“Stop Making My Father’s House A Marketplace.”
(Jn 2:16)
Dear Sisters
and Brothers in Christ,
It is not
difficult for us to find the obvious difference between a worship place and a
marketplace.
A
marketplace is intended for buying and selling commodities. In a large sense, a marketplace means a
playground for all forms of competition in people’s everyday life, oftentimes
unjust, malicious, even immoral, simply because obtaining maximal interests is
the ultimate goal of the market.
A worship place,
on the contrary, is dedicated to religious activities. It is the venue where man approaches the Lord
God, his Creator and Savior, and offers Him prayers of praise, thanksgiving
from a profoundly grateful and loving heart.
A
marketplace by its material-oriented nature turns man less human and closer to
the brutality of his survival instinct.
In the eye of a trader who professes his faith in the “business is
business” principle, everything can be sold and bought, even moral values
concerning human dignity, such as honor, faithfulness, and the like. For a professional trader, everybody, even
God, can be the object of an exchange of interests.
The worship
place gives man a room spacious enough to exercise his most sacred duty of
expressing his love for his God Who created him in His own image. In the act of worshipping God, man proves
himself worthy of being human when he knows the reason why he bows his head and
bends his knees before God and prays to Him.
Leaving the
marketplace where he suffers alienation, degradation and confusion, man enters
the church, the house of prayer where people from four corners of the earth
gather as one family in their home to meet the Heavenly Father Who so loves
them, cares for them better than their own parents on earth. It is in this place of worship that man comes
to his senses which he lost because of the fight for survival.
Therefore
the sacredness of the House of God should be respected and preserved at all
costs. As the result of this, any form
of violation of the sacredness of God’s Holy Temple is a very grave crime, a
very horrible evil.
Saint Paul
in his First Letter to the Corinthians teaches that every human person is the
living Temple of God where the Holy Spirit dwells. He strongly condemns those who destroy God’s
Holy Temple, not only the Temple built of lifeless stones but also and above
all the Temple built of living stones, meaning to say, of human persons, of
believers in Christ, true God and true man.
Amidst
countless and different forms of secularization and commercialization of
religion, and violation of human rights, in particular the right of freedom of worship of God, the
message by Christ our Lord becomes so timely and urgent: “Stop making my
Father’s house a marketplace”.
By
Fr. Francis Nguyen, O.P.
