Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Good morning. Today we celebrate the Feast of The dedication of St John Lateran, the Basilica in Rome.
The Opening Prayer O God, who are pleased to call your church the Bride, grant that the people that serves your name may revere you, love you, follow you, and be led by you to attain your promises in heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Old Testament the book of Ezekiel, 47th chapter, first and second verse, eighth and ninth verse, and the 12th verse. The angel brought me back to the entrance of the temple, and I saw water flowing out from beneath the threshold of the temple toward the east. But the facade of the temple was toward the east. The water flowed down from the southern side of the temple, south of the altar.
He led me outside by the north gate and around the outer gate facing the east. When I saw water trickling from the southern side, he said to me, this water flows into the eastern district, down upon the Arabah, and empties into the sea the salt waters which make it fresh. Wherever the river flows, every sort of living creature that can multiply shall live. There shall be abundant fish for wherever the water comes, the sea shall be made fresh. Along both banks of the river fruit trees of every kind shall grow. Their leaves shall not fade, nor their fruit fail.
Every month they shall bear fresh fruit. They shall be watered by the flow from the sanctuary. Their fruit shall serve for food, and their leaves for medicine. The Word of the Lord. Responsorial Psalm the waters of the river gladden the city of God, the holy dwelling of the Most High. A reading from the New Testament St.
Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, third chapter, ninth through the 11th verse, and 16th and 17th verse. Brothers and sisters, you are God’s building. According to the grace of God given to me. Like a wise master builder, I laid a foundation, and another is building upon it. But each One must be careful how he builds upon it, for no one can lay a foundation other than the one that is there, namely, Jesus Christ. Do you not know that you are the temple of God?
That the Spirit of God dwells in you? Anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. The temple of God which you are, is holy. The word of the Lord. The gospel for this feast is taken from St. John 2, 1322.
Since the Passover of the Jews was near, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep and doves, as well as money changers seating there. He made a whip of cords and drove them all out of the temple area with the sheep and the oxen and spilled the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. And to those who sold doves, he said, take those out of here. Stop making my father’s house a marketplace. His disciples recalled the words of Scripture, Zeal for your house will consume me.
At this the Jews answered and said to him, what sign can you show us for doing this? And Jesus answered and said to them, do destroy this temple in three days. I will raise it up. The Jew said, this temple has been under construction for 46 years, and you will raise it up in three days. But Jesus was speaking about the temple of his body. Therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this.
They came to believe the scripture and the word. Jesus had spoken the gospel of the Lord Satan. We break with the normal ordinary Sundays of the year to celebrate this feast that focuses our attention on a basilica, a church that was established over 1700 years ago. With the edict of Milan. In the year 313, for the first time, it was legal to be a Christian in Rome. And 10 years later, St.
John Lateran Basilica was created. Now, the building that was created then is not the same building that is on the same site with the same name. There were earthquakes, there were fires, and so multiple buildings have been built, but the church itself in the place of great historical significance. And so I believe that what the liturgy is doing today is drawing our attention not just to this one building, but choosing this one building and asking us to reflect upon church, church, religion. I’ve said this before to you, but it’s interesting to me that today many people are rejecting religion and saying it’s somehow not working for me. And I really choose to be a spiritual person, but I really don’t need a church.
And yet, if you examine the lives of those people, you’ll find that they have something very much like church in their life. A small group of friends that believe and think the same way they do, friends you enjoy spending time with because there’s a similar focus in your life, often rituals. Among those people, it could be yoga, could be a lot of other things that, you know, carry with it the idea that this is my time to be still and to be quiet and to listen to God. So in a way, it’s hard to imagine a spiritual life without some kind of religion. But why would people reject religion unless there is something in their minds or in their experience that says religion is not seeming to help me to do the work that I’m called to do? What is that work?
Well, my favorite image, as you’ve heard me say over and over again, is that you and I have been blessed with a God who has, over the many years that he’s revealed Himself to us in the Old and New Testament, has desired to enter into our life and to make a difference in our lives by enriching our lives with his presence and guiding us to a place of fullness, abundance, health, goodness. I use these terms not so much in the physical realm, but in the spiritual realm. You can be extremely healthy, spiritual, and you can be dealing with a terrible disease if you’re dealing with it in the way that God longs for us to deal with things we cannot change. If you somehow surrender to them, accept them, work with them. Let’s look at the readings for this feast because they’re beautiful in terms of the kind of balance they want to bring to us about the role of religion, the role of church. I love the image in the first reading because it goes back to one of the most critical images in the Old Testament, and that is the presence of God is always equated with the temple.
