Temple is Living

In the text today from the Gospel of John in the Roman Catholic Lectionary Jesus challenges the crowd, who are angry that he has cleared from the grounds of the Temple those who had turned it into a market place, that if they destroy this Temple, He will build it up in three days. The Evangelist tells us He was speaking of the temple of his body (John 2:21). This description of Jesus as the Temple is one of the aspects of prayer which Friar Jude Winkler identifies as prayer in communion with Jesus. Paul tells the Corinthians that we are God’s Temple; we present to the world an opportunity to encounter God through our witness to the Spirit living within us. The congregation of the people of God is fashioned by our Love in Christ into a visible Temple of believers who rest on the foundation of Christ. Our life as the Body of Christ is to be the healing and restoring water of life which the Prophet Ezekiel predicts the Babylonian exiles will experience as they return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple. In structures which are built of the sweat of the believer and the materials of nature shaped into a sacred space we can pause in the silence which tells us of God.