22 November 1985
Jamaica, New York

The two passages to which we have just listened could be described as a study in contrasts that meet at a focal point. In the first reading from Maccabees, we were given a description of the spirit of joy and exultation after the victory won by Judas. The reading pulsates with a sense of enthusiasm and of hope. The Israelites had found a new sense of purpose in their lives, which generated a deep sense of gratitude to God. All that culminates in the dedication of the temple. Perhaps you noticed that the word joy occurs no less than four times in that first reading of this evening. In the second reading there is a marked contrast. Jesus discovers that the Temple is being profaned. There is buying and selling. There is, quite clearly, a loss of a sense of direction, a loss of a sense of purpose, a loss of vision, and the mood is not of joy, but of anger. The focal point for these two events is the same, the Temple, which was that same Temple where Judas and his men rejoiced, that Jesus and His disciples entered and found the scene that is described in this evening's Gospel. There is a time difference of some one hundred seventy or one hundred eighty years.

What had happened in the meantime that there should have been such loss of vision? Nothing very dramatic; the years had passed; the Romans had annexed Judea, but they respected the religious convictions of the people. There seemed to have been an imperceptible contraction of vision. The sense of genuine religion had weakened, or rather had been warped. You remember how Our Lord reminded the woman at the well that a time would come when people would worship God in spirit and in truth. It would seem that many who entered the Temple in Our Lord's day worshiped God with their lips but their hearts were far from Him.

What of the Temple of the Church as we know it today? In the span of the lifetime of all of us, we can see a great contrast in the Church as we know it today and the Church as we knew it twenty years ago. Some will look back nostalgically to the past and feel that the Church has suffered much loss in those two decades. Others will see the past twenty years as a time when a great cleansing of the Temple of God's Church has taken place. Most will see it positively and realistically. There have been gains and there have been losses. The attitudes of all of us have been, and still are being, challenged by the Spirit of God.

We, according to our different points of view, like to speculate about the Church and the direction it has taken, and the direction it should take. What about the Temple of my own life as priest? Here, too, we note the great contrast. Take the vision of the priesthood we had on the day we were ordained and the vision of the priesthood as we see it today. None of us but will note the contrast between our first year in the priesthood and the priesthood as we live it today. Undoubtedly there have been gains over our years in the priesthood, resulting from the greater maturity which the years have brought us and also from the experience we have had as priests in serving and seeing the grace of God at work in others. All of us will resemble St. Peter. The Peter of the Gospels is a Peter different from the Peter we meet in that first letter which he addressed to the Christians of his time. There are also, however, shadows in the priesthood that we live today; the growth of selfishness, sluggishness and perhaps laziness which, according to St. Vincent, is the besetting sin of the priesthood. Maybe it was because of that, that he gave us as our fifth characteristic virtue, zeal for souls.

But this varying contrast must not stop there. We must move on to the point where the contrasts converge, and that point is the living person of Jesus Christ Who is our Alpha and our Omega. How much is Jesus Christ a point of reference for us in all things great and small? We talk about Him, but do we speak to Him in the quietness of prayer and personal affection about what is happening in our life and what He, or rather the Holy Spirit, is trying to accomplish daily in us? There is a world of difference between talking and speaking. Do we by constant, daily, almost hourly reference to Jesus Christ, the still point of our priesthood, prevent that hardening of our spiritual arteries which make us, as St. Vincent remarks in our Common Rules, "insensitive to God's honor and our neighbor's salvation"? The only antidote that we have to that disease of aging spiritually in the priesthood is the centering of all things on Jesus Christ, our great High Priest.