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God’s Desire – Fr. Tom Tank

Fr. Tom Tank’s Homily March 7, 2021

“On this third Sunday of Lent we are certainly invited to reflect more fundamentally upon our relationship with God as well as the power of evil that may influence us within our lives. We see in the Gospel today where Jesus certainly recognizes himself as ultimately the temple that he is that new temple and his mystical body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and that means each and every one of us, but when he goes into that temple in Jerusalem he purifies the temple. He cleanses it from the falsehood from the monetary preoccupation that was there and he cleansed the temple and reminds us that Jesus cleanses the temple today. The human side of the Church is always needing cleansing. It’s in need of renewal. It’s in need of purification, but we are too individually are the temples of the Holy Spirit. The temple of God is within each one of us and therefore we are called particularly on this day to stop and reflect upon Christ cleansing our temple. Are there things within my life that I really need to change? Obviously Jesus gave us the commandments of love God above all things of love neighbor as yourself. He joined those two together and he gave us that new commandment to love one another as I have loved you that new standard of love and so obviously love is the ultimate norm, but in order to love there’s some minimum requirements and that’s basically what the Ten Commandments are about. That reading today went through the Ten Commandments and we learn these as children, but it’s so easy to fall into a culture that does not embrace the commands of God. We are reminded, ‘I am the Lord your God. You shall not have strange gods before me.’ and yeah, we don’t worship golden calves. We don’t worship the sun and moon, but there’s a great temptation to worship other things. We can worship our portfolio. We can worship our bank account. We can worship sports. We can worship our own selfishness, our or self-centeredness. Those are all sins against God and so we are called to reflect upon those. We can be reminded, ‘Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.’ which obviously reminds us to respect God’s name because respecting the name is respecting the person, but to take his name in vain is most of all to do evil in the name of God and we see that within our world as well that there is so much evil done in the name of God. Pope Francis just recently in his visit to Iraq condemned that whole thing of doing evil in the name of God, but it’s a temptation not just on the geopolitical scale but also in our own hearts and to keep holy the Lord’s Day, to recognize Sunday as a gift from God. I think too often we recognize things as obligations rather than as gifts that God gives us the gift of his day that gift by which we can truly give him gratitude and thanks to stop and think about the more basic things within our life to take time to truly honor God by the way in which we spend that day which will overflow into the other days of the week, but to do so with a sense of reflection, of family centeredness, of recreation of our own selves and so to honor the Lord’s day as a gift from the Lord that we may praise him. 

Those first three commandments are directed to our relationship with God and the other seven commandments are directed with our relationship with each other. Honor your father and your mother. Obviously children that is for you in a special way to honor your parents because they are your parents and of the wonderful gift they have given you, the gift of your life, the gift of their care day in and day out and to honor them and there’s those times maybe in adolescence in which there’s more of a sense of rejection and that is certainly against God’s call to honor and for us as adults to honor our elderly parents, to care for them to reach out to them and to be compassionate towards them and to be compassionate towards them and to honor and to recognize legitimate authority and to follow that authority. Thou shall not kill. Obviously that is a commandment that has to do with homicide, but it also has to do with infanticide with the killing of the unborn that is so much accepted within our society within our world and it’s sad that many Catholics agree that abortion is fine. That is totally against God’s law and those things not only that direct killing of human life, but also those things that denigrate our human life, alcohol and drugs, mutilation, various things where the human body, the human spirit is denigrated. God does not want that. He does not want us to kill even ourselves. Suicide is another thing that we are running into in our society. Assisted suicide seen as a medical procedure which is totally contrary to the whole medical profession and yet it is embraced just as abortion has been embraced and let’s admit it, we’re all influenced by our culture. If our culture is primarily about God then we’ll be able to resist the secular culture that rejects it, but if or primary thing is about accepting our secular culture we will be going against so often the law of god. Shall not commit adultery, obviously promiscuity is strong within our world, the availability of pornography, the approval of so many practices that are really contrary to God’s law, extramarital, premarital. Cohabitation that is so much accepted within our society is not approved by God. That is not God’s way. God calls us to a deeper respect for marriage as a relationship between husband and wife, man and woman and the dignity of human sexuality within that relationship. Thou shall not steal, there’s a lot of different ways of stealing in our world. Some is just small pilfering, but there’s other acts of dishonesty that go on that we are called to respect the dignity and the rights, the property of each other. Thou shall not bear false witness. Use of the tongue is one of the most important ways in which we can honor God or we can really tear down each other, the power of gossip, the power of falsehood, the power of deception that so often goes on within our world. I once read that one of the best criteria you can use is that if somebody did or said this against you, would you consider it wrong or would you consider it fair? If you don’t consider it fair being done against you the it’s an unjust business practice. It’s an unjust sharing of information. It’s an unjust judgement upon another and then those last two commandments those ones of envy that we don’t rejoice in the good that others have, but rather we become envious and that by our envy we become more and more selfish and self-centered and so we are called rather to give thanks for what is ours rather than to envy what others may have. 

Gratitude is one of the best antidotes for the violation of any of these commandments, gratitude for all that God has done for us and to live according to that gratitude with a deep respect. We always need to remember that God did not give ten suggestions. He gave Ten Commandments. He gave ten ways that are given there for our good. Again, all the Commandments are a gift because if we lived with the commandments we are better people. We have greater peace of mind and heart. We have a greater sense of who we are and what our life is about and we are happier if we truly live the commandments, but that is the challenge to seek the deeper happiness, the deeper joy of life. That is God’s plan. That is God’s desire for each and every one of us.