4/22/22

I visited St. Andrew today. The gospel reading was John 2:13-18:

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

Today was also Earth Sunday, and much of Pastor Robyn's reflection was centred on the need for hope, specifically hope that our environment can be redeemed, and listening for the voice of God calling us towards the best ways we can aid in bringing that about. Pastor Robyn also mentioned the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dire warning released this month that our carbon emissions have to peak three years from now, and be cut back by almost half eight years from now, to avoid the worst impact of climate change or else we will experience "unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, and widespread water shortages." And while the reflection utilized the other reading for today from Jeremiah 32 more, in which Jeremiah listens to God and buys a field while in prison during a siege, I thought the reading from John was just as fitting.

When Jesus speaks about what he sees in the temple, greed turning a sacred space into a marketplace and destroying it, it's not a stretch to compare the temple to the Earth (a sacred place) and the merchants and money changers to capitalism and the way it's turned the world into a marketplace. And the greed capitalism engenders is consuming the health and vitality of the planet, much as the greed of the merchants and money changers consumed the spiritual health and vitality of the temple. Jesus also compares his body with the temple, and the hope of the resurrection is equivalent to the hope in our renewal of the world. But just as Jeremiah needed to heed the voice of God by having hope in the future and acting while in the midst of a time of trial and suffering, we, too, must do the same.

Our hope in the coming new Earth must be followed by action conditioned not by worldly greed but by a revolutionary love of self and others.