Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Good morning. Today we celebrate the third Sunday of Lent.

The Opening Prayer oh God, author of every mercy and of all goodness, who in fasting, prayer, and almsgiving have shown us a remedy for sin, look graciously on this confession of our lowliness that we who are bowed down by our conscience may always be lifted up by your mercy through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Old Testament from the book of Exodus, 20th chapter, first through the third verse, seventh and eighth, and the 12th through the 17th verse. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave unpunished the one who takes his name in vain. Remember to keep holy this Sabbath day. Honor your father and your mother, that you may have a long life in the land which the LORD your God is giving you.

You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass, nor anything else that belongs to him.

The Word of the Lord Lord, you have the words of everlasting life. A reading from the New Testament from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, First Chapter 22, 25th verse. Brothers and sisters, Jews demand signs, and Greeks look for wisdom. But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolish to Gentiles, but to those who are called Jews and Greek alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God for the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. The Word of the Lord Verse before the Gospel God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life.

The gospel for this third Sunday of Lent is taken from St. John, second chapter 1325. Since the Passover of the Jews was near, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep and doves, as well as the money changers seated there. He made a whip of cords and drove them all out of the temple area with the sheep and oxen and spilled the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. And to those who sold doves, he said, take these out of here.

Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace. His disciples recalled the words of Scripture. Zeal for your house will consume me. At this, the Jews answered and said to him, what sign can you show us for doing this? And Jesus answered and said to them, destroy the temple in three days. I will raise it up.

The Jews said, this temple has been under construction for. For 46 years, and you will raise it up in three days. But he was speaking about the temple of his body. Therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this. And they came to believe the scripture and the words Jesus had spoken while he was in Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. Many began to believe in his name when they saw the signs he was doing.

But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all and did not need anyone to testify about human nature. He himself understood it well. The Gospel of the Lord, the message that God longs for our hearts to receive, has been poured out for thousands of years. There’s always been those who’ve understood it, who have taken it in, and it’s changed their life. And they have carried the message in a powerful and beautiful way. But the number, I think, has always been small.

My personal opinion is that it’s growing at an unprecedented level in this time that we’re living. And the key thing in this wonderful core message that God has shared with us is that we keep blocking it in some way, not staying with it, not seeing it for what it really is. It gets cloudy, it gets confused with other things. And it strikes me that in that second reading, Paul is saying that at the heart of this message that God has given to us, there is this way he calls himself the way to life and has something to do with crucifixion. And when you look at the readings of Lent in this period of time in Lent, where we’re asked to ponder is that very thing that brought about the fulfillment of the teaching of God from the call of Abraham until Jesus, it’s finally fully revealed at the crucifixion is key. So what is the crucifix saying to us?

What is Christ crucified saying? Well, the first thing we hear from Paul is that the image of a Savior who is saving the world through giving in to evil and dying this horrible death, that. That core ingredient in the message is so quickly dismissed by those who hear it. He uses these phrases. He said, the Jews, it’s a stumbling block to them. And the stumbling block was that they had an idea of who the Messiah was going to be.

They knew that he was going to be a great leader. He was going to free the people from everything that bound them. So he had a political career and he was going to change everything and make it all easier and better for the. For the Israelites. And instead he ends up being executed as a common criminal. Well, that didn’t make any sense.

You look at the Gentiles when they’re shown, let’s say, they’re the ones who haven’t had any understanding of this mystery. And they just all of a sudden hear this idea that if you die, if you suffer, if you give yourself over to evil, then you’re going to be much better off. And so you take a person who’s fairly underdeveloped and not very sophisticated and certainly on a lower level of consciousness, and it makes absolutely no sense. It’s foolishness. To the Gentiles, what do you mean, give in to evil? What do you mean, be a servant instead of a master?

And the Greeks, they were the ones that. They were the learned and the clever, and they were trying to figure out what this message meant and trying to analyze it too much. And somehow they were seeking the wisdom. And by seeking it in a way that was too complex, they couldn’t see it. Which reminds you so much of Jesus saying, this message I have is hidden from the learned and the clever, and. And it’s revealed to the merest children.

