A friend of mine posted this essay on Facebook, and in light of the Black Friday madness taking place last night and today, I thought it well worth sharing.

As I was reading over the Gospel text for today (Luke 19:45-48, where Jesus cleanses the Temple), I was struck by a certain irony.

Just before this event, Jesus comes in sight of Jerusalem and weeps over it, since “If this day you only knew what makes for peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. . . . [Your enemies] will smash you to the ground and your children within you . . . because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.” He then proceeds to enter the temple, where he finds the court of Gentiles has become a marketplace, not a place of prayer for the nations.

The temple authorities must have had a natural impulse. The court was nearly empty because, although this open expanse of over 20 acres had been reserved for the nations to come and pray to God, most of the peoples of the world neither knew or cared that it was for them. It was a vacuum, begging to be filled. There was a need to provide those who did come to the temple with pure animals for sacrifice, and the proper coins (without engraved images of humans or deities) for use in the temple. A vacuum, and the need that could fill it—the temple authorities put the two together very neatly. With only one problem. There was no room left for the original purpose, and so Jesus came along to restore this part of the world to its intended purpose.

In filling the court, the authorities had shown that they did not know “what makes for peace,” which is leaving room, being empty for God. They soon would show they did not “recognize the time of their visitation,” by killing God’s messenger, his own Son. Even though God had “pitched his tent” in their midst for a thousand years, from the time of David and Solomon, they still had not learned enough to know God or God’s peace.

However, lest we jeer at such foolishness, let us note this irony. Christmas commemorates our own hour of God’s visitation, not one thousand years ago now, but nearly two thousand. Decades ago it was taken over by the marketplace. Now it seems as if Thanksgiving is likewise vanishing under our worship of buying and selling to serve the almighty Dollar. Thanksgiving was begun as a day of peace and prayer to give thanks to God, an empty expanse that the merchants could not resist filling, with turkey for the feast, with football to entertain us, and with deals to entice us into the stores and malls. The temple authorities filled one court with their marketplace. It seems to me that we are very near to filling two holidays with our marketplace.

If the temple authorities were fools, does this mean that we are at least twice the fools?

-Boniface Muggli, osb

Father Boniface lives and works at Assumption Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Richardon, ND.