Bright Friday; The Holy Martyrs Terence, Pompeius and others with them.
Acts 3:1-8; John 2:12-22.
Read Acts 3:1-8
A few weeks ago, the world was shown one of those rare acts that still force the heart to remember what love is. A thirteen-year-old boy, seeing his mother and younger siblings carried toward death, did not bargain with fear. He hurled himself into the sea and swam through cold and darkness so that help might come. Such deeds shame our prudence. They remind us that love does not calculate for long. When the beloved is in peril, love goes.
That is, in some poor human fashion, what we see in Christ.
When Jesus entered the Temple, He found not merely disorder but profanation. The house of the Father had been occupied by men who still possessed the language of religion, the gestures of religion, the authority of religion, yet had emptied it of adoration. They had not abolished God. That would have been too honest. They had covered Him with traffic, custom, advantage, and pious self-interest, until the weary soul could scarcely find its way to Him.
Christ does not endure this with the cold displeasure of a reformer. His wrath is the sorrow of the Son. He knows what it means to confront such men. He knows that once hypocrisy is unmasked, it will not forgive. The moment He drives corruption from His Father’s house, He places Himself in the path of hatred. But He does not hesitate. The Son steps forward for the honor of the Father and for the sake of the lost children who can no longer find the road home.
This is the terrible beauty of John 2. Jesus enters the violence of men as that boy entered the violence of the sea. Yet He goes farther still. He descends not only into danger but into sin’s own black waters, into the ancient misery of a world that has made religion into a wall instead of a door. And there, by offering Himself, He breaks the barrier and opens the Father’s house again.