March 8, 2015: 3rd Sunday of Lent B
March 8, 2015: 3rd Sunday of Lent B
Click to hear Audio Homily
Do you remember how you kept your room as a teenager? Most of you probably did not have the luxury of having your own room when you were growing up. Was your room clean? Or did it have piles of crusty socks, old cereal bowls of curdled milk, and mildewed towels with a bit of funky smell? (In the old days, that would never happen because you were not even allowed to take any food to your rooms). How did your parents encourage you to keep your rooms clean? Did they (a) beg you, (b) bribe you, or (c) like Jesus in today's Gospel, use a whip to drive you to clean the mess?
If you had to make an assessment of your spiritual house--that is, your soul--how would you describe it? Is it peaceful, like a tranquil lake with no ripples on the water? Is it quiet, like sitting out on your patio in a quiet night with only the chirps of night insects? Or is it more like a busy mall, perhaps like the market place Jesus found inside the Jerusalem Temple, where there is plenty of hustle and bustle of restless desires that want to buy and possess additional material goods. When our Heavenly Father sees the cleanliness or the messiness of our soul, how do you think he would react? In today's Gospel we do not find a meek and gentle Jesus, but an angry Jesus with whip in hand, crying out, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
We all have experienced the inner struggles that take place in our hearts. God created our hearts to have the capacities to know, to desire, and to love Him. The first three of the Ten Commandments (Lord is our God / His name is Holy / Keep holy His day) are a call for all of us to relinquish our attachments to false gods and embrace the worship of the one true God. How faithful are we to these first three commandments? When we don't dedicate our whole heart to worship God, everything else in our lives fracture--our relationship with our spouse, our children, our friends, and our community. There are occasions when the pang of our conscience stings us. Those are times when God is inviting us to love Him and to put Him first, but we resist. We know intellectually that our ultimate happiness depends upon surrendering to God's will. Nevertheless, we resist and tenaciously cling to our own will. So at times, we feel like God is barging into our messy room and demanding us to change something we don't want to change. But, we can only make a new beginning in life when we give up an old way of living. If you have been feeling a sting of conscience lately, what is God inviting you to clean out? Is He inviting you to the Sacrament of Reconciliation?
Fr Paul Yi
Click to hear Audio Homily
Do you remember how you kept your room as a teenager? Most of you probably did not have the luxury of having your own room when you were growing up. Was your room clean? Or did it have piles of crusty socks, old cereal bowls of curdled milk, and mildewed towels with a bit of funky smell? (In the old days, that would never happen because you were not even allowed to take any food to your rooms). How did your parents encourage you to keep your rooms clean? Did they (a) beg you, (b) bribe you, or (c) like Jesus in today's Gospel, use a whip to drive you to clean the mess?
If you had to make an assessment of your spiritual house--that is, your soul--how would you describe it? Is it peaceful, like a tranquil lake with no ripples on the water? Is it quiet, like sitting out on your patio in a quiet night with only the chirps of night insects? Or is it more like a busy mall, perhaps like the market place Jesus found inside the Jerusalem Temple, where there is plenty of hustle and bustle of restless desires that want to buy and possess additional material goods. When our Heavenly Father sees the cleanliness or the messiness of our soul, how do you think he would react? In today's Gospel we do not find a meek and gentle Jesus, but an angry Jesus with whip in hand, crying out, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
We all have experienced the inner struggles that take place in our hearts. God created our hearts to have the capacities to know, to desire, and to love Him. The first three of the Ten Commandments (Lord is our God / His name is Holy / Keep holy His day) are a call for all of us to relinquish our attachments to false gods and embrace the worship of the one true God. How faithful are we to these first three commandments? When we don't dedicate our whole heart to worship God, everything else in our lives fracture--our relationship with our spouse, our children, our friends, and our community. There are occasions when the pang of our conscience stings us. Those are times when God is inviting us to love Him and to put Him first, but we resist. We know intellectually that our ultimate happiness depends upon surrendering to God's will. Nevertheless, we resist and tenaciously cling to our own will. So at times, we feel like God is barging into our messy room and demanding us to change something we don't want to change. But, we can only make a new beginning in life when we give up an old way of living. If you have been feeling a sting of conscience lately, what is God inviting you to clean out? Is He inviting you to the Sacrament of Reconciliation?
Fr Paul Yi
