Oblates of St. Francis de Sales

New DeSales World Newsletter - Summer Edition

Third Sunday in Lent (March 23, 2003)

Suggested Emphasis

(I show) steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and
keep my commandments. Exodus 20:6

Salesian Perspective

It is not too difficult to relate the passage from Exodus which is our first reading for the Third Sunday of Lent to a Salesian theme. How many times in his writings does Francis de Sales remind us that the Ten Commandments represent for us the declared Will of God! They are to be obeyed, simply, thoroughly, and forever because God wills it so. They, together with the Commandments of the Church, the Counsels of the Gospel, and the Inspirations of the Holy Spirit, are the signified Will of God. This Will is described by Francis as all holy, all good and he claims it is easy for us to praise, love, and adore God’s most holy Will by making this aspiration our own: Your Will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

There is also his teaching on the permissive Will of God. Francis explains that God’s Will in reality is one most unique and simple Will, but He prefers to call it by different names according to the various means by which we know it. God’s permissive Will, or the will of His good pleasure, deals with those things that must be accepted by us; those things which God permits in every dimension of our lives: our natural, civil, spiritual, and psychological lives. They form the shape of the cross for us, and on that cross he exhorts us to open our arms in an embrace of love and submission as we gently, patiently, contentedly accept whatever He sends us.

Today’s Gospel tells the story of the cleansing of the temple and in the telling we recognize no actual commandments signifying God’s Will being broken, but surely, we can see His permissive Will in action as Jesus accosts the money changers and demands that they leave His Father’s house which they have made into a trading center for the big business of the day: the buying and selling of animals for sacrifice at the coming feast. Jesus was outraged at what he saw as he entered the sacred precincts. The outer court of the temple looked like a filthy stable; the noise of the bellowing oxen must have been deafening, and the noisy shouts of the traders and money-changers only added to the din. He began to upturn the money tables and to drive the animals out of the temple. Shock waves reverberated through the area. He was challenged by the Pharisees: who gave Him the right, by what authority did He do these things? He was acting like John the Baptist, showing an attitude of complete independence toward the established authorities.

Jesus’ only response to them was the cryptic: Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again. They scoffed at Him, reminded Him that it took forty-six years to build the temple and He said He could do it in three days! They misunderstood and so did his followers. Because His mission was being challenged, Jesus offered a real and true proof of it, but this proof was to be recognized only many months later. At the moment it did nothing to satisfy the evil curiosity of His questioners. All of them remembered it later: the Pharisees to accuse Him, his disciples to believe in Him, for by then they did recognize in His Resurrection the sign he had offered to the elders in the temple.

May it be our joy to place ourselves among the many who believed in Him during the Passover festival in Jerusalem. We may not be witnesses to the signs John tells us they saw Him working but we can be doers of the Will of God; we can recognize His good pleasure, His permissive Will in all that happens to us; we can suffer with Him when that is indicated and we can rejoice with Him when God’s hand leads us to the glory of His Resurrection.

Sr. Loretta Fahey, VHM and Sr. Mary Grace Flynn, VHM, are members
of the Visitation Monastery in Wheeling, West Virginia.