Mons. Enrique Díaz Díaz shares with Exaudi readers his reflection on the Gospel of this Sunday, March 3, 2024, titled: “Christ is the strength and wisdom of God”
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Exodus 20, 1-7: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt”
Psalm 18: “You have words of eternal life”
I Corinthians 1, 22-25: “Christ is the strength and wisdom of God”
Saint John 2, 13-35: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will rebuild it”
In the celebration of the 20th Anniversary of our diocese, we proclaim again that the center of our life, our mission, and all our efforts is Christ, in our diocese, made a merciful face in the image of the Black Christ, Lord of the Hospital. Faced with the anthropological crisis where man does not know who he is or where he is going and finds himself lost and marked by values and ephemeral goods, we proclaim together with Saint Paul: “We preach Christ Crucified, which is a scandal… which is madness… in Instead, for us it is the strength and wisdom of God.” By proclaiming Christ, we discover that we also recognize the dignity and value of the human person. When we ignore Christ, we also destroy man.
Despite all the economic confusion, we are still in the era of the “total market”, in which the decisive thing is to win, acquire prestige and well-being, and accumulate goods. It appears as a new religion, with its own creed and its commandments, with its worshipers and its sacrifices, with its temples and its rites, with its promises of complete happiness. We have turned the market into a religion and religions have often been turned into a market, where we sell, buy, deceive, win and lose. We live in a civilization whose center of thought and criterion for action is the desire to earn and have money. The gringo saying “time is money” has entered, first surreptitiously and then blatantly, into our hearts, to the point of perverting the meaning of life, of time, of the person; to value everything in monetary signs. For money one is capable of sacrifices, of renunciations, of changing criteria. And the most sacred thing is profaned: the “temple of God”
It is forgotten that the person is the temple of God and is bought and sold. There are merchants of children and merchants of sex. There are those who negotiate with life, with human organs, with the deepest dreams and desires. Drug traffickers appear who kill the soul and the body, who negotiate with weapons and souls, who destroy towns and murder families in their crazy ambition for more and more money. It thrives on hunger and thirst, on the basic needs of the person. Profits are made by murdering the innocent, and the little ones who are just beginning life are destroyed. Everything is done for the sake of a new god called money, dollar or euro. And this is not far away, it is in our families, with the simple, with the rulers, among friends, among acquaintances, in the home itself, the sacred temple of family and life. Thus the material temple is profaned, but above all the sacred temple and precinct of God that is each person is profaned. When any person is profaned, God himself is attacked.
Rarely do we find Jesus so angry and wrathful. Some even think it is a scene that we should remove from the gospel so as not to scandalize… but, perhaps, we should think the opposite and see if today Jesus would also have to take the whip from him and throw away all those who desecrate and destroy his sacred temples. We are not used to a violent image of a Messiah beating people with a scourge in the hands, however, this is the reaction of Jesus when we make his house not a place of prayer and meeting, but a marketing where sacred things are manipulated, and the divine is not respected. And, above all, this is the reaction of Jesus when the dignity of the person is perverted and commercially manipulated, when he is seen with a sign of pesos, when he is turned into another object of negotiation.
John places this expulsion of the merchants from the temple at the beginning of his Gospel, as if to present to us, from the beginning, Jesus’ program: a new time and a new temple are inaugurated. The Lord will be worshiped in a new spirit and with a new heart. Christ himself says that it is He the temple that they will destroy, and that also is each one of us. And it really now gives us the opportunity to thoroughly review our life and our program. We will have to see if the interior of each of us has become a sanctuary for God, where he is worshiped in justice and truth, where the values are his love and mercy, where the brother is welcomed to share and serve. It is a serious invitation from Jesus, devoured by the zeal of his Father’s House, which demands respect for his material temple and dignity, for the sacred temple that is each person and that each one of us is also. Deep reflection today: What do we base our own dignity? Have we not become perverted, corrupted by money and ambition? Do we look at our brothers as temples of God, or have we become thieves of his dignity? What does Jesus tell us today in our way of living and relating to God and others? Do we attend the celebrations to meet the Father and the brothers, or only out of ritualism and custom?
Thank you, Good Father, for making our humble person a temple that is filled with your presence, grant us wisdom and love to respect and value each living temple and make your home a place of prayer, meeting and harmony. Amen
