2024 Short Lent Talk: “He was speaking about the Temple that was His Body”

“He was speaking about the Temple that was His Body”

(c.f. Gospel for 3rd Sunday of Lent, B – John 2:13-25)

The Temple:

Last month, Canterbury Cathedral held a ‘silent disco’. In the Church of Saints Augustine and Thomas Beckett, they invited young people to put on headphones, and party, in the hope that would engage them in Christianity. Honestly, it seems a desperate attempt to win over a disengaged group. This is, perhaps, an issue with Cathedrals today, they have become museums and tourist attractions, rather than ‘houses of prayer’.

Our Sunday Gospel speaks of the treatment and lack of respect for the Temple. At the end of Seminary formation, we went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, through Bethlehem, Galilee, and in Jerusalem, we had a moment of reflection and respect at the Wall of the Temple, all that remains of what the Jewish people believe once held the presence of God’s glory on earth.

The Dominican Aiden Nichols explains that the Jewish people contemplated God through the lens of His Temple Presence in Jerusalem. Those needing any form of spiritual uplift would make a pilgrimage to the Hill of Zion, and the psalms speak of it as the place to which the nations would look to and be gathered into.

The Temple was the place where God has established his glory, but this was not the Temple built by Solomon, but a second one reconstructed after the peoples’ return form Exile in Babylon, no longer containing the Ark of the Covenant, now lost to the people. However, the Second Temple remained a privileged place of encounter with God, and yet, it was not being respected.

Jesus, himself, showed a deep respect for the Temple, for it was in this place that Mary and Joseph presented Him forty days after his birth, and at the age of 12, he decided to remain behind, so He could be about his Father’s business.

Each year he would have visited the Temple for the Feast of the Passover, and he would have paid the Temple Tax to enter, and the gospels speak of his public ministry patterned around his pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the great Feasts.

Jesus cleanses the Temple because the money changers were tainting that glory by narrowing true worship only to those who had purchased their sacrifice using the Shekel. Whereas Jesus wants the Temple to be a ‘house of prayer’ for all, with true worship purchased by the sacrifice of his body and blood.

Later, Jesus predicts that the Temple would fall, and in AD70 it is raised to the ground during the first Jewish-Roman War.

His Physical Body:

The Gospel is clear, it is Christ’s body that is the true sanctuary of God’s presence on earth. As Christians, while we understand the necessity of a building for worship, ‘The Church’ is not a building, it is made of ‘living stones’, the ‘Ecclesia’ being the gathered assembly of God’s people.

As Jesus’ body is ‘The Sanctuary’, the Altar (during Mass) is our primary symbol of Christ in a church. It should not be obscured by flowers, chairs, Christmas cribs or Easter Gardens. These are good things, but they should be off to one side. Yes, they are blocking a side altar, but this begs a question of whether there should be more than one altar in a Church, but that’s another talk entirely!  

God has assumed a human body to give us a tangible means to receive him and respond to him. In ‘building the Church’ as His Body, God provides us with an accessible place to access his glory. By setting Himself free, by the Holy Spirit, it is a sign of how the gospel is to be communicated to the world world.

It is not that He could not do this before, but we were not ready receive such a revelation of his presence. Of all the regions, Christianity is marked out by the ‘Incarnation’, that God chose to dwell on earth as a human person, in a physical body. He is ‘fully man and fully God’ and because his conception is of the Holy Spirit he is without sin, showing us that sin is not an authentically human.  

There have been many heresies about Jesus, such as ‘Docestism’ that taught Jesus only appeared to have a physical body, or ‘Apollinariansim’ saying that Jesus had a divine mind, not a human one or ‘Monophysitsim’ saying Jesus was a hybrid, neither fully human or fully divine.

All these devalue or nullify the redemption won by Jesus on the cross. As sin is an infinite offense against God, humanity is incapable of dealing with it. Justice, however, demands humanity atones for its crime. To explore this in more detail, we can consider the theology of Anselm; in brief, Jesus had to be fully human and fully divine to deal with humanity’s sinfulness, bringing us to the Mass, the representation of the cross: ‘this is my body which is given up for you’.

