We are God's temple

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome.  Constantine built it in the fourth century and the Church has been celebrating this on November the 9th at least since the twelfth century.  This is a day to remember our unity with the Chair of Peter and the mother church.

A temple is supposed to be a sanctuary, a holy place.  From that temple should flow love, joy, peace, healing, and holiness.  Ezekiel “saw” such a temple (Ezekiel 47:1-12).  Water flowed out of it.  That water made salt water fresh and caused living things to multiply.  Trees along the river produced abundant fruit and their leaves were used for healing.  This image of God’s temple reminds me a lot of Abraham and Joseph (Genesis).  When Abraham lived by faith, everything he touched turned to gold.  People were blessed simply because Abraham and his family lived in the neighborhood.  Joseph was a teenager locked up in prison for no good reason.  Yet, from that prison, the water flowed until the whole earth was blessed through him.  The Psalms tells us how this can be (Psalm 46).  The temple is the city of God, the holy dwelling of the Most High.  The waters that flow out of the temple to enliven the earth first gladden the city of God.  St. Bernard said it well: “You cannot be a channel if you are not first a reservoir.”  If God’s temple, be it Abraham, Joseph, or us, has a deep reservoir of faith, then that water will flow out and fulfill the promise to Abraham that all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him.  We don’t produce the water; we’re “instruments of his peace.”

Saint Paul takes this image even further (1 Corinthians 3:9-17).  He says that we as a people are God’s temple.  To be His temple we need to stand on the firm foundation, the only foundation of this temple, Jesus Christ.  When we serve the Church as builders by sharing our faith and bringing others into God’s temple, we need to be sure that we’re bringing them into the temple that has Jesus as its foundation, and not a building of our own choosing.  In fact, Paul gets fairly blunt about it.  This temple is holy because the Holy Spirit dwells here.  So, if we do anything to destroy that temple, God will destroy us.

John’s Gospel shows us how serious this is (John 2: 13-22).  Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the temple.  They had turned a house of prayer, God’s temple, into a marketplace.  Did Jesus have the right to make this judgment and get angry like He did?  

The key is to understand what sort of “anger” Jesus had.  Normally when we speak of anger, we mean a passion that’s out of control and, in fact, controls us.  It’s the loss of control and is a sin.  But this isn’t the anger Jesus had.

Obviously, Jesus was perfect in every way, so we have to be extremely careful not to equate His anger with our normal experience of anger.  Yes, it was a passion for Him, but it was different from what we normally experience.  His anger was an anger that resulted from His perfect love.

In Jesus’ case, it was love for the sinner and His desire for their repentance that drove His passion.  His anger was directed at the sin they were engrossed in and He willfully and intentionally attacked the evil He saw.  This certainly must have been shocking to those who witnessed it, but it was, in that situation, the most effective way for Him to call them to repentance. 

At times we’ll find that we also must be angered by sin.  It’s way too easy for us to use this example of Jesus to justify losing control of ourselves and entering into the sin of anger.  Righteous anger, as Jesus manifested, will always leave one with a sense of peace and love for those who are rebuked.  There will also be an immediate willingness to forgive when true contrition is perceived.

The leaders of Jesus’ day destroyed God’s temple by nailing it to a cross.  On the third day, that temple was raised up.  From the altar of His body the life-giving water and blood flows for the healing of the nations.  Today we celebrate a basilica in Rome.  It’s a good day to look in the mirror and celebrate “that” basilica, too.  And be holy.