Years ago, I made a conscious decision to ignore the Stock Market, choosing a purposive ignorance. Why am I not hooked to Wall Street? Studying probabilities in graduate school helped seal my vow to not follow the speculations that surround the Stock Market and the very lucrative casino industry. It hasn’t stopped confounding many that an eight-block-long street in Lower Manhattan should be the cause of many heartaches and loss of life. Or that Las Vegas and its cancerous casinos should be the center of carnage and wreckage of life. The accolade, “Sin City” reveals the notoriety of Las Vegas as a moral gutter and center of unbridled greed and chicanery—a plastic city, shining brightly at night for the reign of sin and perversity, but ugly and dry as bone when exposed to the light of day.
You may have heard or read that money exchange and trading with money originated with the Jews, and in the temple. The episode reported in today’s gospel happened at the court of the Gentiles, situated inside one of the temple chambers. It is the Temple Wall Street. The religious administrators of the temple were diligent in providing worshippers with supplies of quality sheep, cattle, oxen and doves for the temple sacrifices. But given that majority of the worshippers came from foreign lands to visit the temple, they were made to exchange their “dirty” pagan money for the “holy” temple money. Their pagan money and even the Roman coin in use all over the land contained the images of pagan gods and were considered unfit for buying holy rams, holy oxen, and holy doves for the sacrifice. Soon a lucrative system of money exchange was born, introducing another tributary to the banking industry. It was only to be expected that this barter would dominate the life of the people who engaged in it and upend any semblance of divine worship in the temple. In fact, worship of money quickly took over the worship of God.
Jesus saw through this perverse greed and the trafficking going on inside the temple and won’t take it. His just anger was unleashed against the perpetrators as He became a one-man riot squad. Isn’t it surprising that no one confronted Him for “disturbing” the peace and the free flow of the temple sacrifice? They rather asked for a sign to which He gave a curious answer: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” It sounded like the temple priests and their cohorts in the currency exchange business knew that they were being justly chided. They knew it was disingenuous to pretend that they were providing a holy service when they pocketed the unholy money. They also knew that the temple service had outlived its purpose and was no longer faithful to its avowed intent—the true worship of God. The challenge of the status quo was long expected. But as we’ve learned from the relationship between Wall Street and Washington, swamp-dwellers will rather spill blood than give up their filth. It would take the destruction of Jesus’ body to rebuild the already moribund temple.
You need not look too far to notice similar trafficking going on in our society by gospel-poachers who traffic on the Word of God, employing God’s name to extort money from vulnerable worshippers. Their personal mansions, private jets, custom-made cars, and fat bank accounts are telltales of their bravado in turning the house of God to a marketplace.
But we too can be guilty of turning God’s temple into a den of thieves through a disregard of the covenant and the commandments of God enshrined in our hearts. We also desecrate God’s temple by our noise, distraction, the way we dress for Mass and treat our body, which is God’s temple where God’s spirit dwells. Join in rebuilding this temple, and this Lent determine to keep God’s temple holy.
Fr. Chukwudi Jo Okonkwo