COMMANDMENTS 

OF THE HEART 

OPENING IMAGE

In Mikhail Sholokhov’s classic novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, a group of young Cossack soldiers on the way to war stayed overnight in an old man’s house.

While they were having their last smoke before going to sleep, the old man, who had served in the Turkish war, asked them, “So you’re off to war, soldiers?”

When they answered, “Yes, grand-dad, off to war,”  he said,  “It won’t be anything like the Turkish war was, I don’t suppose. They’ve got different weapons now.”

One of the Cossacks, named Tomilin, barked back, “It’ll be just the same. Just as devilish. Just as they killed the Turks off then, so we’ll have to now.” He sounded angry, but  no one knew with whom.  

The old man began to preach, “My sons, I ask you one thing. I ask you seriously, and you mark what I say. Remember one thing! If you want to come back from the mortal struggle alive and with a whole skin, you must keep the law of humanity.”

Stephan, another of the young Cossack soldiers, asked with a smile, “Which one?”

The old man blurted out, “This one: don’t take other men’s goods. That’s one. As you fear God, don’t do wrong to any woman. That’s the second. And then you must know certain prayers.”

The Cossacks sat up, and all spoke at once:

“If only we didn’t have to lose our own goods - not to speak of taking other people’s!” “And why mustn’t we touch a woman? How are we to stand that?”

The old man answered right back, “You must not touch a woman. Never. If you can’t stand that, you’ll lose your heads or you’ll be wounded. You’ll be sorry after, but then it will be too late. I’ll tell you the prayers. I went right through the Turkish war, death on my shoulders like a saddlebag, but I came through alive because of these prayers.”

Then the old man went into another room, “rummaged beneath an ikon, and brought back a crumbling, faded brown piece of paper.”

“Get up and write them down!” he commanded. “You’ll be off again before dawn tomorrow, won’t you?”

And all the Cossacks, but one, slowly got up, wrote down the prayers and tucked them inside with the crosses they wore around their necks. And they left for war the next morning! 

HOMILETIC REFLECTIONS

The old man in that story by Mikhail Sholokhov is like Moses in today’s first reading. He delivers for God a list of commandments that are meant to protect and help other people as well as myself.

The old man in that story by Mikhail Sholokhov is also like Jesus in today’s gospel. He is not afraid to tell it as it is.

Anyone reading the Old and New Testament knows that people need commandments. Anyone reading Sholokhov’s novels or most novels or the daily newspaper, knows that people need commandments. Do you think we need commandments?

People have strange gods. People worship weird things. People curse god and others. People are workaholics - never resting to enjoy Sunday as well as the gifts around them. People forget God. People forget or neglect their parents. People kill. People commit adultery. People steal. People tell lies about their neighbor. People idolize and wish they had their neighbors wife, or husband, their swimming pool, their $30,000 dollar plus car and their vacations.

The result is a ruined and divided heart. Breaking commandments lead to broken hearts. Our core, our center, is ruined if God and concern for others are not allowed presence there. The human heart is the place where God wants to dwell, where God wants his temple. The human heart is a temple and we can really mess it up, when we fill it with all kinds of strange gods, idols, ideas, and desires.

Today’s Gospel is an invitation to ask Jesus to come into our heart, into our temple and to clear out the sheep and the oxen and to toss out the money changers.

Today’s Gospel ends with the words that indicate very clearly that Jesus knows the motivations of the human heart. He knows what makes people tick. “He needed no one to give him testimony about human nature. He was well aware of what was in the human heart.”

Today’s Gospel is an invitation to listen to Jesus’ warning, “Stop turning my Father’s house into a marketplace!”

Today’s readings then are one more Lenten call for conversion of heart. And as we know, conversion of heart means dying - a dying to self. St. Paul tells us in today’s second reading, that the message of the cross is crazy and foolish. It’s absurd to let go of all those  resentments and hurts that fill our heart. Disarmament is dangerous. The message of the cross is a stumbling block. It always sounds absurd, that is, till we see the long range results of our present patterns of behavior. The message of the cross always sounds crazy, that is, till we look through Good Friday to Easter Sunday, when we begin to see the possibility of resurrection and new life on the other side of our present death, when we see a cleansed temple on the other side of our present messy one.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

To be practical, I would suggest taking some time out for Lenten prayer and reflection on the following three questions that come out of today’s three readings:

          1) What’s going on inside our heart?

          2) What are the commandments of our heart?

3) Do I see the wisdom of the cross or does it still seem foolish    or absurd?

First question: What’s going on inside my heart?

When Jesus walked into the temple to pray, he walked into a temple whose god had become the god-almighty dollar. He walked into a temple that had become a marketplace for animals. He saw a lot of things that were not helping it to be a house of prayer.

Lent is a great time to have a heart examination. Allow Jesus the healer to come into your heart and look around. Jesus found money changers and animals for sacrifice in the temple in Jerusalem. What would he find in our heart, our inner temple today? What beasts within us need to be sacrificed?

Name the beasts! Lent is a good time to make a moral and spiritual inventory. What’s biting or bugging me? What’s barking inside of me? Am I an alligator, always causing fear by attacking people? What do I pig out on?  Am I a bear of a bull to live with? Am I a pest? What animal is on my high altar? What  pet resentments do I keep on feeding? What place does money play in my life? What are my sins? 

To answer those questions is to name our beasts. To answer those questions is to make a moral and spiritual inventory. Lent is a good time to do just that.

Second Question:  What are the commandments of  my heart?

In prayer, we see not only the beasts that roam our heart, we can also hear God’s commandments of the heart. 

In 1927 in his essay on “The Future of An Illusion,” Freud asked, “In what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie?” Then he asks his readers to reflect on what would happen if people just went by instinct. “If one imagines its prohibitions lifted - if, then, one may take any woman one pleases as a sexual object, if one may without hesitation kill one’s rival for her love or anyone else who stands in the way, if, too, one can carry off any of the other man’s belongings without asking leave how splendid, what a string of satisfactions one’s life would be! True, one soon comes across the first difficulty: everyone else has exactly the same wishes as I have and will treat me with no more consideration than I treat him.”

Sound familiar? It’s the same message that the old man gave the young soldiers in the opening story of this homily. Sound familiar? It’s the golden rule. Sound familiar? It’s Jesus command to love one another as we love ourselves. In prayer  we can realize this. Isn’t that one good reason why we need churches and temples? Don’t we need places on the planet where people can hear that they are not the only person  on the planet?

Third Question: Do I see the wisdom of the cross or does it still seem foolish or absurd?

To name our beasts and to keep God’s commandments is a dying to self. To many people to do that is absurd. Moreover to realize that I can’t change by my own power, but only with the help of God, is also absurd for many people. Yet, if I look at my life in prayer while sitting in a cleansed temple and empty heart, I’ll gradually see what Paul is getting at in today’s second reading. As with Jesus it’s only in my weakness that I will find the wisdom  and power of God. 

CONCLUSION

The old man in the opening story of this homily told the young soldiers to write down some prayers. They did and then tucked them inside their shirts next to their crosses. Today’s readings suggest going even further. Allow Jesus into your heart, into your temple, and let him cleanse you as he cleansed the temple in today’s Gospel and then begin to live by his commandments of the heart, his  commandments of love. It will hurt. It is the cross. But your heart  will be what you were meant to be: God’s temple - the Father’s house - a house of prayer.