A clean and open space

 Making a whip of cords, he (Jesus) drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ (John 2:15-16)

All in all, it’s not a very ‘sweet Jesus’ sort of thing to do. But I understand the impulse.

Walking into the temple precincts, Jesus twists together a whip of cords, upends the tables of the money changers; their coins ching and clatter across the pavement.

Swinging the whip above his head, he drives off the merchants with their birds and lambs and cattle and who knows what else, clearing out an empty space until all that remains is him, standing alone in the courtyard, catching his breath, looking around for who or what he has yet to chase off.

He wants the temple—the ‘Father’s house’—to be a meeting place where human hearts might know and feel the Great Heart who loves and longs for them, a space to pour out their loves and hurts that they might meet and enter the Love who is their home, their hearts enfolded in the divine heart.

I felt something of the same yesterday while visiting a church that was new to me. The choir stood at the director’s command, a flute from a hidden corner intoned an exquisite passage, inviting the heart to rest, wait and listen for the voices to breathe their harmonies over the gathered people.

A spiritual, deep and soulful washed over us, the congregation rapt, moved but unmoving in the pews around me, until it was over. The final note hung in the air a nanosecond as a moment of sweet, mystic communion was about to gather every heart into one love for the Holy God who inspires such beauty and devotion.

But it was not to be, the congregation broke into simultaneous applause, unable to leave a tender moment alone, as they did every time someone sang or played or spoke, shattering any opportunity for silent communion with each other in the Great Love who woke us from sleep and called us together.

There was no open space for the heart to breathe and pray and be.

I was not tempted to make a whip of cords and drive these good people out, but I certainly wanted to tie their hands that they might let Beauty’s presence wash over them and grace their hearts with whatever the Holy One might give them.

Just so, I think I understand Jesus as he stands out of breath in the middle of the courtyard.

He cleared an open space where the clamor of buying and selling, of work and worry is stilled, a space where human hearts are relieved of the compulsion to fill every single moment with sound and motion—all the things we do in our vain attempts to fill our life with meaning or to drown out the nagging doubt that our lives and all we do to fill them has any meaning at all, that the emptiness we sometimes (often?) feel has no cure.

But the heart does not lie. Our hearts know we are made for love, to be filled with affection and warmth, to find ourselves amid the mutuality of giving and receiving that makes us truly human and truly glad to be graced with the privilege of drawing breath on this wonderous little corner of the cosmos.

We need a clean, open space to feel what we feel and to speak our fears and needs and hopes from the hidden silence of our hearts. And there, exactly there, in that open space, we meet the one who is the face of the hunger within us.

He is not only the fire of our hunger but also the food and drink that satisfies the heart’s ancient longing, standing in the open space, ready to hear, ready to heal, ready to receive, ready to welcome us that we may be taken into the Heart he is. Heart-to-heart, we meet and know the Love who made us, the Love who ever awaits us, the Love who lies waiting to live and breathe through our holy and precious lives.

David L. Miller