Friends
Peace be with you.
In the Fall of the year 2000, I studied for a semester in Jerusalem. Early on, my classmates went to the Temple Mount to take a tour but I was reluctant because I was leery of going to places in the Old City without a guide. At the time, I was worried we would walk into a place we weren’t allowed and that we wouldn’t know because we didn’t speak Hebrew or Arabic. I also figured I’d rather go for the first time with our archaeology professor so he could explain where things were at the time of Jesus rather than simply seeing what it has become 2000 years later. Unfortunately, when the time came for us to go to the Temple, fighting had broken out between Israelis and Palestinians and it wasn’t safe to go there. So, I’ve never been to the top of the Temple Mount. I have been next to it at the site where Jews pray called the Wailing Wall. I remember having a conversation there with a classmate about how disappointing it was that we’d never get to walk on the place the site that was so important to the life of Jesus, the place of his presentation as a child, the place where he turned over money changers tables, as we heard about in the gospel today, and the place where he was tried by the religious leaders before being sent to the Roman authorities for crucifixion. My classmate, however, had a different view. He looked at it all and said he’s just grateful that, as Christians, we don’t have a site like the temple that, if lost, we’d fundamentally lose a component of our faith.
For the Jewish people, the Temple is the site of encounter with God. When Solomon built it, it contained the Ark of the Covenant and became the place where the Jews would sacrifice to God. It got repeatedly plundered and rebuilt until 68 AD when the Romans removed all the Jews from Jerusalem and the sacrifices stopped. Someone pointed out to me that Jerusalem is not built on a river. Until fairly recently, most important cities were built on a river. Chicago, Boston, Rome, and even Dublin are all built along rivers. A river is useful for hydrating your people and for transportation of goods and people. Jerusalem is an exception. Its main source of water is a spring that they dammed up to create the Pool of Siloam but they don’t have a river connected to the city. In the first reading, Ezekiel is saying that the Temple is like a river for the people of Jerusalem. The waters flow from the temple to the Jordan river and, eventually, to the Dead Sea, which it makes fresh. It’s the Temple itself that is their river but also more than a river because of its cleansing properties. That’s how important it was for the Jewish people.
That’s, also, what makes Jesus’ actions so controversial in the gospel for today. The Gospel of John is different than Matthew, Mark, and Luke in its presentation of the temple. He is concerned that the Temple is becoming a marketplace but he doesn’t talk about how they should make it a place of prayer. Instead, he connects the temple to his death and resurrection. The Temple has been under construction for 46 years. Jesus says that he could destroy the temple and raise it up in three days. So, he is the new temple, the new place where God dwells among people.
The fact that we use these readings on the Solemnity of St. John Lateran is significant because you would think it would be one of several churches, mostly in Rome, that would be our Temple. How could Christianity survive without St. John Lateran, the Pope’s Cathedral? Or St. Peter’s Basilica, the church built over the bones of Peter? Or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem? The answer is that it would go on. We would mourn the loss of the building but it would not impede us from the mission Jesus gave us, to spread the gospel to all the world. Our mission is more important than any building that has been built and the buildings have to be at the service of the gospel not places for social interaction. They need to be places of prayer that empower us to spread the gospel.
How are you inspired by this temple to live out the gospel mandate of the man who is our temple, Jesus Christ?
