Friday, Nov 20, 2009

Reading- Maccabees 4:36-37, 52-59

...They celebrated dedication of the altar and and joyfully offered burnt offerings.

Gospel - Luke 19:45-48

Jesus entered the temple area and proceeded to drive out those who were selling things, saying to them, "It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves."

On the homily, Fr.Floredo threw the question on why and how we behave on God's dwelling: the temple, a place of worship. That it must not be a place for gossips, but for concentration to God. And it echoed on my conscience that our body is the temple of God as he created us. In like manner, we should give it due reverence by treating it with loving care and not making it a den of worldly dins that drowned our very existence to doom and perdition.

Josef Pieper, a renowned German Catholic philosopher wrote why we need Christ to cleanse the Temple thus: How is an intentional turning away of the will from the very quintessence of all good - toward which the will is inherently oriented by its very nature - even conceivable? How is it possible that the willing person can abuse his freedom so as to decide against the good?... Sin... has its ground of possibility in nothing other than in the fact that man is a creature: "Seen from the point of view of its nature, every spiritual creature has the ability to sin" (Saint Thomas Aquinas) It is because of his creatureliness that man is capable of sinning..."The creature is dark, insofar as it stems from nothing."...But what does "stem from nothing" mean, if not "to be created"! And precisely this - the fact that descent from nothing is inherent in every creature - is the deepest ground for man's capacity for sin, for his posse peccare: such is Thomas' opinion. In other words, not because the will is free, but rather "because the free will comes from nothing, that is why it is inherent to it not to remain in the good by nature." At the same time, of course, Thomas says that such a "bent toward evil" comes to the will "not by virtue of its origin from God, but because of its origin from nothing."
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