The temple. What was in the temple was God’s presence. What was the symbol of God’s presence? The Ten Commandments. God manifested his love with his people in the Old Testament in many ways. But one of the ways that seemed most potent was he gave them a guide to live by.
He gave them something that you could call simply the truth, the reality of what a relationship with God is supposed to be, the reality and the truth of how we’re to deal with each other. That was the essence of God’s presence in the law. The temple was always a sacred place, and it was a place that carried great, great power. And I love the image in this first reading from Ezekiel because it’s all about an image, a beautiful image of what the power of the temple was, was doing, how it was affecting people. And it was, look at it. Here’s this building, this marvelous building in which the presence of God is.
And pouring out of it is life giving water seeping out of it, going out the door, out the facade, and it moves on the earth and the earth is dry and maybe say, less fruitless. And then all of a sudden this water touches it and it becomes a stream and then a river. And along this river and everything that is alive begins to multiply. It’s like this water brings life, abundant life. And then there are all these trees and growth. And the thing about the trees that I find so beautiful is that they become a source of two food and medicine.
Food and medicine. Beautiful images, I believe, of what just Jesus longed to bring to us. Initiating at the Lord’s Supper, this thing about God entering into us, his presence, flowing out of the place where that presence is into us. And it creates for us food and medicine. The food is the bread of life. Medicine is the forgiveness, the healing forgiveness of wine, bread, blood poured out for us for the forgiveness of sins.
Beautiful image. Nothing is more healing, nothing is more cleansing for us than to know that we are loved in a way that in no way, shape or form we can merit unmerited love. It’s beautiful. Now take that image of unmerited love, the way in which God has revealed himself in the fullness of the Old Testament and New Testament. And we see in the Gospel passage one of the most confusing at times and interesting experiences of the experience of the moment in Jesus life when he becomes most angry, and in a way, embarrassingly so. I mean, he’s at the temple and he loses his temper and he starts turning tables over people who were there, who probably knew, didn’t know what was going on, and screaming at them and yelling at them and saying, get out of here, get out of here.
You’re turning my father’s house into something radically, radically different than it was ever intended to be. So some people have interpreted this by saying, well, these men were there and they were charging exorbitant prices for the sacrifices that people had to make to God to appease God for the things that they had done wrong or what, or even just to show God thanksgiving for the things they were able to do. But it’s like they were overcharging and therefore they were corrupt and they were making money. Sort of like you might go into a company and say, wait, there’s a lot of corruption here. You’re making your Customers pay too much. I don’t think that was really it.
And a lot of scholars don’t think that was it, but they really believe that what Jesus became so sensitive to after 613 laws had been established and, and God said when he established the Ten Commandments, don’t take anything away and don’t add anything to them. I think that’s fascinating. And they came up with so many rules and laws. But when you’re in a relationship where there’s a lot of demands on you, it seems like human nature goes to this one very simple principle. If I have to do all these things for you, then what are you going to do for me? And if I ask you to do things for me and you do them, I’m going to be much closer to you.
But if I ask you to do things and you don’t do them, I don’t know. I’m not so sure we’ll be friends. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Isn’t that the way most of us work in relationships? I know I can tell you how many thousands of people have come to me over the last almost 50 years of ministry and have said to me, I used to be close to God, but then I asked him to take care of this situation, to heal this person, and he didn’t do it. So as far as I’m concerned, I’m through with Him.
He doesn’t really do what he promises. And I can’t believe in somebody who doesn’t come through for me when I need him. And you know, and I know that what we think we need is not always the best thing for us. We know that God is the God who takes care of us in ways beyond our imagining. And isn’t it interesting, we don’t seem to have any problem in. In presuming that we know more than he does and know that this was the right thing to do and you didn’t do it.
So you’re not doing your side. You’re not keeping your side of the bargain. This is a marketplace. I pay, you perform. You ask me to perform, then you’ve got to pay me. This seeped into the religious imagination of the people at the time, and it was really ruining things.
