Feast of the Dedication of the Church of Saint John Lateran at Rome

Today we honor the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome, our Holy Father, Pope Benedict. It was in the year 324 that Emperor Constantine erected this great basilica in honor of the Savior. And its baptistery was later dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. The Lateran basilica reminds us of our history as Church. It is filled with treasured relics. Its high altar is built over an ancient wooden table said to be the one on which Saint Peter celebrated the Lord’s Supper with the first Christian community of Rome. But we are not simply remembering some faraway church that most of us have never visited. No, we celebrate a greater reality- the unity and universality of our faith- the reality that we are Church with Christ Jesus as our cornerstone. Though sinful we are even now being made into a dwelling place for God in the Spirit.

The Liturgy of the Word this morning provides a dazzling blast of images. And we are being invited to enter the world of symbol, where we must suspend a demand for clear-cut clarity and allow ourselves to be taken under the spell of the Word’s symbolic language, a world where meanings expand and explode all at once. And if perhaps the question of today’s Liturgy is: “What is the Church?” We are invited this morning to open our hearts to the fullness of the mystery revealed to us in symbolic texts that gather meanings- words are used, but the experiences, the realities are really beyond words. 

Such is the nature of symbol. How to describe a kiss, the embrace of one we love, a meal shared, a small kind word or a smile that can erase a hurt, the vision of a sunrise through morning mists, or the experience of sitting quietly beside someone as they lay dying? How to describe the nearness of God in Christ through the Spirit? How to describe what we experience as real but really indescribable? And if ever you have loved, or fallen in love, and known your friend, the one you love, as refuge, safe haven; their beauty, their body, their kindness and presence as home and even sanctuary, then perhaps you get an inkling of what Jesus is saying this morning when he refers to his body as temple.

In the Gospel of John, we always stand contemplatively before the figure of Jesus. And in this morning’s passage, we notice him as he calls the Jewish leaders to acknowledge the true meaning of the temple: it is the meeting place of God and the people, not a place for business, but his Father’s own house. No wonder he is so driven to clear out what does not belong there. “What right have you to do this?” the authorities ask him. Jesus’ right is the “right of Truth to name flagrant infidelity and to demand righteousness,” to demand more. They refuse to see the true mystery of the temple in all its gracious demands; they refuse to see the mystery now present in the person of Jesus.

“Destroy this temple,” he says, “and in three days I will raise it up.” And then we hear this most beautiful phrase whispered to us by the evangelist, “He was speaking of the temple of His Body.” The temple of his body. Jesus declares himself now and forever the meeting place between God and his people. The narrator explains that the Temple that will be destroyed and raised up is not the temple of stone but the temple of Jesus’ body. Jesus is the gift that replaces the former gift.

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” Jesus says referring to his Hour, the Hour of his passion, death, and resurrection. For it is in that Hour that he will become most truly temple. For it is most of all in that Hour of great sorrow and emptying, that he will truly become the place where we can encounter the most tender, self-emptying love of the Father for all creation. For in that Hour Jesus’ body will be broken open, destroyed by the horror of his passion and so become the life-giving temple of Ezekiel’s vision, the temple from which living, life-giving waters flow. Jesus’ crucified flesh is the temple overflowing with the Father’s love. Life-giving power gushes out of the sanctuary of his pierced heart and recreates paradise with its waters. Here and now, Jesus reveals himself as the place where the Father’s love abides and flows out. Jesus wounded and risen is the most perfect symbol, the perfect embodiment of the Father’s restless desire for us.

If we add to this St. Paul’s theology, then things really begin to percolate. Paul sees all of us together as Christ’s body, God’s temple, built upon the foundation that is Christ and made into a holy dwelling place for God in the Spirit. Like Jesus, we are God’s building, God’s temple. He and we are this pierced temple, a life-giving uncontainable flood gushing from his wounds and from our brokenness as well.

And so, images of body, temple, and Church become somehow interchangeable, and mystery unfolds. Jesus’ body is the temple that overflows with healing grace; we are Jesus’ body, the Church. Jesus is the body that we are in our brokenness. For Jesus, Son of the eternal Father, Son of Mary, makes his own “the least movements and deepest wounds of our humanity and even now fill(s) them with the life of his Father.” Our hope is built upon the fragile cornerstone of God’s body, Christ’s wounded and risen body. The transcendent beauty of the wounded resurrected Jesus is what the Church reveals. He is our broken wounded Self, forever risen and pierced. For he is the temple whose walls and doorways leak profusely, a great river that draws us to the Father, to one another, and makes us more and more like him. It is he who leads us beyond ourselves, to cross and tomb and resurrected life and makes us Church.

And we like him become living symbol, sacrament of encounter with the Most High God. The tabernacles of our wounded hearts overflow. When we feel safe enough to be wounded together, dare to become transparent, then we like Ezekiel’s temple, like Jesus' body become most truly a great meeting place, a place of encounter with the living God who has poured himself out for all. Then it is that we meet God in the sacred, broken, leaky temple that is Christ’s body, the Body that the Church is, the Body that we are together. Healed of divisions, revealing our wounds to one another as places healed by the blood of Christ, we become temples of encounter. Then it is that we are truly Church.

Like those who fall in love, we are meant to become more and more like the beloved, Jesus our Lord, he who is our priest, our altar and our sacrificial lamb, our gift of finest wheat. Here at this table God’s restless desire for us and our restless desire for God meet and merge. For here at this table, we become who we are most of all. Here we become what we eat- Temple, Church, true Body of Christ, wounded, risen, present. Real but really indescribable.

Reflection by one of the monks with insights from Schneiders: Written That You May Believe and Corbon: The Wellspring of Worship.