In the Gospel of John we always stand contemplatively before the figure of Jesus. We have seen him enter the Jerusalem the holy city riding on a donkey’s foal to begin his reign as humble king. And this morning we watch as he comes into the Temple. And when he discovers the confusion of buying and selling in this sacred place, he is outraged. “Take these out of here,” he says. “Stop making my Father’s house into a market.” These words and actions recall the prophecy of Zechariah who foretold what would happen when the Lord entered the holy city of Jerusalem: “On that day…there shall no longer be a trader in the house of the Lord.” And amidst the chaos of upturned tables, coins scattered and lambs and oxen scrambling, his disciples recall the words of Scripture, “Zeal for your house is eating me up.”
“What right has he to do such a thing?” As king Jesus has “ultimate authority over the Temple,” and as such he is its “reformer and rebuilder.” His right is the “right of Truth to name flagrant infidelity and to demand righteousness.” “Destroy this temple,” he says. “And in three days I will raise it up.” We can imagine the indignation that this interruption of the temple business and its cult along with his talk of destruction engendered. Small wonder that the scene in today’s Gospel is viewed by most scholars as the act which precipitates the decision of the authorities to kill him. But Jesus does not “condemn the temple cult; he intervenes because he truly understands and loves it” and demands more for God. His action is directed against everything that does not correspond to the holiness of this Temple.
Jesus predicts the destruction which will befall the Temple and the institution within a generation as God’s judgment on religious leaders who have corrupted Israel’s sacred traditions. They have made the Temple a political symbol of resistance to Rome, believing that scrupulously preserving cult and tradition will safeguard their identity vis-à-vis their Roman oppressors. And so the sacred place where the Most High comes to meet his people has been profaned.
Religious leaders have lost sight of the mystery of the temple in all its gracious demands; and worst of all they have refused to acknowledge the living presence of this mystery in the person of Jesus - this is tragic blindness to the nearness of all Israel had longed for. Jesus embodies the love, grace and mercy of the God of Israel, at a time when these ideas have become particularly unpopular among the Jews. He proclaims the coming reign of God, a place he calls the kingdom, a place where no one gets excluded. They are threatened by his brand of compassion. Make no mistake, they are right to be concerned, Jesus is dangerous. The breadth of God’s compassion has been breaking through in all his signs and healings. He brings good news to the poor, sets free those oppressed and heavily burdened, and he is teaching the people how to hope again. Indeed it is in the person of Christ Jesus that the new Temple is being rebuilt, a Temple “gleaming with holiness, the Temple promised and longed for by the prophets.”
Finally 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. It is in the Hour of his passion that Jesus will become most truly Temple. For it is most of all in that hour of great anguish and self-emptying love that he will truly become the place where we can encounter the most tender, self-emptying love of the Father for all creation. There on the cross Jesus’ body broken open, destroyed by the horror of his passion will become the leaky life-giving temple of Ezekiel’s vision, the temple from which living, life-giving waters flow out. Jesus’ crucified flesh is the Temple; all our grace, our hope, our life gush out of the sanctuary of his most sacred, pierced heart to recreate paradise in our midst.
The Temple that will be destroyed and raised up is not the temple of stone but the temple of Jesus’ own body. Jesus is the new gift of God that replaces the former. Jesus is himself now and forever the meeting place between God and his people. “With Jesus’s Passover – with His body destroyed and restored to life – the new cult, the cult of love will begin in a new Temple – Jesus himself. Jesus’ resurrection is the key that will allow the disciples to finally understand.”
My brothers and sisters, the Temple is no longer a place but a relationship with Christ Jesus our Lord. Jesus makes his own “the least movements and deepest wounds of our humanity and even now fill(s) them with the life of his Father.” He makes us his growing living body, and so we participate in his life-giving power. It is he who leads us beyond ourselves, to cross and tomb and resurrected life and makes us Temple – a living, life-giving sacrament that we are becoming together when we dare to forgive over and over and allow our hearts to be stretched open in compassion.
As we gaze contemplatively on the person of Jesus, we see who are meant to be and who we are becoming, his wounded body. And like those who fall in love, we become more and more like the beloved. And it is here at this table most of all that we become who we are; we become what we eat- Temple, Church, true Body of Christ, wounded, risen, present.
