Today is the feast of The Dedication of the Basilica of the Most Holy Savior, otherwise known as the Basilica of St John Lateran, the mother-church of Christendom. The Gospel was of Jesus chasing the moneychangers out of the Temple: ‘Stop making My Father’s House into a den of thieves,’ he said. An alternate Gospel text for this day might have been the story of Zacchaeus up in the tree (the better to see Jesus). Jesus looks up, sees him and invites himself to dine in the home of this leading Pharisee.

Jesus ‘stayed with’ Zacchaeus. He ate with him; he  celebrated with him. The word ‘Sabbath’ means ‘rest.’ It also means ‘to remain,’ to ‘stay with.’ It is a time set apart, consecrated, as it were, the exact opposite of the worldly commerce that had taken over the sacredness of the Temple and that Jesus inveighed against.

The application is to our own lives, so taken up and busy about so many things. The choice is before us: Each moment can be a stepping stone to grace, a response to the gift of the present moment, a sacrificial offering of self – a Sabbath; or those very same activities may – unknowingly – turn us away from God, make us selfish, greedy, covetous. It is not so much what we do as how or why we do it. The animals in the Temple were meant to be given over to God as symbols of ourselves. They had become instead a means of exploitation and abuse.

It is the direction of our minds, our attitudes, our intentions,  that make all the difference in our personal lives: We may become Temples of God where God may dwell within us, and we in God; or dens of thieves where the best part of ourselves has been stolen away from us.