The Place of Right Praise - Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon

0:00 Peace be with you. Friends, this Sunday we're celebrating with the whole church the dedication of the great cathedral of Rome, the Lateran Basilica. You know, when you go to Rome, you can visit the four major basilicas, St. Peter's, of course, St. Mary Major, St. Paul outside the walls. But you could argue very persuasively the most important of the four is St. John Lateran. Now, why? Well, because it's the sea church of the Bishop of Rome. So the pope lives near St. Peter's, and St. Peter's is the grandest, and then where all the great liturgies and so on are held. But it's not the sea church, meaning the church where the seat or the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome is situated. You can find that in the back, in the apse of St. John Lanteran. So really, if there's any one great temple of the Catholic Church worldwide, it wouldn't be St. Peter's.

0:55 It would be St. John Lateran. That's why the church puts a great stress on this feast day of the dedication of John Lateran. I love it. I've been there many times. We film there for different things. And literally, as the pillars along the nave, you have these grand statues of all the apostles. The church is based upon the apostolic faith. Above the ball of the Kino, over the main altar, They're the heads of Saints Peter and Paul. And as I say, in the back of the church is the cathedra, or the teaching chair of the Pope. And so it is the great temple of Catholicism. And that's why the readings for today are all about the temple. And as you probably know, if you've followed me at all and read things of mine, I love talking about the temple. The temple, you could say, is the master theme of the entire Bible.

1:52 If you're looking for a symbol that kind of runs all the way through the scriptures, something that links together everything from Genesis to Revelation, you could very plausibly say it's the temple. Why? This place of right praise. This place where the people of God meet the Lord and they find union. Israel worshiping the Lord, God meeting his people. So the temple is a charged place. That's why, as I often quote the second chapter of Isaiah, Mount Zion, the true pole of the earth. Mount Zion meant the place where the temple is. There all the tribes go up. It's the magnetic center of the whole world, the temple, the temple. That's why the great authors and the great patriarchs and figures of the Bible are kind of obsessed with the temple.

2:48 They're critical of it in many ways, and they extol it. Now, why are they critical? Because it falls short of what it's supposed to be. Look at all the prophets, major prophets, minor prophets, all of them. They tend to look at the temple with a kind of jaundiced eye. But again, it's not because they hate the temple. It's because they love the temple, and they see it as a place, unfortunately, of corruption, where the worship of false gods has found its way, where the people are not oriented to God but to other gods, and then they fall into disharmony, etc. And so the prophets raise their voices against it. No exception there is the prophet Ezekiel. And our first reading is from Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a prophet, yes, indeed. He was also a temple priest. He knew all about the temple. And that's why he begins with this furious critique of the temple. There's no greater criticism in the Bible of the temple than in Ezekiel, because he tells us that the Shekinah, the glory of the Lord, has up and left the temple.

3:56 I've said, maybe you've heard me before, I've written about it, it's one of the most devastating lines in the whole Bible, that God's glory has up and left his temple, gone east over the Mount of Olives, left the temple. And we never hear in the Old Testament that it ever comes back. However, by the end of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, and now we come to our first reading on this feast of John Lateran, the great temple of the Catholic Church, 47th chapter, Ezekiel has a kind of vision of one day when the Shekinah comes back, one day when the temple is restored, what will happen? Well, the people will be back in the attitude of right praise. But then in this gorgeous image, he sees water flowing out from beneath the threshold of the temple.

4:56 And then as he continues to, as this vision unfolds, He sees the water now flowing from the southern side and now making its way into the countryside and now down to the Dead Sea and then making eventually the salty waters fresh. And then he envisions great trees growing along the side of the stream and the beauty of the trees and even their leaves are being used for medicine. What is this, everybody? but it's an image of the restored temple, which amounts to the restored creation. You see, it's the book of Genesis here being re-envisioned. Genesis, so before the fall, God makes his beautifully constituted universe. It's destroyed, it's interrupted by sin, but when the temple is restored, God's creation will be restored.

