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A team of 200 priests comment on daily Gospel
Liturgical day: Friday 33rd in Ordinary Time
Gospel text (Lk 19,45-48): Jesus entered the Temple area and began to drive out the merchants. And He said to them, «God says in the Scriptures: ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’: but you have turned it into a den of robbers».Jesus was teaching every day in the Temple (…).
Jesus foretells the demise of the Temple of Jerusalem
EDITORIAL TEAM
evangeli.net
(based on texts by Benedict XVI)
(Città del Vaticano, Vatican)
Today, Jesus leads a gesture the scope of which would go much further than the simple fact of the expulsion of the "vendors": it is beyond doubt that he foretold the demise of the temple, and precisely its theological, historical-salvific demise. As evidence for this, besides the “Eschatological Discourse”, there is the passage: "behold, your House is being left to you desolate" (Mt 23:38).
Inasmuch as it belonged to the Father, Jesus loved the Temple and taught there gladly. He defended it as a "House of prayer" for all peoples and tried to prepare it for that function. Yet, He knew that the age of this Temple was over and that something new was to come, linked to His Death and Resurrection. There was a change in the air of universal reach and unpredictable sense: it would no longer be the "House of God"...
—The temple with its worship is "demolished" with Christ’s crucifixion; Its place is now taken by the living Ark of the Covenant – the crucified and risen Christ.