Let Jesus cleanse your heart, Pope Francis says

Vatican City, Mar 8, 2015 / 09:28 am

Pope Francis drew a penitential lesson from Jesus' Cleansing of the Temple, encouraging Christians to allow Jesus to drive out  "all the behaviors that are against God, against our neighbor, and against ourselves."

"Does the Lord feel at home in my life? Do we allow Him to 'cleanse' our hearts and to drive out the idols, those attitudes of cupidity, jealousy, worldliness, envy, hatred, those habits of gossiping and tearing down others?" the Pope asked in his Angelus address March 8, according to Vatican Radio.

Before thousands of people gathered in St. Peter's Square Sunday, the Pope reflected on the Sunday gospel reading about Jesus' confrontation with moneychangers and merchants in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Driving out the merchants and money changers with a whip, Jesus said: "Take these things away; you shall not make my Father's house a house of trade." (John 2:16).

The Pope noted how the people and the disciples saw this action as a "prophetic gesture."

 "Jesus cleanses with tenderness, with mercy, with love. Mercy is His way of cleansing," Pope Francis said. "Let us, each of us, let us allow the Lord to enter with His mercy – not with the whip, no, with His mercy – to cleanse our hearts. The whip of Jesus with us is His mercy. Let us open to Him the gates so that He would make us a little cleaner."

Pope Francis encouraged Christians to "travel in the world as Jesus did" and to "make our whole existence a sign of love for our brothers, especially the weakest and poorest."

"Let us build for God a temple of our lives," he continued. "If we are witnesses of this living Christ, so many people will encounter Jesus in us, in our witness."

The Pope also reflected on the nature of Jesus' body as a temple of God.

"His body, destroyed on the Cross by the violence of sin, will become in the Resurrection the universal meeting place between God and men," he said. "And the Risen Christ is Himself the universal meeting place – for everyone! – between God and men."

"For this reason, His humanity is the true temple where God is revealed, speaks, is encountered," the Pope added.

The true worshippers of God are not only "the guardians of the material temple, the keepers of power and of religious knowledge." God's true worshippers are also "those who worship God 'in spirit and truth'."

Pope Francis connected Christians' call to become temples of God with the reception of the Holy Eucharist.

"Every Eucharist that we celebrate with faith makes us grow as a living temple of the Lord, thanks to the communion with His crucified and risen Body," the Pope said. "Jesus recognizes that which is in each of us, and knows well our most ardent desires: that of being inhabited by Him, only by Him."

"Let us allow Him to enter into our lives, into our families, into our hearts," the pontiff concluded.