So all of that says there’s something in this crucifix that is so core, so simple, so easy to understand if you can simply open your heart to understand what it’s saying. So let’s see if the first reading of the Gospel don’t help us. Let’s see if they. I really believe they do help us to understand this message of the crucifix. First of all, I want to say a few things about the word crucifix crucial. Crucifixion.

The word crucial means that there are two opposite opinions about something and that it is absolutely essential that one of them be chosen over the other. If there is going to be any success, we call it a crucial decision. Absolutely essential if you’re going to go forward to decide which of these conflicting ideas is the one to choose. A crucible is an interesting thing. It’s a clay pot that holds metal that’s being mixed with another metal so that it becomes stronger. Then it’s also important to look at the word to suffer.

Because of the one thing that we talk about is that Jesus had to suffer the crucifixion. There was a time in our history of spirituality in the Catholic Church that during the Middle Ages, everyone thought if they were in a painful situation, if they were suffering, they were pleasing God because it proved that they loved Him. That pain was what suffering was about. Pain is not necessarily the core of suffering, though it includes that. But to suffer means to allow, to endure, to put up with patiently, without anger, without resistance. So there’s a conflict in us that we have constantly.

I believe as human beings, the conflict between truth and that which is not true lies between being self oriented and wanting everything for me versus being a person who wants the best for everyone else. There’s a whole sense of. There’s a way in which life is supposed to serve me versus whether I want to serve it. These are crucial questions of which you want to pick. And it seems that when one picks the correct one, there is an experience of loss or an experience of something being taken from us. That’s our right, the right to have what I want when I want it.

And that’s where we get into the real issue of the crucifix and crucifixion. So hold those thoughts and then let me go back to the first reading and talk about the image of the temple. Because the temple was the place where, you know, that they felt that the temple was the sacred place where you connect with God. And there was a thing in the middle of the temple, in the smallest part of it, where only the certain priests could enter. It was the holiest place. And what was in that tabernacle was the first reading the Ten Commandments.

So here are human beings in a way, worshiping a God who has done something for them. And the thing that he’s done that’s been so incredible in their mind is he’s revealed to them their nature. And that’s what the Ten Commandments are. They are a description of who we are, who we’re meant to be. We’re meant to be a people who trust in a power beyond ourselves. Our core essence is that we are people who respect those things that give us life.

And when we’re in love and when we have this most powerful of human emotions where we want to care for and love someone, we don’t want to lie to them, or we don’t want to steal from them or destroy them or even demand to have what they have. It’s hard for us to imagine that people didn’t really know what human nature was at one point. And this is the way in which God begins his work with people. So that they can see, this is who I am intended to be. This is my essence. And it can be distorted by my mind and by my will.

And I can become something that is the opposite of who I am. And when that happens, then death enters and destruction and intense pain versus the pain and the suffering that is demanded. When we understand the kingdom, then we go to the Gospel. And what we realize is that Jesus is explaining to everyone that this image of the temple as a sacred place that carries within it the truth of who we are is about to be replaced. And it has to be replaced. And Jesus is the one that replaces it.

So when he goes and looks at the temple as it is, and he experiences it, what he realizes has happened, is that the whole notion, even of sacrifice, of the notion of suffering, of offering something that you created, that God helped you make, and you bring it to God and you say, God, you are the reason I have this gift. You are the one that enabled me to do this. That was the heart of those sacrifices. It was a way of honoring God for being a part of your life and producing good through you, for yourself and for others. And what happens? They turn it into some kind of convenience store.

Meaning if you had to travel to get to Jerusalem to offer your sacrifice, the problem was you had to bring whatever you created, whether it’s the best of the fruits that you raised or vegetables or wheat, or then maybe the animals became preferable. And then you would bring some small animal that you nurtured, the ones that gave birth to this. And you were identified with this creature that you brought to God and thanking him for having you be a part of him and creating life in this figure that you’re offering. And all that was gone when they came and just had to buy the cheapest thing they could to get through the ritual. It was about purification. And purification is like opening your mind to what’s real and true.

