The Temple on Mount Zion has not existed since the 1st century AD, when it was destroyed by the Roman legions. For this reason we are inclined to forget its centrality in salvation history and especially in the life of Jesus and his family. The Gospel of Luke, in its first two chapters, enables us to correct this oversight. It was in the Temple that the priest Zachary received the annunciation of the birth of John the Baptist. Jesus, forty days after this birth, was presented in the Temple, as required by the Mosaic Law for firstborn children. On that occasion Simeon uttered his joyful cry of recognition and his prophecy concerning the opposition and sorrows that Jesus and his Mother would experience.
Jesus’ reverence for the Temple
After settling in Nazareth the Holy Family made annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem. On one such pilgrimage Jesus as a boy of twelve stayed in the Temple, conversing with the learned teachers of the Law. When found by his anxious parents, he informed them that he was called to be in his Father’s house, an attraction that remained powerful throughout his life.
From the four Gospels, especially John, we learn that Jesus came to the Temple during his public life to celebrate the principal feasts of the Jewish year (Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles, and the Dedication of the Temple). The Synoptic Gospels show Jesus performing cures and teaching in the Temple on the occasion of his final Passover. His respect for the Temple is evinced by his payment of the Temple tax (Mt 17:27) and his denunciation of those who swore by the Temple without recognizing that God had made it his dwelling place (Mt 23:21). Consumed with zeal for his Father’s house, he performed the most violent act of his life, driving the merchants and money changers from the Temple precincts (Jn 2:13-22; Mk 11:15-19).
Jesus the Temple
Greatly though Jesus revered the Temple, he recognized that it belonged to an era that was passing. He claimed to be greater than the Temple (Mt 12:6). He wept as he predicted the destruction of the holy city of Jerusalem with its Temple (Lk 19:41-44; 21:6). At his trial before Herod, this prediction would be used against him, as though he had threatened to destroy the Temple and rebuild it by his own hands (Mt 26:61; Mk 14:58).
The rending of the veil of the sanctuary in the Temple at the moment of Jesus’ death (Mt 27:51; Lk 23: 45) is a symbolic event marking the end of the Old Dispensation and the inauguration of the New. Thereafter the unveiled truth would be accessible to all who lived by the Spirit and in the Truth (Jn 4:24; cf. 2 Cor 3: 7-18). Everyone by whom the Truth is believed and in whom the Spirit is at work would become a temple of God, a sacred place, reflecting the splendor of the divine. Sins such as fornication or adultery on their part would be a kind of desecration (1 Cor 6:19). All believers together would constitute the great temple of the Church, the body of Christ (Eph 2:21-22), a spiritual house made of living stones (1 Pt 2:5).
The new Temple
Although Christianity is a religion of the Spirit and of Truth, it is not a religion of disembodied spirits. It worships the Son of God who came in the flesh of Jesus Christ and who abides among his people. In the visible Church Jesus makes himself present in various ways. He comes to us through sacramental signs and especially through the consecrated elements of the Eucharist, which become his body and blood by consecration. We reverence the tabernacles in which the Blessed Sacrament is reserved. We treasure the holy places where Jesus walked upon this earth, and we find union with God as we pray in the great shrines and basilicas that have been erected in honor of holy persons and sacred events. We venerate the bodies of the saints and martyrs of the past as well as the persons in whom he walks among us today. In the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, there will be no temple because the entire community will be irradiated with the splendor of God’s presence (Apoc 21:22).
The great Temple of Mount Zion stands no more, but it prefigures the body of Christ, the New Temple, against which the powers of destruction will rage in vain (Mt 16:18). The sacred heritage of Israel, pointing forward to Christ and the Church, will never lose its meaning for Christians. Enshrined in the memory of believers, the Temple continues to symbolize the glory of God’s saving presence among his creatures.
©Magnificat February 2000
