Today the Church gives us the opportunity to express our debt of gratitude and appreciation for this wonderful Abbey Church which we have received from our brothers, a beautiful place in which we may gather each day for worship, for the Eucharist, for the hours, and to which we may come at any other time to spend time before the Lord.
We express our gratitude for our brothers who labored to gather the field stones for these walls and then put them in place and participated in many of the other tasks in the construction of this building, for our brothers who put to their heart and souls into the design of the building and selected with great care and devotion the materials to be used. We express our gratitude to our neighbors, local professionals and benefactors without whose help this church would never have come to be what it is. In this Church we find a wonderful combination of strength and density, in the stone, the arches, the altar, the relation of the various elements, their proportion and symmetry; warmth in the dark wood, the church floor, the play of light and color the stained glass, the Salve and rose windows. Each time we enter to pray the materials brought from the Valley in RI remind us of our community’s history; the architectural elements taken from the classic period of Cistercian art and architectural help to form us according to our Cistercian tradition, inserting us into the mindset of one of the great flowerings of contemplative life in the history of the Church. All of these convey a certain experience of God, of the weight of his divine glory, and give him honor. This gift from our brothers was born of their own faith and love, that is, it came forth from their own depths as an expression of the gifts that God had given them through their work and prayer. Through their devotion God was preparing for himself a place for his glory to dwell.
In my preparations I was taken by today’s First Reading in which the prophet Ezekiel has a vision of the glory of the Lord entering the temple. I would like to take a look at that passage this morning. In this account, taken from the last major section of the book, we find ourselves in the midst of a vision which began two chapters before. At the opening of the vision, Ezekiel tells us that It is the 25th year of the Babylonian exile. As is the custom when he introduces a vision, Ezekiel says, “the hand of the Lord was upon me”. In a vision the Lord brought him to the land of Israel and set him down upon a very high mountain, on which was ‘a structure like a city’ to the south. There was a man there “whose appearance was like bronze, with a linen cord and a measuring reed in his hand.” The man instructs Ezekiel to look, hear and set his heart upon all that he is shown because he is to declare all that he sees to the house of Israel.
This ‘structure like a city’ turns out to be a temple. Over the next two chapters, the man with the measuring reed gives Ezekiel a tour of the temple’s architecture, measuring everything along the way, in detail, beginning with the outer wall and entering through the gateway facing east: he measures the outer court, the north gate, the south gate, the inner court, chambers for the priests, the vestibule, the inner temple and so on. It is this mysterious guide who leads Ezekiel to the gate facing east at the opening of today’s reading:
“And there [he] saw the glory of the Lord coming from the east. [He] heard a sound like the roaring of many waters and the earth shone with [the Lord’s] glory. To fully understand this vision it must be seen in relation to his earlier vison of Jerusalem’s former temple at the end of the first half of the book, in which he witnessed the Lord’s glory depart from the temple and from Jerusalem (Eze 8-11).
In that vision, the glory departs from the Jerusalem temple toward the east. In the vision in today’s reading, the glory returns from the east. These two visions, the departure of the Lord’s glory and its return are the two hinges upon which the whole Book of Ezekiel is constructed.
The first half of the book is full of prophecies of judgment by war and captivity that are to befall faithless Israel, but these only depicted the surface; the true and unimaginable disaster for Israel was the departure of the Lord’s glory, of his presence from the midst his people. It is the heart and culmination of what Israel’s faithlessness had brought upon herself.
The return of the glory of the Lord is the heart and culmination of Israel’s redemption. All the promises of prosperity and peace found in the second half of the book are only the surface of this new blessing from the Lord, which is a final blessing: the permanent return of the Lord among his people. The glory of the Lord fills the temple. Ezekiel hears a voice say, “Here I will dwell among the Israelites forever.” Here in the temple’s inner court is the permanent dwelling place for his throne and for the soles of his feet.
Corresponding to the gift of the new temple, the Lord wants the people to respect its holiness by their own holiness, which also is to come from him. In chapter 36 the Lord had said to Israel through Ezekiel that for the sake of his holy name:
…25 I will sprinkle clean water over you to make you clean; from all your impurities and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you… 27 I will put my spirit within you so that you walk in my statutes, observe my ordinances, and keep them…you will be my people, and I will be your God. (Eze 36:24-28 NAB)
What the Lord wants from Ezekiel is to describe the temple to the house of Israel, show them its design and layout, but he gives no command to build it. Rather Israel’s contemplation of the temple is meant to be for them a call to conversion, it is to make them ‘ashamed of their iniquities’, that is, grow in self-knowledge of their distance from God, and embrace the commandments of the Lord. The building will just be there, but it is not said how. Ezekiel’s task is to prepare Israel for the gift. The gift of God of the new temple and of a new heart and spirit cannot be separated, but are intended to be held together.
The fulfillment of this temple, which appeared to Ezekiel as a “structure that was like a city” can never be any earthly temple but belongs to the “new heaven and new earth”. In the final book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, an angel says to John, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb” and, like Ezekiel, he is “carried…away in the Spirit to a great high mountain, and [shown] the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.” (Rev 21:10-11)
In this city there is no temple… “for its temple is the Lord God almighty and the Lamb. 23 The city had no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb. 24 The nations will walk by its light…
As Ezekiel was guided through the temple by a man with a measuring reed, so the one who spoke to John “had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls.” (Rev 21:15)
This measure of the city conforms to the measure of Almighty God and the Lamb. The mission of the Church on earth is to let herself be measured by this divine measure and adjust or tune herself to it. By the divine goodness, this measure has been revealed to us in all its fullness in God’s Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is himself measured by nothing outside himself but measures everything, as the one true and unique measure. He is the measure for all other worldly and human measures. He is the whole in whom the parts find their genuine measure, right proportion, and proper fulfillment. He is the whole because in himself as in no human creature, there is the perfect concordance of existence and mission. In him the two are perfectly ‘in tune’ with one another. Who he is and what he came to do are one. The however, of this perfect agreement between mission and existence is not found in himself, it some ideal he has set for himself but has accepted in obedience from the Father. The source of this unity is not in his own will but that of his Father.
Prayer is thus essential for Jesus, for, although he uniquely is his mission, this mission is not simply given to him once and for all but must be implemented step by step according to the Father’s instructions (in the Holy Spirit). He anticipates nothing, least of all his “hour. His “food” by which he lives, that is, is his Father’s will, comes forth to him ever-new from the Father. If the measure of the heavenly city is to show itself among us, we must be like him, we must put on the mind of Christ and be constant seekers of the divine will. The divine glory has come to dwell among us, here he has found a place for his throne and for the soles of his feet, so let us, as we sang at this morning’s invitatory from Psalm 23 “Open wide the doors and gates. Lift high the ancient portals for the Bridegroom who is Christ the Lord.”
