All the people were hanging on his words

23 NOVEMBER (Lk 19,45-48)

Prophets have always cried out against false worship. To them only one is the worship pleasing to the Lord, one the sacrifice he loves: obedience to his Word, listening to his voice, loyalty to his Commandments. It is the spiritual worship everyone is called to.

But here you are, putting your trust in deceitful words to your own loss! Are you to steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal, go after strange gods that you know not, and yet come to stand before me in this house which bears my name, and say: “We are safe; we can commit all these abominations again”? Has this house which bears my name become in your eyes a den of thieves? I too see what is being done, says the Lord. You may go to Shiloh, which I made the dwelling place of my name in the beginning. See what I did to it because of the wickedness of my people Israel. And now, because you have committed all these misdeeds, says the Lord, because you did not listen, though I spoke to you untiringly; because you did not answer, though I called you, I will do to this house named after me, in which you trust, and to this place which I gave to you and your fathers, just as I did to Shiloh. I will cast you away from me, as I cast away all your brethren, all the offspring of Ephraim.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Heap your holocausts upon your sacrifices; eat up the flesh! In speaking to your fathers on the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I gave them no command concerning holocaust or sacrifice. This rather is what I commanded them: Listen to my voice; then I will be your God and you shall be my people. Walk in all the ways that I command you, so that you may prosper. But they obeyed not, nor did they pay heed. They walked in the hardness of their evil hearts and turned their backs, not their faces, to me. From the day that your fathers left the land of Egypt even to this day, I have sent you untiringly all my servants the prophets. Yet they have not obeyed me nor paid heed; they have stiffened their necks and done worse than their fathers. When you speak all these words to them, they will not listen to you either; when you call to them, they will not answer you. Say to them: This is the nation which does not listen to the voice of the Lord, its God, or take correction. Faithfulness has disappeared; the word itself is banished from their speech. (Cf. Jer 7,1-28).

However, the Lord’s people had always passed from the spiritual worship to the material worship, to the offering of some animal to be sacrificed to their God. It is a simple, light worship, that costs nothing. Instead the other worship costs the sacrifice of the personal life. You must renounce to your own will, sacrificing your own thoughts to take on those of God.

Then Jesus entered the temple area and proceeded to drive out those who were selling things, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.'” And every day he was teaching in the temple area. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people, meanwhile, were seeking to put him to death, but they could find no way to accomplish their purpose because all the people were hanging on his words.

Jesus enters Jerusalem and purifies the worship of his Father. He declares unnecessary external worship, the one made out of man, without man. He asks for the interior worship, for the sacrifice of the personal will in a perfect obedience to his Word. The chief priests and the scribes see in this request of Jesus a real attack on their religion and that is why they want to eliminate him. They try to capture and put him to death. They cannot because all the people hang on the lips of Jesus in listening to him.

Our worship today would also need a lot of purification. It has become for us trade in human ideas, exchange of earthly feelings, music, singing, incense, ceremonies, celebration of man and his sin, cries against this or that other social injustice, time for demands, pulpit from which to search a universal acclaim. Jesus Christ is always more hidden from this cult, because man has taken completely its upper hand. He conquered the scene. It is a cult that often tires the man that participates in it, because the Lord which it is falsely offered to, is already tired. Appearance has engulfed the inner life, ceremony the sacrifice, singing the praise, incense the perfume of our virtues, the artificial lights the moral, ethical and spiritual light.

Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels and Saints make us true worshipers of God.