Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome

 Lectionary: 671

The Jews said,
“This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and you will raise it up in three days?”
But he was speaking about the temple of his Body. Therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they came to believe the Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.

 

Everything about our religion depends upon the physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead; and upon the testimony of those who saw, touched, embraced, walked and ate with him. 

In today’s passage Saint John tells us that the disciples, “…when he was raised from the dead, remembered that he had…” made his outlandish remark about restoring the temple in three days. If they thought about it at all, they probably stored it among his many imponderable remarks and forgot about it – until it suddenly made sense.

Or perhaps it disappeared altogether until the catastrophe of 70 AD when Jerusalem was attacked and the temple razed. That edifice was enormously important to the Jewish religion. Ever since Solomon commissioned its building a thousand years before Christ, the Hebrew prophets had insisted that it was the only place to offer sacrifice. If Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses had built altars in other places at one time, those days were gone. The Jews could gather and pray in their homes and synagogues, but the holocausts belonged exclusively to the temple and its priests.

Judaism has never revived the sacrifice since that time, nor has the temple been rebuilt. But Christians, following the new way of Christ, had moved on by 70 AD. The tragedy went unrecorded in the New Testament, except for some cryptic remarks of Jesus.

Benedict XVI, in his book about Jesus written while he was pope, remarks about that mysterious oversight among Christians. No sooner had they believed and been baptized, than Jewish converts turned their devotion away from Jerusalem and its shrine and to the Lord. He is the temple, the altar, and the lamb of sacrifice. That revolutionary image shines brilliantly in the gospels as the Baptist points to Jesus and shouts, "Behold the Lamb of God." Jesus is the New Priest in the line of Melchizedek in the Letter to the Hebrews, and the Lamb in the Book of Revelation. His disciples saw that so clearly in the Breaking of Bread they completely forgot about the destroyed temple. 

After the Acts of the Apostles, there are no more direct references to the temple of Jerusalem, The word is used as a metaphor for the Christian's body, ("You are the temple of the Lord."), in reference to pagan temples, in reference to the Heavenly Temple which was the pattern of the old one, and finally: 

"I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb."

During those earliest decades after Pentecost, the Church neither missed the old building nor longed for a new one. Eventually -- operating in spite of the Empire and later with it -- she would build cathedrals and basilicas where she might give fitting honor, glory, and praise to God.  The new model would be the cross of Christ, a cruciform of nave, chancel, and apse, with the transepts as its wings. Entering that holy place we stand within the cross of Christ. (Unfortunately, for my purposes, Saint John Lateran is not built in that pattern. In any case...) 

On this feast of "the pope's chapel" and one of Christendom's oldest basilicas, we thank God for the Lord who gathers us into his body the Church, that body which was destroyed and buried and rose again resplendent and divine. We celebrate our place within his love for the Father and his passion for us. We thank God for these holy places we have built, where we can withdraw from the cacophony of daily life and rest in the Sacred Presence of the Spirit.