Sacred space

In today’s Gospel, our Lord, the Prince of Peace, gets violent: forcibly clearing out of the temple area the moneychangers and vendors who had set up shop there.

Why were these people there in the first place? Actually, they were there to provide necessary services to those who came from around the world (hence the need for currency exchange counters) to worship and to offer sacrifices according to God’s law (hence the need to provide oxen, sheep, and doves for those who could not bring such sacrificial offerings with them).

If these services were necessary for worship at the Temple, what then was our Lord’s problem with them? Look at what our Lord says in a parallel to this passage (Matt. 21:13):

And said unto them, It is written,
My house shall be called the house of prayer;
but ye have made it a den of thieves.

What was wrong? To begin with our Lord’s second point, what had been necessary services had gotten seriously out of control, hijacked by greed. What had been begun with good intentions had degenerated into something filthy and evil.

This reminds all of us to be careful in our own lives: we must continually ask God’s grace and evaluate the concrete ways by which we follow the Gospel, for our fallen human nature and the world in which we live can easily cause us to drift off course and to twist that which was originally well-intentioned into something that is not of God.

What else was wrong? Very simply, all of these things were detracting from the Temple as a house of prayer. The temple was a sacred space, that is to say, a specific place that is specially set aside for God (indeed, at the time, it was the sacred space).

God is Lord of all the earth and everything we do should in some way be dedicated to God, yet it is important also to have places in our world and in our lives that are very specially set aside for God: sacred places and sacred time.

Obviously, churches are our very special sacred spaces, where the body of Christ comes together and celebrates his most precious gifts. Sadly, we do not always respect that space: cell phones proliferate in cacophony, “fellowship” degenerates into socializing, and people behave as if they were at the shopping mall.

Catholics in particular may fail to appreciate the many built-in reminders of sacred space. There is the vestibule, a place of transition from the space of ordinary life to the space that is dedicated wholly to God. There is the holy water at the door, reminding us of the waters by which Christ cleansed us in baptism and by which we entered new life in him. There is the altar, the table of the Lord before which the Lord’s people gather. There is the tabernacle and the single candle reminding us of the very, very special and abiding real presence of the Lord.

We need to appreciate sacred space in our lives, not only when we gather as a community, but when we are alone, to take advantage of these sacred spaces, visiting a church during the week, leaving the world outside if only for a few precious moments, to be alone with the Lord in a place set aside for him.