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When I was growing up at my sending parish, the tradition was Confirmation happened when you entered 6th grade, which was built into the Sunday School program. When it was my time to prepare for Confirmation, I remember one of our priests, Canon Tom Hotchkiss, getting up and telling us, in no uncertain terms, that getting confirmed needed to be our choice, not our parents.
This was a particularly powerful statement coming from Tom Hotchkiss because his son was in our class. That said, we all looked at it differently. There were those who I had never seen in Sunday School before and never saw them in Sunday School afterwards, though I saw many of them in school and other places. These clearly didn’t take what we were doing seriously.
There were others who weren’t sure about confirmation but found ways to either justify going through it or at least make it work for them while still following the words Tom Hotchkiss gave us at the start of our preparation.
There were others, including me, who dived in head first. We took Canon Hotchkiss words seriously and tried to make the Confirmation process our own. Many of us continued not only to attend Sunday School, we also found other ways to take part and participate in the worship, outreach, and life of the church.
To get what we needed out of Confirmation, we had to take the charge Tom gave us seriously. To move closer to God, we had to want that connection. We had to understand what Confirmation was really about. It wasn’t about what our parents wanted or fitting into the society and community around us. It was about something more than that.
Jesus, in our Gospel today, is trying to get those around Him to understand what they are really doing. He’s trying to get them to understand what their worship is really about.
Here, we see Jesus in what was likely the first Passover during His ministry. Like all good Jews of His day and age, Jesus went to the Temple in Jerusalem to worship. This was the way to live into their Faith and tradition and to follow the Law laid out in Torah and summarized in the 10 Commandments today.
Temple worship involved sacrifice, specifically for sins that had been committed. These sacrifices were made by people all over the country. Most of these people had to walk to get to Jerusalem and not all of them kept livestock.
Over time, that meant there had to be vendors to provide the proper animals for sacrifice. Now to make sure they didn’t make it to the Holy of Holies in the Temple, these vendors were typically close by, yet across the way from the Temple, places like the Mount of Olives (if you go to Jerusalem today, you can see this is literally across the street from the Temple).
In Jesus’ time, Caiaphas was appointed High Priest. The thought by some scholars is that the vendors, or at least backers of them, hadn’t supported Caiaphas in his bid to be High Priest and that he was very upset about that.
The thought, then, is that Caiaphas, in a petty attempt at revenge, placed a new market closer to the Temple in attempt to run the vendors out of business.
What began as a convenience, even a necessity, for worshipers descended into something uglier. There are many other things we don’t know that could have made the situation worse. Were these vendors profiting over something necessary to worshipers? Was there other corruption going on?
Whatever was actually happening, it was taking the focus away from what their worship was really about: coming closer to God. That is what Jesus is taking issue with. That is why He, quite violently, drives the vendors in the Temple away.
Now the religious leaders, just as Paul discusses in 1 Corinthians today, ask for a sign from Jesus that He has divine authority to do this. Jesus responds “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
John tells us that Jesus was referring to the temple of His Body. Yet Jesus’ death and Resurrection did something more. They completely changed how people worshipped. We no longer have to make sacrifices to come closer to God. Jesus has done that work for us. Jesus made the sacrifice of Himself, the sacrifice that made all others unnecessary.
Jesus changed worship to bring it back to what it was supposed to be all about: deepening our relationship to God.
From time to time, we all fall away from the true point of our life together. We sometimes forget what it’s all about. It’s not about what our parents or others want or expect from us. It’s not about the social aspect of it all. It’s not about making money or taking revenge. It’s not even about how we’ve always done things, because as Jesus shows that can change in an instant.
The only thing that matters is that we are moving closer in relationship with God, and in doing that moving closer with our neighbor, who are all those who God loves, which is everyone. That relationship with God is the only thing that matters. It should be our sole focus and purpose. Anything else that draws us away from the love of God needs to be left behind. Instead, we need to take on what brings us back to God, namely our Lord Jesus Christ.