Click here to read the Sunday readings from the USCCB website.
Jesus says here that He, “did not need anyone to testify about human nature.
He himself understood it well.” Jesus is God after all, and He gave us the Ten Commandments to help us to overcome the weaknesses in our human nature, and to teach us how to love.
The Ten Commandments are structured in two parts, the first three talk about how we love and honor and worship God, but then the last seven talk about how we are to treat other people, how we love our family and our neighbors.
But if you think about what we just heard in our first reading, there was a lot more ink spilled on the first three than the last seven, which we can take to mean as they are more important in the grand scheme of things, that is why they get so much extra attention from God, extra emphasis and detail on how to fulfill them.
The first commandment says, “You shall not have other gods besides me. You shall not carve idols for yourselves… you shall not bow down before them or worship them.” And it goes on to say “For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God.”
We should avoid doing anything to make God jealous, so He tells us how to go about that here because He wants our primary focus to be on Him.
I have heard it said recently that one of the biggest sins that people commit is idolatry, but it is one of the least confessed sins in the confessional.
And it is true in my experience, hardly anybody ever brings that up, very rarely does someone confess the sin of idolatry at least to me.
We often think that it just means exactly what it says here, “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them.”
And of course we aren’t doing that, but what we are doing is we put things ahead of God on Sunday, we say, “this Sunday we are gonna go on a trip to see our grandkids, or we are going to go watch our son or daughter play sports, or we are going for a hike, we don't have time for Church today. We don’t have time for God.”
Created things get in the way of our worship, which is supposed to be one of our primary responsibilities, and it is actually the third commandment, “Remember to keep holy the sabbath day. Six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD, your God.”
God wants us to worship Him, that is how we show our love for Him, by putting Him first. The bible says, “For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their fathers’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me...”
No Christians would say that they hate God, but by our actions, by our failure to worship Him and our failure to show Him that we put Him above everything else in our lives, that’s communicating to God that we hate Him.
That is pretty strong if you think about it, but that is how much God wants us to worship Him.
Interestingly, in our Gospel, when Jesus made this cord and drove the merchants and the money changers out of the temple, they were actually in an outer court of the temple, in fact it was the only place the Gentiles could enter into to worship God. If you weren’t Jewish, then you were a Gentile, so it was like everyone else in the whole world only had this one little space to worship in the temple.
The Gentiles weren’t allowed any farther, but because the Jewish merchants decided to set up shop right here, with their tables and their animals, this limited the amount of people that could come in worship God, they were taking up the only space the Gentiles had to worship God.
So Jesus was mad, He was righteously angry over this. It wasn’t an emotional thing, Jesus just wanted to allow the people who wanted to come and worship Him to have the appropriate and adequate space to do so. He was jealous of the space that the Jews had taken away from Him.
Worship is very important to God, but it can get lost in the busy-ness. We are so busy, we can get lost in all of the good things that we might do, all of the things I mentioned earlier are good things on their own, but what we really need to look at is how we are worshipping God, if we are taking care to put Him first, especially on the Sabbath day, but every day, we should be thinking about God and worshipping Him through how we live, praying to Him, talking to Him, making time for Him.
Bishop Robert Barron said, “We must never interpret the wrath of the Lord as an emotional outburst, but rather as a divine passion to set things right. God is not only grieved at our sin, but He is positively angry at it, because He sees what it does to His beloved creatures and He wants to correct it.”
What he said there is perfect because it goes along with Lent, and our focus right now. We heard in that opening prayer, “O God, author of every mercy and of all goodness, in fasting, prayer and almsgiving have shown us a remedy for sin.”
A remedy for sin is to get rid of the materialism that ends up being idols, is to put that aside and identify those things right now, because God wants us to turn back to Him.
He gives us all of these good things, He’s “the author of every mercy and of all goodness” of all created things, He gives them to us, and then we put them ahead of Him, you know, that’s problematic, that’s sin.
So God gives us this remedy here during Lent, of Fasting, Prayer and Almsgiving to recognize those things, to put them behind God and to worship God with our whole heart, that we would show Him our love, show Him our dedication to Him, and continue to grow in that relationship rather than idolize the material things of this world that we often put before Him.