And it was lost. It was all kind of a farce. And it must have been incredibly difficult. There were all these people from all these different countries, and they’re all different kind of coins. And you had to have money changers. They made some money off of it, and I’m sure they had to give a cut to the temple if they got that job.

And yeah, it was a marketplace. It was something that just had no similarity what it was intended to be, which is what happens to people who take things like religion and twist it, turn it into something radically different. So what is Jesus saying? I am the new temple. Well, what was in the center of the temple was wisdom as to who human beings are. Now the center of the temple is the person of Jesus.

The person of Jesus has within him the person of God. So the new temple is not a building, but it’s us. And inside of us is God. God dwells inside of us. Now think of the difference. One is insight into who I am.

The other is insight into the part that I am. That is the most mysterious part, and that is that I can’t do what I’m called to do, be who I’m called to be on my own. I have to do it in partnership with divinity. That means I have to believe in this incredibly mysterious thing of God dwelling inside of me and being a source of wisdom and strength. And I call upon it consciously, and I know it’s there in the three things that it’s trying to do. So clearly is it’s trying to make sure that on a daily basis you hear the voice of this God inside of you.

And he’s saying three basic things. You are loved as you are. You are loved exactly as you are. And I want you to know that basically, you are also the person that I need you to be in the world. And I’m going to engage you in work that will change the world. Ultimately, if you surrender to my truth and you listen to me and you become who I want you to be.

You’re valuable, you’re loved, and you are forgiven of everything you’ve done. And what you have to understand is that the world that I’ve created for you is precisely what you need and your struggles against the evil that’s around you. Those are all things that I plan so that if you’re working with me and I can help you go through this, you’ll find an amazing, amazing transformation happening to you. What a gift. Divinity inside of me versus a model of who I’m supposed to be. But yet I feel at times religion simply falls back on talking about what you should be.

And it’s almost like in homilies we get the Ten Commandments in some kind of more particular way. But in truth, it’s not about those rules and laws. It’s about a transformation, becoming those things. And that can only be done in partnership with divinity is the only one that has the power to use all things and somehow use them for the good, so that every evil and every setback and every problem we have continues to move us in the direction of insight and awareness and consciousness. It’s so mysterious and so simple at the same time to figure out how it works. You’ll never, never be able to do that, to know it works, to believe it works, to want it to work.

That’s what a child does, that’s what we need to do. And when you trust in that, then life, the life that God has promised us, the promised land, the peaceful, still, inner place appears. Closing PRAYER Father, we long for the gifts that you promise, and yet we so resist the process that you’ve opened for us. Bless us with the kind of understanding and the simple trust we need to have in you and the promise. And let us go into it without trying to figure it out, without having nice, neat, clear lines that we can stay within. But give us the freedom of children that simply are so excited about a gift.

And when they know that this gift has been promised, they know it will be given. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. Hello, my name is Will Richie and I work for Pastoral Reflections Institute. Monsignor Don has asked me to share my personal reflections on today’s homily. What strikes me is this idea of suffering, how pain is always not included in it. He says that suffering means to allow, to endure, to put up with patiently, without anger, without resistance.

Recently I had a chance to see the youth choir called Watoto from Uganda. They had immense hope and joy and power. And yet it was an hour long production that was extraordinarily well done, with some documentary footage, how the poverty leaves men to go to other cities, about how women often leave their children behind and how the children are left to be cared by others as orphans. This incredible group grabbed me in a way that also harkens back to today’s homily in which Monsignor shares that Jesus message was actually hidden from the learned and the clever, and it was revealed to the children. These children came from places that my own children, myself, my friends, my family, actually our church where we were watching them could not even imagine. And yet the smiles on their faces, the conviction in their singing, their full surrender, that mysterious, that simple, childlike belief that no matter where they come from, God is taking care of them and has been taking care of them at every moment.

You talk about a testimony for me, my family, my children, my young daughter asking why don’t they have mommy and daddy’s my son smiling, seeing a girl about his height smile at the same time, he being 7, she 11 and separating our differences in a way that brought us together through their example and their conviction, bringing purpose to their suffering and giving us perspective on ours as well. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program, is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere, any and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued service.

Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.