Bright Friday; The Holy Priest-Martyr Basil, Bishop of Amasia (c. 322)
Bright Week. No fasting or abstention from foods.
Read
Acts 3:1-8; John 2:12-22
Christ is risen! Truly, He is risen!
Jesus shows us he is in the business of temple building. The Jews in the crowd are astonished at Jesus’ industriousness; it took them 46 years and yet his plan is to build it up in three days. As we see earlier in the passage, the temple they have built, as glorious as it is, has set up its worship around the wrong altar: the worship of commerce. Jesus proposes to destroy and rebuild echoes the psalm “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain to the builders labour” (Ps 126:1 LXX). Rebuilding the temple means reorienting the worship around the true praise of God, not the sacrifices of blood and goats, but the sacrifice of a “contrite spirit.” It means following the blueprint of the master builder. It means uniting ourselves to the body of Christ, the Church, where we enter into the perfect praise of Christ, who offers himself and the world to the Father, continuing the work of redemption for which all creation groans (cf. Rom 8:22-23).
While we enjoy the church, which is the body of Christ, we might do well to ask ourselves about the state of our worship. Do we worship fundraising before the liturgical experience of the church? Do we worship professional advancement, forgetting that every good and every perfect gift is from above (James 1:17; ambon prayer)? Do we hoard our riches in our own temple, instead of imitating our Lord’s generosity, who pours the riches of his fleshly temple for the life of the world? If so, let us ask the Lord to help rebuild our temples in his image.
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