Home Is Where the Heart (God) Is
“Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” - Jn 2:16
Today’s Gospel certainly presents an impassioned Jesus. Jesus drives out all those who took advantage of the Temple to do business. Jesus’ strong reaction—a very prophetic gesture—is understandable when one considers the significance of the Temple for the Jewish people. For them, the Temple was considered the resting place of God, where the human and divine meet. The Temple was considered God’s home.
So, it’s very striking when Jesus shares his prophetic statement about the temple of his body! Jesus is now the new Temple, the universal meeting place between God & humanity. With Jesus begins the new worship, the worship of love. In Jesus we can be at home with God. And God wants home to be a place of genuine love, not of borrowing, buying, or selling.
A marketplace filled with these conditional exchanges goes against what Jesus—the Word made flesh, the face of God—had been teaching his followers about who God is. God isn’t a Divine Accountant who keeps track of the good we do in one column and the evil we do in another column. And yet, I have moments where I still struggle in really believing that I’m God’s beloved, that there’s nothing I can or cannot do that will change God’s love for me. I can easily slip into a scarcity mindset, believing that God doesn’t have enough love to go around. I believe I’m not worthy of his love because of what I’ve thought, said, or done—especially my hypocrisy and self-reliance. Or I experience the temptation that I must always have or do more in order to be acceptable, loved, or valued. It’s in those times I find my prayer to be more of a bartering process. “Lord, will you forgive me if I give money to the poor?” “God, will you love me if I’m nicer to that person, or stop my addictive behaviors?”
When we don’t believe and see ourselves as beloved children, we become slaves to the marketplace, to this conditional way of relating to God, myself, and others. But our faith teaches us that each of us is made in the image of God. Each of us is “a word of God spoken only once.” Our hearts, the very core of who we are, then, are God’s home, God’s resting place. And Jesus wants to prepare our hearts for God.
As our Lenten journey continues, may we grow in trust that God—who loves unconditionally—wants to be at home with each of us in the depths of our hearts, and may we open ourselves to let him enter with his mercy.
How do I relate to God at this time? What personally gets in the way of being at home with God, or God being at home with me? If I were to open my heart wider to God at this time in my life, what would it concretely look like?
David Romero, SJ