Perhaps when we think of the pope’s church, we think of St. Peter’s in Rome. Actually, it is St. John Lateran that is the pope’s church. The Emperor Constantine gave the Lateran Palace and its church to the pope sometime before 313, the date when we know the Council of Rome met in the Lateran Palace. Since the pope is charged with care of the worldwide church, St. John’s is considered the mother church of Roman Catholics. (It is believed that Constantine also began the building of St. Peter in about 323, over the spot thought to be St. Peter’s grave.)
Such a “mother church” is more than a building. Like the temple in Jerusalem, it represents the place where believers gather to encounter God, both their personal God and the God of their faith community. In our Gospel today, the evangelist John tells us about the time when Jesus became angry because vendors in the temple “mall” were distracting people from this holy meaning of gathering at the temple. Jesus knew well the history of his temple. It had begun in the 10th century B.C. as the religious worship site built by King David. It was rebuilt and rededicated after the Babylonian exile in 520 B.C. Then in Jesus’ time, it was enlarged into such magnificence by Jewish King Herod that it was regarded as a wonder of the ancient world. Its longevity represented God’s faithfulness to the Jews in their tumultuous history. Because of its age and magnificence, Jesus’ critics in our Gospel were affronted at his destructive action and incredulous at his claim that he could raise the whole temple up (rebuild it) in three days. The Gospel gives us the meaning of his words: “But he was speaking about the temple of his Body.”
In three of the four Gospels, we hear that at the moment Jesus died, the temple curtain was torn in two. This temple curtain separated the ordinary worship area from what we might think of as the sanctuary, where the holy Scriptures were kept and where only priests could enter. The new Christian believers of the first century, who worshipped in homes and had no churches, were beginning to understand that Jesus Himself was where God’s full holiness dwelled, rather than in a building. They began to understand that they themselves were temples of God because the Spirit of God dwelled in them, and because they lived in Christ, as St. Paul taught. Today our liturgical theology says that the presence of Christ in those who gather is one of the “true presences” of Christ in every Mass (the others being Scripture and homily, the priest representing Christ, and consecration/communion). So today’s commemoration is about more than the dedication of an old church in Rome. It is a recognition of how God’s holy presence has been with us Christians for 21 centuries, in and through the Risen Christ, present in the materiality of history and a papal-led Church and, above all, present through the grace of faith-filled believers of yesterday and today.
— Blog entry by Sister Mary Garascia
The post November 9, Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, TEMPLES: a Sunday Scriptures blog first appeared on Sisters of the Precious Blood.