Patristic Wisdom: Looking to the Third Sunday in Lent

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business. When He had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. And He said to those who sold doves, “Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!” Then His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up.” So the Jews answered and said to Him, “What sign do You show to us, since You do these things?” Jesus answered and said to them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Then the Jews said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking of the temple of His body. Therefore, when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this to them; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said. (John 2:13–22)

If Jesus says that the temple in Jerusalem is the house of his own Father, and this temple was constructed for the glory of Him who created the heaven and the earth, are we not taught openly to consider the Son of God to be a Son of none other than the creator of heaven and earth? Since it is a house of prayer, the apostles of Christ, too, are commanded by the angel to enter this house of Jesus’ Father (as we have found in the Acts of the Apostles), and to stand and speak “to the people all the words of this life.” … Furthermore, if the house of Christ’s God were not the house of the same God, how would the disciples have remembered what is said in Psalm 68 [LXX]: “The zeal of your house has devoured me”? For that is what is stated in the prophet, and not ‘devours me.’ Now Christ is especially jealous for the house of God in each of us, not wishing it to be a house of merchandise, nor that the house of prayer become a den of thieves, since He is son of a jealous God. This is the case if we understand such words from the Scriptures in a reasonable manner, which were spoken metaphorically from the human viewpoint to set forth the fact that God wishes nothing alien to His will to be mingled with the soul of any men, but especially with the soul of those who wish to receive most divine faith.

Origen, Commentary on John 10.216, 220–221