Seeking Signs

The Book of Exodus contributes the passage of God communicating the Ten Commandments to the texts in the Roman Catholic Lectionary for the third Sunday in Lent.  Friar Jude Winkler celebrates the great gift that the commandments were to the Israelites in a time and place where popular culture held the gods to be capricious and the natural tragedies of life like sickness and floods were thought to be punishment for displeasing the gods. The Law given to Moses was a sign of the justice of God and means to determine "what God wants'. The discipline of Lent, prayer, fasting and almsgiving is cited by Fr Larry Gillick SJ as those opportunities to focus on the Will of God and be mindful of the addictions and practices which move our desire in a direction away from intimacy with God. The letter of Paul to the Corinthians puts our preference to be Jews requiring "signs" and  Greeks demanding "common sense" in our contemplation of the mysteries of the journey within which we are invited to follow Jesus who upsets the rules of being religious and posses the great paradox of death leading to life as John relates in the text from his Gospel where Jesus cleanses the Temple. Friar Jude comments that this is the first of three visits to Jerusalem at Passover in John's Gospel. From this "sign" we have proposed Jesus public ministry was about 3 years. The "New Temple" which Jesus indicates He will build in 3 days is the sign, according to Father Larry, of the shift in the locus of the Presence of God from the Holy Place to within each person with Jesus as the Man-God model.