Everyone - pilgrims who had come for Passover, priests, Pharisees - everyone was satisfied that brisk trade was going on around the Jerusalem Temple. The voices of the sacrificial animals drowned out the hymns? Well, what can be done; at least there is always a chance to buy those animals. Surely a pilgrim would not lead them from home, which could be hundreds of kilometers away... The money changers, bargaining with clients, argue and curse so loudly that it is disgraceful? Sad, of course, but denarii have to be exchanged for drachmas and back again... Strictly speaking, no one approves of all this noise in the temple courts, but everyone puts up with it as an unavoidable evil, a kind of tribute to eastern temperament.

Strictly speaking, devout Jews endured all this not so much from indifference as because they were waiting tensely for the coming of the Messiah. Through the prophets the Lord more than once angrily rebuked Israel for its lack of reverence. The words quoted by Jesus, "My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers," belong to the prophet Jeremiah and were spoken 600 years before the events described in the Gospel. But in Israel there was a conviction that the coming Messiah would order the service in the Temple and, so to speak, "put things in order." In carrying out this cleansing, the Lord acts precisely as the One long-awaited Messiah. This is exactly how the Jews perceive it, and therefore they demand a sign from Him.

Yet one cannot fail to notice that the dialogue between the Jews and the Lord takes place in raised tones: the Jews react to Christ's action with a certain hostility. This happens because the Lord calls things by their names. His words, "Do not make My Father's house a house of trade," do not fit at all within the framework of tolerance and indulgence toward lawlessness and irreverence. It is important to see this, because in our own time, when someone tells us about what we softly call "disorders" in our spiritual and church life, we often react the same way the Jews did then, in April of A.D. 27. Fear and uncertainty about God's love make this kind of truth very offensive to people. It is useful to remember this and notice it in ourselves, so as not to become like those Jews.

Jerusalem. The Temple. Walls. Stones. How much they had seen! "Before their eyes" the future Mother of God was raised. Soon after His birth her Son was brought here. This is where He appears as a boy. The grown Christ comes here too. Here He teaches and heals. When you understand how much was revealed to these stones, Christ's words stop sounding surprising: if people stop praising Him, the stones will do it for them (see Luke 19:40), and God can raise up children for Himself from stones (see Luke 3:8).

For some reason, one thinks these stones must have been carefully chosen. They were used to build the Temple of the Living God, to whom everything best belongs. But over the years even the stones must have darkened, the Temple faded, and faith grown dim. And then the Owner Himself of this holy place comes and, though He turns everything upside down here, in reality puts everything back where it belongs: trade to the world, and the Temple to God. For this, among other things, He was later lifted up by that same world on the place called the Skull.

And in today's reading from the Book of Acts we see that the disciples really are not greater than their Teacher (see John 15:20). They do the same thing He did: they use the Jerusalem Temple for its proper purpose. The sick should not receive alms at the Temple, but healing. We too would do well to take up a broom and go clear the rubble in our own heart, the new Temple of the Living God.

The Decalogue is known to everyone who has read the Bible even once in life, and many who have never read it know or at least have heard something about the Ten Commandments. It is the only part of the Torah that for the overwhelming majority of Christians today is truly relevant: most Christians today look at Old Testament law, whether civil law or cultic law, as something that has no direct relation to them. This perception is explained in large part by the fact that these laws appear irrelevant to Christians today, first because, as people usually say in such cases, "Christ fulfilled everything for us," and second because the laws we find in the Torah, whether in the book of Exodus, the book of Leviticus, or the book of Deuteronomy, were given by God for another age and today seem completely inapplicable.

Meanwhile, much here depends on how we perceive the Torah as a whole and the Decalogue in particular. The Decalogue is not simply a moral code in which the order of prescriptions and prohibitions has no significance; it is an integral literary composition in which each commandment occupies its own strictly defined place, outside of which it loses, if not all its meaning, then a significant part of it. Indeed, if we look at the first part of the Decalogue, the first five commandments, it is not hard to see that the first commandment is the main one here, not because it forbids paganism, but because it speaks of God, before whom a person stands and who can and must become the center and meaning of that person's life. The other commandments among the first five are given as means for solving this spiritual task. To exclude from life everything that blocks God from view by claiming His place in a person's soul and heart (the second commandment); to make prayer not a formality, but real, full communion with God (the third commandment); to learn to spend time with God (the fourth commandment); finally, to add to communion with God full and respectful communion with neighbors, while avoiding every form of worship of human beings and human traditions (the fifth commandment): this is the path offered by the first part of the Decalogue.

Its second part describes another path, a path leading away from God, a path by which a person spiritually and practically destroys himself, his relationship with God, and his relationship with neighbors. Here, in the second set of five commandments, the fifth is the main one, or the tenth if we take the whole Decalogue together: it forbids envy, forbids desiring "your neighbor's house," desiring his world, his spiritual space, which God gives him and from which the envious person wants to push him out. The violation of each following commandment, leading to lying and slander, theft, sexual immorality, and finally murder, is only the logic of this displacement carried through to the end.

Thus the Decalogue already marks out two paths: the path of life and the path of death, between which a person must make his choice. And the whole Torah also places a person before this choice, because one must choose not "in principle" and not "in general," but in concrete situations; and the laws we find in the Old Testament books describe the typical situations in which each of us, one way or another, finds himself in life. Understood in this way, the Torah can become for us, in the words of the apostle Paul, a "guardian leading us to Christ," to whom we think we have come and no longer need guides, but after whom we will have to keep reaching and whom we will have to keep catching up to until His return in glory.