My accountant told me he was fortunate to have a personal relationship with Christ. “I didn’t always feel this way,” he continued, remorsefully. “How did this change come about in your life?” I inquired. “Well, I have to thank my deceased wife for that. She arrived at this stage of a personal relationship with Christ before me, and I wanted to have what she had,” he replied, gratefully. He saw what this relationship did for his wife’s life, and he wanted in on it. My accountant is a good man and it shows in his character and behavior.

We are all privileged to have a personal relationship with Christ, if we are open to accept it. This affair of the heart is made possible by the Son of God who came down to earth so we could live in him and he in us. This invitation is the Lord’s, not ours.

Aristotle, reflecting on God in his book on metaphysics, could not envisage a personal relationship between God and man because the chasm separating both, he argued, was too great. He was right. But, the birth of Christ changed all that. The amazing bonding of humanity and divinity in Christ, the Son of God, makes what Aristotle thought impossible, now possible for anyone wishing to follow Him. Jesus’ deepest knowing comes from doing God’s will. He knew God by heart for He is God’s only begotten Son. This anchored him and directed his footsteps, his words, his decisions, even his righteous anger when he drove the moneychangers, who made a business of religion, out of the temple. By the sheer power of his righteous anger, Jesus upended those who would turn God’s temple into a market place.

The four evangelists ( Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John ) who wrote the four gospels about Jesus want us to know that someone very special has come into our lives. Someone who knows who he is and who knows who God is and who knows what effect he would have on time and history.

Jesus refers to Himself as the living temple which, if destroyed, would rise again. We have heard this many times before. It is familiar, but it should not be startling to us. The meaning of Jesus’ words, however, escaped his listeners, but they should not escape you. With the coming of Jesus, new life is in the making, a new way of living, and relating to others. Resurrection, which means new life, is upon us because of Jesus, the living temple, not of stones but of flesh and blood. We are asked to set our hearts on this new temple of flesh and blood where business no longer is “as usual.”

We are freed by Christ, the living temple, from being people without direction to being people with direction. We have been sprung free from the dehumanizing slavishness to all that is less than God. We don’t have to pay homage or coin to any master who competes with God’s will for us. We have been set free because God’s triumph in Jesus means that everybody is sacred, everybody can be forgiven, and everybody can have new life. Do you realize this? St. Paul did, and he put it beautifully when he said, “you are God’s temple and God’s spirit dwells in you?” ( 1 Corinthians 3:16 ).

The Christian who only sees God in the grandeur of a building, like the worshipers who turned it into a market place, but not in other people, especially the least among us, is missing the full story. We must serve God by the way we treat our neighbor. In this way, our lives become one continuous act of worship to the same God who dwells in the human soul.

I was having lunch at the Pelican Cafe in Lake Park, Florida, the other day. Seated next to me was the police chief of West Palm Beach. I didn’t know this until he told me. He asked me what I did. I told him I was retired. But, he was persistent. “Before you retired, what did you do?” I told him I was a priest, and served as a pastor for thirty years. “What would you say is the most important passage in the bible?” he asked. He was a Baptist. I told him my favorite passage is the new commandment of Jesus where he says,” Love one another as I have loved you.” Then he inquired, “why do you say that?” I replied, “because it includes everything else. Jesus is the embodiment for us of God’s will, and if we can love others or at least try to love others the way he loves us we know we are doing God’s will.” My newfound friend wanted to know more, so I explained, “God’s love is not pie-in-the-sky. It comes down to basic things, as Jesus explained in Matthew 25, such as feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick and those in prison” and, since he was a black man, I added, “not judging people by the color of their skin.” My friend, the chief, it transpired, was a thoughtful man in more ways than one. So, when it came to paying the bill, he grabbed mine before I could reach it, and paid it. Our relationship, I believe, deepened into something beautiful because of our mutual relationship with Christ.

The point of this message is that those who follow Jesus, the living temple, experience a personal relationship with the son of God. That’s what its all about.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy