have sacrifice without the victims. And you couldn't have the have the victims unless you had the victims. So how do you get them? I think the point is this, there may there are all kinds of guesses about this. That there was cheating going on and all of that.
And there may well have been, after all it was And it's all and then when you're doing business, the principal rule of the law of God and the man is caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. But there may be another point that I would like to stress because it has meaning for us. And that is in the whole process of worshiping God, we can forget God. In the whole process of trying to be to be living up to a per a perfect ideal of entertaining our guest, we can forget the guest.
Be more concerned about whether our China has a good true reflection of a mirror. And this is human, you see, this is human. And our lord remember, our lord was human. Our lord knew a thing about human nature. His human nature wasn't dwarfed.
His human nature wasn't different from ours. His human nature was human, and there's only one human nature. God almighty knows the mess we're in and the confused state we're in, he knows that. He knows the conflicts we are in, of course he does. He went through them himself.
Christ was tempted, tempted. I don't pretend to explain it, but I know he was. So he knew what human nature is. He knew what it could do. It put him on the cross.
But at the same time, it produced a Peter, and a Paul, and a John, and a Matthew, and a Luke, and all the rest, and a Colby. So it's you know, the opening prayer of this mass for this week is terrific. That we we ask God that we will serve him himself. And you see that there's a these old these are very old prayers, and they are so solid. They are so simple, but they are so straightforward.
They touch us to the profoundest depths of our being because it's so easy to forget God in his creatures. And the creatures are good. They're attractive. They're lovable. They're desirable.
And in many instances, we need them. You can't offer a sacrifice to God unless you have a holocaust. And yet you could forget God in the holocaust. See how easy it could happen. And so to to me, this is a big big issue.
As I say, someone said that the the worst enemy of religion is religion and there's a great deal of truth in that. Of course there is. We can we can forget and lose sight of God in in our religious practices. Well, we say it shouldn't be that way, but it can be that way because we're human. Because we can be so easily engulfed by everything that's around us.
And everything that's around us in some sense is desirable and beautiful and attracting us. And so it's so easy not to keep God first, and yet that's the first commandment. God comes first. In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit. Amen.
The lord