READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Jeremiah 8:4-12
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
St. Luke 19:41-48
Grace to you all and Peace from God our Father and our Lord
Jesus, the Christ.
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His
Church, saying:
“And he entered
the temple and began to drive out those who sold”
Love is love, they tell us.
And I can hear St. Peter quoting holy Scripture while Jesus
is driving out of the Temple in today’s Gospel, “C’mon! Thus saith the Lord,
draw near to me and I will draw near to you! Why are you running away??”
Come. Clo. ser. Love. is. love.
Draw near to God, but wait till He calms down first. Draw
near to God, but first put that flaming sword away. Draw near to God, but first
turn off those heavenly faucets. Draw near to God, but first drop the
thunderbolts and firestorms out of Your hands. Love is love.
If Jesus has to leave a constant, heavenly reminder in His
Word to “not be of the world”, then you know your default position is “of the
world”. You are of the world because you believe Love is Love. How the
establishment gets you to believe this is they make the definition of “love”
all about you and who wouldn’t approve of that?!
They reason to you this way: “shouldn’t you be able to love
your wife and love your family? No one should be able to tell you how to do
that. You see, we agree?”
By this they do two things: first, they eradicate any
possibility that truth lies outside of yourself and second, they confuse
“leaving people alone” with “making laws against others who don’t believe”.
Leaving people alone is just fine and Christians can be on
board with this. Jesus has given the example of “shaking the dust off your
feet” with any city or house that refuses to believe, no matter how much truth
is given (Mt 10:14). He has also said things like, “let the dead bury the
dead” (Mt 8:22) and “don’t cast your pearls before swine” (Mt 7:6).
However, you leave them alone because it is not you who
saves them, but it is God’s Word that works. You may not be the one to “save”
them, but your goal is simply to give God’s Word. Once that’s accomplished,
good. But even before that, we have Jesus referring to some people as dust,
dead, and swine.
The Love is Love crowd will not stand for that, because now
they are oppressed and we must love the dust, dead, and swine-people too
otherwise we are Soil-ists, Alive-ists, and Domesticated Animal-ists. On those
accounts, Jesus is out. Christianity is incompatible with Love is Love and that’s
just the tip of the iceberg.
Now we come to find that love is NOT love. Now Love is what
we say love is and that can change, so stick to your tweeter accounts so you
know which love we are talking about today. Love is love does not mean love is
love. And since that’s the case, we can’t just leave it up to people to define
this love. We must do it for them, for the greater good, or else.
Repent. You believe love is love. How do you know? Jesus, in
the Gospel today, overturning tables and beating people until they leave the
Temple, makes you uncomfortable. In fact, you have been so desensitized by the
“love is love” programming, that thinking about these things doesn’t even gain
your attention any more. You are not being “authentic, to your true self-self”
if you let someone else define love for you!
Let me make the point: if the slogan was “adultery is
adultery” would you get upset then?
If the slogan was “abortion is abortion”, as if to say we
make excuses and word-salads to promote these satanic activities because
someone thinks that their life and identity are enwrapped in nothing else
besides these behaviors, would you protest then?
So what is Jesus doing today? Jesus is being loving.
Contrary to all senses and sensibilities, Jesus is lovin on those people. Do
not go against your conscience, when you witness these seemingly unapproachable
acts of God. You act the same way. You stop yourself, for the most part, from
doing certain things or participating in certain things because the Holy Spirit
has convicted you of sin in the matter.
In the same way, Jesus is here, cleansing the Temple, after
Palm Sunday, of sin. You see, true love is not you laying down your life for
your friends (Jn 15:13) or believing all things (1 Cor 13:7). True love is God
laying down His life for you, to rescue you from something that you don’t even
know is killing you for all eternity.
The real question is, if “love is love”, then why did God
have to die on the cross? If “love is love” could save the world and everything
was just fine in the Temple, then why did the wrath of God descend upon those
“innocent” dealers and money-changers? They were just providing a service for
those pilgrims from out of town, after all, right?
Love is love when you can love your enemies. Love is love
when you can love God’s enemies. Love is love when God’s enemies, those who sin
against Him, no matter how much, are declared righteous, not of their own
doing, but of God’s divine Action!
In the Temple with His whip of cords, God is not driving
away or causing unnecessary division here, we are. We live with
double-mindedness, where we say one thing and do another, also known as
hypocrisy. We believe God doesn’t know what He doing. We believe in religious
freedom in the Church. This comes out as we flee from the God we have begged to
draw near to us and flinch from the sting of the horribleness of our sin, when
He does.
God is the only single-minded being in Creation. We approach
God with a backup plan when He does things we don’t like. God approaches us
with His Body and Blood, a one-way ticket. In this way we can see that not all
love is the same. Our double-mind thinks it has the upper hand, because it
thinks twice as much as God does. It’s sinfulness believes that it tricks God
into having this sort of violent zeal for the Lord’s house in order to catch
Him doing it and then not believe in Him when He acts.
St John 2 says, “And his disciples remembered that it was
written, The zeal of thine house hath consumed me” (John 2:17) “and the
reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me” continues the
quote from Psalm 69 (Ps 69:9).
When it is in that, Scriptural zeal, it refers to Christ.
That the reproaches, the sins of the sinners, fall on Christ and not on the
backs of those who deserve it. The men being driven out today had lots of love,
but no faith. The sin within has lots of love, but no faith.
You see, Jesus doesn’t believe in you or your love, that’s
why He saves you. It’s because Jesus knows you completely that he knows how
completely you need to be rescued from your love and from the divisions you
cause, especially between you and the Lord. They need to be driven out,
violently, because you hold onto them violently. And in Christ, He reveals the
gracious magnitude of God’s love, come to cleanse all from division, and unify
in His Body and Blood.
Jesus knows good and well that there’s nothing inside us
worth believing in. In fact, everything inside us looks absolutely
untrustworthy. If anything, when the Lord peers into our hearts, He should
hightail it for the hills, getting as far away from us as He can. But He’s not
that kind of God.
He loves before He looks. And even after He looks, He still
loves, because His love has nothing to do with us, except He bestow it upon us.
It is not sparked by our goodness or sustained by our obedience. God is love.
It’s who He is and what He does. While we were still loveless, He was full of
love to save. While we were still sinners, He was still the sinless, gracious,
saving God He’s always been.
The love of Christ is truly an untranslatable love. A
No-holds-barred mercy. A Covenant of faithfulness engaged in, even if it costs
God the lifeblood of His beloved Son. That love is the beating heart of God in
cruciform display. The kind of love that chases us to the ends of the earth,
picks us up, places us atop divine shoulders, and dances all the way
home.
There really is only one word that encompasses the totality
of what that actually is - Christ. He is the love of the Father made flesh. “Remember
your mercy, O Lord, and your Love, for they have been from of old”, says
Psalm 25:6.
God’s love has always been there, from of old. It is we who
have changed, turned left and right, and have been driven by the wind of fad,
fortune and “love is love”. Such that, when God finally draws near to us, we
feel the depths of our degradation, we see the “darkness that can be felt”
inside us, and we know its our fault. So we run, because we think the “whip of
cords” is for us.
But Jesus brought the whip of cords for His own back and He
wept because of the hardness of your heart to not see His suffering, death, and
resurrection for you. For in three days, He rebuilt the Temple proper, that is,
His Body, the Church, and baptized you into it.
The things that make for Peace, then, are in that Temple,
that Body of Jesus. The time of our Visitation is such that God is made man,
which is unheard of! The House of Prayer is found in the Lord’s Prayer and the
Body and Blood that purchased and won it from God’s lips, to our ears, to God’s
lips once again.
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