At that time:
When Jesus drew near Jerusalem, seeing the city, he wept over it, saying: If thou also hadst known, and that in this thy day, the things that are for thy peace; but now they are hidden from thy eyes. For the days shall come upon thee: and thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee: and compass thee round, and straiten thee on every side, and beat thee flat to the ground, and thy children who are in thee; and they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone: because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation. And entering into the temple, he began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought, saying to them: It is written: "My house is the house of prayer"; but you have made it a den of thieves. And he was teaching daily in the temple.
Sermon CIV.
My house is the house of prayer.
But you have made it a den of thieves.
—St. Luke xix. 46.
What made our Lord so severe with these people of whom the Gospel tells us, who were selling and buying in the temple? He was usually gentle and mild, not violent, as on this occasion. He was generally content with reproving what was wrong; here he resorted to force—that force which no one could resist, and which he could always have used if he had chosen; by which he could have destroyed all his enemies in a moment, if he had seen fit to do so. And he not only made these buyers and sellers leave the house of God, but he drove them out in confusion, and also, as we read elsewhere, overturned the tables and chairs which they had used.
Well, one reason for his severity probably was that those who sold were making an unjust profit out of the necessities of those who bought; for the things which they were selling were such as had to be offered by the people for the sacrifices of the temple, and could not well be obtained by them anywhere else. But I think his principal motive was to impress on his followers, and on us who were to come after them, a lesson which we are very apt to forget. He wanted to teach it to us in such a way that we could not forget it: and therefore he made use of this extraordinary means.
This lesson is contained in the words which he quotes from his prophet Isaias: "My house is the house of prayer." These words were true of the temple in which he then was, but they have a more special reference to the temples in which he now dwells, in which he dwells continually, which he did not in that temple, magnificent as it was.
You know, or ought to know, what these temples are. They are our churches, where he is all the time, in his Real Presence, in the Blessed Sacrament. These are the temples of which that in Jerusalem was only a figure or type.
The church is the place for prayer. That is the lesson for us, and we were, as I have said, the ones whom he chiefly wanted to instruct. For prayer—that is, for acts of religion of all kinds—and for nothing else. It is the place to think of God and to speak to him, and not to do anything else, innocent though it be.