Thursday, April 10—Day 37

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house will consume me.” The Jews then said to Him, “What sign do You show us as your authority for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking of the temple of His body. So when He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.
John 2: 13-22

Cleansing the Temple
Salvator Rosa’s painting Christ Expelling the Money Changers from the Temple (1660) conveys sublime rage against mercantile corruption of sacred space. In the scriptural record, Christ overturns the tables of the moneychangers after driving them out with a “scourge of cords,” and then He tells the dove sellers: “stop making My Father’s house a place of business.” Rosa’s painting depicts the first stage of Christ’s action, representing his angry gaze and upheld arm directed at the male moneychangers, while others present—a female seller of doves, the doves themselves, and a sheep—evade the direct path of the scourge. The implication is that the female figure in the bottom left is complicit with the unjust economic system of temple exchange, and she will need to heed Christ’s command to cease her involvement. As a woman, I am glad she is there in the painting; her presence prompts me to examine my own complicity with forms of economic injustice in the world today.    

Saint Francis of Assisi broke from the greed of his own father’s mercantile practices in twelfth-century Italy. In 1182 Francis was born the son of a wealthy businessman, specifically, a textile merchant. After experiencing a call from God to rebuild a church in ruin, Francis took expensive textiles from his father’s stock and sold them to acquire money for church renovations. It was a Robin-Hood-style attempt to take from the rich and give to the poor. Francis’s father discovered what had happened and brought his son before Assisi’s Bishop. During his testimony before the bishop, Francis simply said, “Pietro Bernadone, Hitherto I have called you my father on earth; henceforth I desire to say only ‘Our Father who art in Heaven.’” As G. K. Chesterton recounts, Francis then “rent off all his garments except one; and they saw that it was a hair-shirt.  He piled the garments in a heap on the floor and threw the money on top of them. Then he turned to the bishop, and received his blessing, like one who turns his back on society; and, according to the account, went out as he was into the cold world. Apparently it was literally a cold world at the moment, and snow was on the ground . . . He went out half-naked in his hair shirt into the winter woods, walking the frozen ground between the frosty trees: a man without a father. He was penniless, he was parentless, he was to all appearances without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world; and as he went under the frosty trees, he burst suddenly into song.”

In The Messiah Handel’s chorus sings: “He shall purify the sons of Levi, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness” (Malachi 3:3). Let us follow Saint Francis’s example by allowing the Holy Spirit to refine us, casting off the wealth entangling us, and offering our lives up in joyous praise to God.
Natasha Duquette, Associate Professor,
English Department

Prayer
The tree of love its roots hath spread
Deep in my heart, and rears its head;
Rich are its fruits: they joy dispense;
Transport the heart, and ravish sense.|
In love’s sweet swoon to thee I cleave,
Bless’d source of love . . .
(Saint Francis of Assisi)