5:54 Now, my point is, in Ezekiel, You see the prophetic disdain for the temple, and you see, in the richest way, the prophetic love for the temple. Both are on display. Okay, with Ezekiel haunting your mind, now turn to the gospel, which is from 2nd chapter of St. John. St. John, like all the biblical authors, is obsessed practically with the temple. What do we hear? Jesus goes up to the temple and he's horrified by what he sees. He's shocked by what he sees. It's all the merchants and the money changers and it's the corruption of the temple. It's meant to be a house of prayer, but you made it into this den of thieves. So Jesus, like all the prophets,

6:50 calls down judgment upon the temple In fact, he acts out the judgment upon the temple, overturning the tables and making the whip of cords, and he moves furiously through the temple, purifying it. There's all the prophetic disgust with the corruption of the temple now on display. But then what he says, it says, The Jews answered and said to him, What sign can you show us to justify your doing all this? Jesus says, destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up. There's the whole prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. Destroy this temple. I mean, this temple's under judgment. But in three days, I will raise it up. I will build a new temple.

7:44 As Ezekiel envisioned, Jesus announces, I will build a new temple. Well, three days, what are you talking about? They said it's taking 47 years to build this. This was Herod's renovation of the temple. Three days. Well, John reminds us. He was speaking of the temple of his body. Okay, now, now, just a few. In John's account, Jesus does this very early in his ministry, but when he comes to the cross on Golgotha and Calvary, on top of Mount Zion, in view of the temple, Jesus makes this great sacrificial offering. Uh-huh, the cross is expressing fully what the temple was meant to be. And then the dead Christ is approached by a Roman soldier with a spear, and he pierces his side, and out comes blood and water.

8:42 No one who knew the Bible is going to miss the symbolic power of that. In the water flowing from the side of Christ, we see fulfilled Ezekiel's prophecy that from the side of the renewed temple, water will flow forth for the renewal of the world. Ah, there it is. Jesus' body is now the true temple. It's not so much the building in Jerusalem that matters. In a way, Jesus' judgment anticipates its destruction in the year 70 AD when the Romans raised it to the ground. You know, the wailing wall today that I visited there and found it deeply moving is the retaining wall of that temple. That's all that's left of it.

9:36 But see, we say it's not that building in Jerusalem that matters so much. Rather, it's the body of the crucified and risen Lord, which is now, listen, the place of right praise. That's why every Mass, every Mass, the Eucharist, the source and summit of the Christian life is a representation of the sacrifice of Jesus. We eat his body and drink his blood. And from the side of the sacrificed Christ comes indeed the water that renews all of creation. I say, everybody, that's what the temple means for us.

10:20 And every church building is meant to be evocative of this great truth. You know, when I was coming of age, we kind of under-stressed church buildings. We put a huge stress on the community is the church. Fair enough. Sure it is. Of course it is. But the trouble is we kind of underplayed the importance of these temples in which we worship. Because the church building itself is meant to be a symbolic evocation of the body of Christ. In it, we're supposed to see the renewed temple. How wonderful, everybody. Look, when we finish Mass,

11:11 and so we've listened to the word of Christ in the liturgy of the word, we've seen the representation of the sacrifice of Christ, we've eaten his body and we've drunk his blood, and then we're sent forth. In a way, like the water flowing from the side of Christ, we flow out of that church building meant to become great Catholics in the world, Christifying whatever it is that we touch. We're journalists, we're writers, we're teachers, we're politicians, we're financiers, we're investors, whatever it is, whatever it is. We're meant to be now the water that flows forth from the sight of Christ for the renewal of the world. And that's why, if I can glance at reading number two, Paul says, Brothers and sisters, you are God's building.

12:16 Don't you know that you're the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? Okay. We come forth as members of the mystical body of Christ. We come forth from the church, the temple, meant to be symbolic of him, so as to transfigure the world. I think, friends, the Church wants us to think about all of this. As we look intently at this one particular church in Rome, St. John Lateran, the C Church of the Bishop of Rome, the great temple of Catholicism, as we look at that, we're meant to see this deep truth about the temple, about Christ and then finally about us and our role in the world. And God bless you.