Beyond the Temple

Today's readings: 1 Kings 8, 22-23. 27-30; 1 Peter 2, 4-9; John 4, 19-24.

Every year on November 9, the Church celebrates the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome, which ranks first among the city's four great patriarchal. After the peace of Constantine and the persecution era, it served as the centre of Christian life in the city, as the popes' residence, and as Cathedral of Rome, a title it still holds. It housed important ecumenical councils in the first centuries of Christianity and in a sense it marked the passage from the underground Church to the splendor of the Roman basilicas.

Today's feast has a twofold meaning for us: one pointing to the temple in the physical sense, as the place where the Christian assembly gathers for worship; the other, given that we are referring specifically to the Roman basilica which represents Peter's authority and primacy, pointing to communion with the universal Church and with the Pope. In our culture, these represent two major challenges: the challenge of belonging to and worshipping in community, and the challenge of communion with and obedience to Peter's successor.

At times we seem to have become allergic to belonging and authority. The culture of individualism dictates that we can be believers without the need to belong. We are made to believe that faith can be lived in the intimacy of our solitude. On the other hand, as the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar has written, an 'anti-Roman attitude' seems to be quite diffused. But present-day experience seems also to be calling us to return to what may provide points of reference in life. This reminds us of the prophet Ezekiel, who, writing in exile, dreamed of returning to his home in Israel and especially to the Temple.

Strictly speaking, God can never be housed. But today's feast is an apt occasion to ask why churches are so important. If God exists everywhere and can really hear our prayers from anywhere, why do we need to assemble in churches? And if, as John's Gospel suggests today, the 'true worshippers' are those who worship in spirit and in truth, then why the need to go to church?

We acknowledge that ultimately, it is not the temple that makes our worship true. When Solomon completed the Temple's construction, he acknowledged God's presence everywhere and, as we read in today's first reading, he prayed: "Not even all of heaven is large enough to hold You, so how can this temple that I have built be large enough"?

We need to discern the deeper meanings that make us feel the need for the temple and at the same time go beyond it. The temple as a building points to the Body of Christ, which is still work in progress in the world and depends on us all being "living stones", as Peter writes today, a people who share a common faith and the sacraments, and who acknowledge the Pope's primacy in love and hence his authority over the universal Church to guarantee its unity.

We are also called to respect our own body, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Paradoxically, while our culture instructs us to take care of our body, at the same time it invents new ways of defiling it. This is why, in spite of the importance and admiration for the building, the prophets in the Old Testament prophesied against the Temple, "Not a single stone will be left on another; everything will be pulled down" (Mark 13, 1-2).

To reach out to the Temple, which provides the space that makes time sacred, we must start from our own body, which hosts the Spirit of the Lord. Things do not happen the other way round.