Commerce

Aside from graduation, the only other time I got a medal pinned on me was in Antipolo. This was a long time ago, and I hope to God this practice has been discontinued at the church of the Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje, our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage. As you went up the steps of the church, people rushed to you and pinned religious medals on you. This would have been nice if it were graduation except that the forced-on-you religious medal was the prelude to a transaction (actually an extortion) which eventually ended with a forced-on-you payment. You might complain, claiming that in school, medals are usually won and given. Well, here in church, medals are bought.

Would Jesus bristle at the sight? After all, might he not understand that these are just poor people trying to be entrepreneurial and enterprising? Location (or geography), as they say, is everything. I used to buy tawas (alum or aluminum sulfate) from vendors right outside Quiapo church and I never really cared to asked why alum should be sold there. Actually, you could buy all sorts of stuff along the perimeter of the church. It was convenient. Shop then pray. Pray then shop.

In today’s gospel, we see an indignant Jesus, on a rampage, cleaning the temple of animal vendors and money changers. He is not being anti-enterprise or anti-shopping here. He is only being anti-anything that subverts or distorts our communion with God. The stalls were not just selling commodities needed for religious compliance and sacrifice; they were selling narrow ideas (i.e. theologies) and practices that eventually converted a sacred place and holy presence into a marketplace.

When temple degrades into marketplace (or when communion cheapens into commodity), it is easy to miss the most important things. We miss the ultimate mystery of our redemption, which is the very sign of Lent. When the Jews ask Jesus for a sign which gave him the right to do the purging he just did, the only sign he gives them is an event: destroy this Temple, and in three days, it will be up again.

Now that kind of a sign would be too much for the merchant part of us. We’re with our calculators, thinking capital expense and years of construction to rebuild the place, and we fail to see his reply as prefiguring the ultimate act of our redemption: his passion, death, and resurrection. He is the new temple, the new sacred place and holy presence, in and through which we are reconciled with God.

In truth, we are saved not by calculation or a transaction, but by a relationship of communion with a Person, a covenant that is initiated by God, and initialed with the blood and new life of the Lamb of God.

In a Lenten lecture last week to the Ateneo de Manila Professional Schools (titled “Cleansing markets and temples: A Lenten view of the present crisis”), I tried to draw parallels between the crises in the worlds of finance and the spirit. There I pointed out that the financial crisis is due to three catastrophic failures. These are failures in truth, balance, and trust. We failed to account for the true value of our assets (e.g. houses) and the risk associated with these; we failed to address the longitudinal trade imbalance between east and west (i.e. between selling and saving in China vs borrowing and buying in the US); and thus burned, we are now finding it difficult to trust the soundness of credit and markets once more.

On a parallel, we court catastrophe in our spiritual lives if we fail to see the truth of who we are (and what we have) before God, if we fail to achieve balance (or interior freedom) among the many competing attractors in our lives, and if we fail to trust yet again in ourselves and in the redeeming action and mercy of God.

Truth, balance, and trust. Recover these and we just might avoid spiritual meltdown, which after all is the greater disaster, more painful than toxic assets or locked liquidity.

The next time then you are in Antipolo or Quiapo or in whatever temple or place of worship, place yourself before the crossed beams of the new Temple. Before the risen, crucified Christ, ponder where you are and where He desires to place you in relation to truth, balance, and trust. If a medal gets pinned on you while you stand there, do not fret. In the ambient light of this new and sacred Temple, medals (like redemption) are free.

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