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What steals the life from you? What robs you of the grace you can give and receive? In today’s gospel we find Jesus flipping tables at the temple and driving out the money changers and merchants. He accuses them of turning the “house of prayer” into a “den of thieves.”
I confess to harboring money changers in the temple of my own heart; those nasty homunculi that weigh and measure every need and every offence; who deduct generosity and tally debt, and return what was given in equal value. It’s a noisy business, this transactional living, and it sets strict limits on what I can receive, what I can give, and how I am able to respond.
If these merchants and money changers are thieves, then what do they steal? From me, they steal possibility and they steal peace when I fixate on the finite flow of materiality or insist on being resourced by human means alone. I become deaf to the God who is able to do immeasurably more than all I can ask or imagine—for me and through me.
This Advent, I resolve to put down my scale—to stop weighing and worrying about the cost of loving, giving, and trusting. I imagine instead what the scene at the temple was like when the coins ceased to clatter and the hagglers stopped shouting. I imagine a scene of deep silence and wide space where the whisper of wisdom and higher ways can be heard.
Lord, free me from the noise, the greed, and the false abundance. Restore my heart to silence so I may become again a living house of prayer.
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