9th November, The Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

For the reflections for the rest of the week please go to archives "Reflections for 32nd week in Ordinary Time". 

I am the Resurrection and the Life.

Those who believe in me will live,

even though they die.

Those who live and believe in me

will never die.

Do you believe this?

9th November 

The Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

Ezekiel 47:1-2, 8-9, 12. Psalm 84:-5,10,11. 1Cor.3:9-13 16-17.

Wherever the water goes it brings health and life teems wherever the river flows.

My soul is longing and yearning, is yearning for the courts of the Lord.

Didn’t you realise that you are God’s Temple and that God’s Spirit was living among you.

He was speaking of the sanctuary that was his body.

  John 2:13-22 

¹³ When the time of the Jewish Passover was near Jesus went up to Jerusalem, ¹⁴ and in the Temple he found people selling cattle and sheep and doves, and the money changers sitting there. ¹⁵ Making a whip out of cord, he drove them all out of the Temple, sheep and cattle as well, scattered the money changers' coins, knocked their tables over ¹⁶ and said to the dove sellers, 'Take all this out of here and stop using my Father's house as a market.' ¹⁷ Then his disciples remembered the words of scripture: I am eaten up with zeal for your house. ¹⁸ The Jews intervened and said, 'What sign can you show us that you should act like this?' ¹⁹ Jesus answered, 'Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' ²⁰ The Jews replied, 'It has taken forty-six years to build this Temple: are you going to raise it up again in three days?' ²¹ But he was speaking of the Temple that was his body, ²² and when Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and what he had said.

 

The Temple God has built.

                For three hundred years there were no churches. In the Roman Empire Christians met persecution. To proclaim the Apostles’ Creed was to proclaim one’s readiness to die for Christ. However in 313 A.D. under the influence of his mother, Helen, a Christian, the Emperor Constantine declared the Christian religion legal. Christianity became the official religion of the Empire. The Emperor donated his palace to Pope Sylvester I so that half could be for a church and half for his apartments. This became the first church in history.  To this day the church which has been destroyed several times by fire and rebuilt is the church of the Pope, the Bishop of Rome. We celebrate the dedication of this church throughout the Church as a sign of our unity with the Pope, the successor of St. Peter and vicar of Jesus Christ. By celebrating the dedication of the pope’s church we celebrate Christ as head of his Church, his Body throughout the world, united with the person of its visible head, the Pope.

            The community needs a building to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and for its other needs, but as we hear in the Gospel today, Jesus’ own Body has taken the place of the Temple in Jerusalem and by our faith  and Baptism we become members of his Body. St. Paul reminds us that God now lives in the community of believers. It is the community which is the house of God. Do you not realise that God lives among you? As written in the Book of Revelation when God will live openly among his children, “here is the dwelling of God among mortals” (Rev 21:3), so now, but in the silence and darkness of faith, God lives among his people. God has ‘pitched his tent among us’ and is God-with-us. Every Assembly of the faithful is a sacred assembly for God lives with them.

            Each person is a living cell of the Body of Christ and so St. Paul tells us, “do you not know, that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1Cor 6:19).

            Do we realise the significance of these truths? It is in the community that we encounter God and particularly in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. We should make our liturgical gatherings and other gatherings of the faithful an experience of God’s presence. Jesus told the Samaritan woman that we needn’t worship in Samaria or Jerusalem but in spirit and in truth. To experience God we must learn to meet him in the inner sanctuary of our own heart.

Do you enter into the sanctuary of the temple of your heart, to meet God? You will need to leave the market place and enter into inner silence.

Father, may we be transformed by experiencing you living among us.