Gospel of Luke, chapter 21:5-6

There are people who see the presence of God only in churches and church services. We read about people like that in today’s Scripture. They were fascinated with the splendor of the Jerusalem Temple built by Herod the Great in over 46 years and lavishly adorned with gold and silver offerings of the people. For these worshippers, the Temple is God’s dwelling place on earth and the adornment of the Temple means that the people’s faith in God is strong. Can you imagine the shock on their faces when Jesus tells them that this Temple standing in all its glory and majesty is destined to be utterly destroyed leaving not one stone upon another? The destruction of the Temple, prophetically, was accomplished in AD 70 by the Roman army under the command of Titus.

Jesus’ statement about the Temple is also significant for Christians today. We must remember that the people of Jerusalem who were building up and decorating the House of God were the same people who were planning to destroy the son of God. If they saw God in the adornments of stone and gold, why couldn’t they recognize Him in flesh and blood? When a temple or church becomes so overwhelming that people are no longer able to see God except inside it, the time for its destruction has come. How do you explain the fact that the flourishing of Christendom in the Middle Ages was associated with a culture in which freedom, human life, and human rights were cheap? Think of the religious wars, the torturing and killing of freethinkers, the burning of suspected witches and the inquisition! Could it be that the more people exalted the church as the house of God the less they esteemed the human person made in the image of God?

This should not be the case . Our faith demands that we recognize the presence of God in the human person as well as in the temple. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (1 Corinthians 3:16). The Christian who, like the worshippers in today’s Gospel, sees God in the grandeur of the temple but not in other people is only telling half the story.

Today’s Scripture, therefore, challenges us to serve God both in the church when we gather for worship and in one another after worship.

In this way, our lives both inside the church and outside the church, become one continuous act of worship to the same God who dwells in the human soul as well as in the building.

Fr. Hugh Duffy