And Jesus saw this so clearly. And when you think about it, when you have a relationship with God as He’s intending you to have, when religion really does its work of awakening in you a way of seeing and experiencing a God who is so personal that he’s inside of you, guiding you day by day, whispering in your Ear telling you the things you should do. In St. Paul’s words, you don’t need the law anymore if you have God in you. You are the new temple. You are the temple of God.
That’s what Jesus is trying to say in this whole thing. He’s saying you all have created a major boundary around God’s presence. And, you know, if you know anything about the temple, there was the inner space that was the holy of holies that only the priests could go to. Then there was another zone that only the men could go to, another zone where women would go to. And, you know, it was almost like, you know, it was like this precious thing in the center was kept from, you know, everyone’s. I mean, it wasn’t available to everyone.
It felt like. And so there were things it felt like you had to do in order to get into that inner circle. And it had to do with performance and, you know, purchasing, you know, a ticket to get in almost. I mean, that’s what it feels like to me. And so when you see this, and you see, then Jesus comes along and says, I’m going to destroy this whole system. I’m going to destroy it.
I’m going to destroy this temple, and I’ll build a new one in three days. And the new temple is going to be me, but not just me, but it’s going to be each and every human being that can trust in my desire to live inside of them will have them inside of you. And can you feel the difference between saying, I’ve got to go to church. I’ve got to go to the building to talk to God. That’s the only place he is. And a person who knows that they’re inside of me, God’s inside of me.
It’s inside of me. And when I go to church, I bring God to church. And together, we’re all together in the church with God. And then we celebrate his presence in Eucharist. I mean, it’s such a different image. It’s not so much that the church building is the source of everything for us, but it’s rather a place where we celebrate everything that is happening to us because of this extraordinary action on the part of the God man, Jesus, who changed the system radically by saying, God no longer simply dwells in the temple, but he dwells in every single person.
Now, St. Paul, he realized this in the second reading. There’s something interesting about this letter to the first letter to the Corinthians that we read from. He’s saying, I have been building on this whole image of God inside of people. I want people to understand that they no longer need the law, as I said, and that God is in them, guiding them and directing them. But you have to be careful with all this, because it’s all based on Jesus.
It’s based on who he is and how he operated. You could see where any human being could say, oh, God’s in me, that I can use him for everything, anything I want, and I can get anything done that I want. Well, it’s not quite that simple. You just have to realize what Jesus was doing is in order for God to be fully active in his life, he had to accept things that were very, very difficult and go through a death, a transformation. So that’s what we’re called to do, is to go through this transformation of a misconception of religion and come into a new place where we recognize this mystery of God’s presence inside of us. Now, Paul says something very interesting in the reading.
He said, if you are God’s temple, and you should know that you are, and the spirit of God is in you, if anyone destroys that temple, God will destroy that person. Those are such risky words I’m sure he had heard over and over again. If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy them. But in the New Testament, it’s so interesting. Jesus reveals a God who doesn’t destroy people who are destructive to others. He doesn’t destroy sinners, he saves them.
He’s the medicine, he’s the food. So be careful of a phrase like that and know that this God, this God who is in you and in me, is never interested in destroying anyone or anything but bringing life. Just like that water in the first reading, wherever the spirit of God that flows out of you touches anything, that which is polluted becomes fresh. That which is not producing life starts producing life. There is fruitfulness, there is medicine, there is all these beautiful things. And what a wonderful image to walk in this world, to know that out of me flows this gift of life because of who lives inside of me.
What a different image of religion and church than what so many of us have and what the temple seemed to be filled with when Jesus turned over so many tables and said, stop this insanity. So I pray that we’ll be blessed with the image that is so clearly part of the New Testament. We are the temple of God, and we need churches and gathering places to celebrate that and to enrich that and to feel the joy and the peace that that brings. Sa the closing prayer. Father, awaken in us the beauty, the richness of the images that you have given us in Scripture to awaken in us, the knowledge of you as our partner, you as the source of so many things that we long to accomplish on our own, but cannot give us peace, give us fruitfulness, and most especially give us joy. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen.
The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinsinsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website power pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible.
Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher Produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios Studios Copyright 2024.