The one sacrifice of Calvary brought about the ‘atonement’, the ‘at-one-ment’ with ‘God the Father of mercies, [who] through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit amongst us for the forgiveness of sins. Through the ministry of the Church may God grant you pardon and peace…’ and in Confession, we hear Christ say:

‘…I absolve you of your sins…’

In the Old Temple, on the ‘Day of Atonement’, the High Priest entered the sanctuary, the ‘holy of holies’, performing atonement rituals for the people’s sins, but these had to be repeated each year. By his death, Jesus, the true High Priest has entered the heavenly sanctuary. His Last words on the cross are ‘it is finished’, but what is finished? The atonement, our reconciliation with God.

His body, blood, soul, and divinity:

John 6 is essential in understand the significance of Jesus’ body. At the Annunciation and Christmas, we celebrate that ‘the Word became flesh and dealt amongst us’. The second person of the Blessed Trinity, who is consubstantial with the Father brings the substance of God into our humanity.

Just as God, pitched his tent amongst his people wandering in the desert, now God in Christ ‘tabernacles’ himself amongst the ‘living stones’ of the Church, feeding, and nourishing his people ‘in Word and Sacrament to strengthen us and make us holy’. John 6 dismisses any symbolic interpretation:

‘I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me will never thirst’.

Some people could not accept this, because they could only see Jesus as the ‘carpenter’s son’. Despite the ‘signs’ (miracles) they cannot see past his weak human body. Sadly, they stopped following him from this point. Sensing their hesitation, Our Lord turns to his disciples, ‘do you want to go away too?’ Peter, speaks up, ‘to whom shall we go, you have the message of eternal life’.

In instituting the Holy Eucharist, Jesus Christ takes the bread of the Passover and elevated its meaning. He is the ‘bread which has come down from heaven’, and his blood, poured out from his body on the cross, is how the new and eternal covenant is initiated for his people, of which the Eucharist is its fitting memorial:

As St Paul says to the Corinthians, ‘The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?’ Surely, participation is not passive, but a profound sharing in the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, in fact an initiate sharing in his body.

“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man

and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven’.

The Eucharist is a sublime gift, feeding the divine life given in Baptism. “Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof (of my body), but only say the word and my soul shall be healed”. Each time we receive Holy Communion we know we are receiving Jesus, ‘body, blood, soul, and divinity’, and so, we should be properly prepared and disposed, to make the encounter fruitful.

We appreciate this communion is temporary as we await the summons to join Him in heaven and participate in the banquet of the Lamb of God, of which the Mass is a foretaste, all the incentive needed to fulfil each Sunday, the Dominical command: ‘Do this in memory of me.’

Jesus abides with us even as we leave the Church, but and this is a big but, only if we have received Holy Communion in a ‘state of grace’, our souls free from mortal sin, those actions that explicitly or implicitly infringe the Ten Commandments, which remains at the heart of the moral code of God’s people.

Just as this time of year is a good time to have a ‘spring clean’, we should also have a deep dive into our souls, ‘examining our conscience’ to see where we have fallen short of the glory of God and resisted grace from entering our hearts.

Christ is the Head of the Body the Church:

St Paul, writing to the Corinthians, uses the metaphor of the body to speak of the Church, saying each part of the body, the eyes, ears, nose, hands, feet etc have a particular function, contributing to the life of the body. As the scripture scholar Tom Wright says, we can extend this metaphor to mean all members of the body of Christ have gifts that they must use for the common good of the mission and that we should not look down on another member, who at face value, has a minor role, but only when we are looking through earthly eyes.

In discussing our Vision, the parish ‘core team’ reflected on the story of the moon landings, and particularly, when a janitor was asked about his role, he said he was there ‘to put a man on the moon’, that the cleanliness of the NASA site was an integral part of the mission; he had completely bought into the vision. In the same way, a person who stacks the chairs and washes the floors is an integral part of the Church’s commission to ‘make disciples of all the nations.’

Without the Sacred Liturgy, however, the Church is reduced to a charity. We must not forget a person is a unity of body and soul, and it is via our senses (sight, taste touch and smell) that we experience the world around us. This is true of the liturgy, that ‘work’ of God’s people that defines the Church. As Pius XII said, the language of the liturgy is ‘signs perceptible to the senses.

Scott Hahn says on his book on ‘Signs’ that the Mass is often described in terms of ‘smells and bells’. The Liturgy, then, should be beautiful to give us a ‘sense’ of heaven, present on earth in the celebration of the Mass. Bells are wrung to herald Lord’s appearance and incense is offered altar and ambo as a sign of ‘our prayers rising to heaven’ and, perhaps, to obscure our vision, for if we truly saw what was happening we might be overwhelmed if we were to see and stare directing at the Lord’s ‘power, glory and presence’ that is moving in this place.

The Mass is our ‘source and summit’. Thus, we must not pigeon-hole our faith to an hour a week. It is our source into an hour a week. The Mass is the ‘source’ because it provides the impetus: ‘Go, you are sent to announce the gospel’ and it is our ‘summit’ because we bring the fruit of our apostolic labours back to it in thanksgiving and praise. Mass starts with a confession, through our fault, through our fault, through our most grievous fault’ where we have not done this.

St Paul says, ‘never let one part of the body say to the other I do not need you’. As ever, the Church needs all the baptised to step up and play their part in the mission and maintenance of the Church. We must, though, discern our role, and amongst the quality of each member, there remains a diversity of function. We must never, as Our Lord warns his disciples, ‘Lord it over’ one another.

At Baptism, we became a ‘Temple of the Holy Spirit’. As St Irenaeus says, ‘where the Spirit is, there is the Church and every grace’. St Paul also teaches us about the various charism needed to preach the gospel.

Providing we are humble, there is a role for everyone, from those who love their neighbour practically or spiritually, through an increase of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, prophecy, discernment, and the various tongues as a manner of spreading the revelation of gospel. The graces given by the Holy Spirit are for the benefit of the Church; they are not to be presumed upon but discerned by the Church’s shepherds to ensure they are used for the common good.

If one person of the body suffers, we all suffer. Hence, the ‘corporal works of mercy’ are an integral part of the community’s mission. Here is also an opportunity for our ecumenical spirit, for we can work together in service of endeavours like the Food Bank or the Homeless Unity Group, here in Bexhill.

There is, of course, only one Church, and we must be ‘one body, one spirit in Christ’ and while doctrinally we cannot speak of ‘Churches’, we can acknowledge that elements of our mission can be found in other ‘ecclesial style communities’ who can put us to shame in the work of evangelisation and charity.

The Glorified Body:

Our redemption is not completed until we get our bodies back. While we are still in Lent, we must have an eye on Easter. As heard last Sunday, the ‘Transfiguration’ gave the disciples a glimpse of Jesus’ glorified body to prepare them for the scandal of the cross, the acceptance of which leads to the garden of the resurrection, our new creation in Christ, and our ultimate reality of personhood. Our first ‘transfiguration’ was baptism, when the old creation was washed away, and we became this new creation in Christ. Now, we await our final transfiguration, a complete renewal of our body in the resurrection.

Our identity is to be a citizen of the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ when God will live with his people. Being after the Resurrection, this is when there is no more sin or death, where our creation in God’s image is fully realised as we ‘see God face to face and will be like him for all the ages’.

As the ‘bride of Christ’ there is a mystical union of with Christ, the head. The betrothal was the Cross; now, the bridegroom has gone to his ‘Father’s house’, to prepare a room for his bride. Like ‘wise virgins’ waiting for His return; we keep vigil with our ‘lamps of faith’. When the bridegroom arrives, we are taken into house, where there is the great banquet of heaven (c.f. Cana a sign of this).  

Mary and the Body of Christ: A final word about Our Lady who had the first and most intimate experience of the Body of Christ, carrying Jesus in her womb. At the prompting of the angel, she carries out the first ‘Corpus Christi’ procession in the ‘Visitation’. As Mary and Elizabeth meet, they have a natural encounter, Jesus and his forerunner have a supernatural encounter, John ‘leaping for joy’ at the presence Christ. As the Diocese implements a Pastoral Plan, we must take Jesus into the community, inviting them to come and encounter the body of Christ, his Church.