Friday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Scripture

“It doesn’t matter what I wear to church – God doesn’t care what I look like.” “I prefer to worship God in nature than in a church building because there’s not much difference and I feel better in nature.” “There’s nothing particularly different about the stuff we see in church versus any other building or things.”  

Maybe these are statements you’ve made or thought, or heard other people make – and there’s a degree of truth to all these statements.  People catch on to the fact that a lot of things seem arbitrarily holy and they don’t see the necessity of marking off some objects as godly versus others.  God is not only in the holy objects and meets us in our ordinary lives.  God knows every bit of our lives, and that’s what statements like the ones above often proclaim.  
 
But is there something helpful about naming and preserving certain things and spaces as holy?  For we do it anyway, in spite of ourselves.  I have a friend, for example, who does not let anyone touch his video game console without proper instruction.  He polishes the screen and keeps the video games set apart and in a particular order.  Other friends do these kinds of things with their cars, or with particular rooms in their houses that they preserve as being theirs alone.  The word “holy” means “set apart” and whenever we set apart something, like the video games, we are naming them as something holy in our lives.  We are suggesting in our actions what is important to us.
 
Today’s scriptures suggest that setting apart space for God is an important way of saying, “I am God’s person – God is important to me and I want to be part of God’s life.”  The first reading is from First Maccabees 4:36-37, 52-59, and it is set in the time after Israel had been conquered by the Greeks in the fourth century before Christ.  When the Greeks conquered Israel and other areas of the world, those places became “Hellenized” – people learned Greek language and Greek practices including Greek pagan religious practices, and the Israelites were concerned that their way of life and their special witness to God was getting lost.  In today’s scripture, we see that the Greeks had taken over the temple after the conquest, and here the Jews are restoring the temple to holiness.  They are marking it out, naming it as a special place for God.  This is the scripture, by the way, that provides much of the foundation for the Jewish holiday of Hannukah.
 
The gospel reading from today (Luke 19:45-48) raises some of the same themes.  Jesus drives out the people from the temple who were selling things and making profits off of God’s house, and as he does so he suggests that God’s house of prayer has become a “den of thieves.”  What had been set apart for God was now also a place for commerce just like the marketplace, and so there was no one clear place that was God’s own.  This suggested to Jesus that peoples’ priorities had therefore become making money solely and that they had lost their references to God.
 
As we turn toward the Feast of Christ the King this Sunday and look ahead to the season of Advent, it is a good time to look at our own lives and consider what it is we have made holy in our lives.  Is there a place for Christ, our King, there?  How can we make space and time for the King this season?

- Jana M. Bennett