3rd Sunday of Lent B - Homily 6

Homily 6 -2024

Throughout most of John’s Gospel, we are dealing with three quite distinct timelines which John seeks to intertwine as fruitfully as he can. There is the historical timeline of Jesus’ public life, and then the timeline of the Gospel text, written for readers of John’s Gospel about sixty to seventy years later, and then there is our timeline two millennia after that, as we scratch our heads trying to understand things from a quite different culture from those earlier times.

Jesus obviously caused a certain amount of mayhem one day in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The basis of his concern was: “Stop turning my Father’s house into a market”. He seems to have felt quite personally indignant, personally hurt. Not surprisingly, he was confronted by a group of people who challenged him to state his authority for doing what he had just done. As is usual in John’s Gospel, John built on the incident to introduce a meditative comment on the significance of Jesus’ life for the benefit of his readers [and also for us now in the year 2024]. By the time his readers first read his meditative Gospel, the Jewish Temple had already been destroyed, about thirty years earlier, by the Roman army.

John started his meditation with a cryptic comment put on the lips of Jesus, addressed to those who had challenged his authority: “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Gospel then explained, for the benefit of its readers: “He was speaking of the sanctuary that was his body”, and added, “When Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples … believed … the words he had spoken”. For Jews of the time, the temple’s destruction was an enormous blow, calling for a radical readjustment. For John’s Christian readers, the destruction was ultimately insignificant. They had in their midst, here and now, the far more wonderful presence of the Risen Jesus among them, accessible through prayer — as do we readers still, so many years later.

Perhaps, the idea of Jesus, of Jesus’ humanity, as the “new Temple”, may not say much to us. But it could be good for us if it were to allow it. It is worth recalling the sense of Temple for so many Jews of Jesus’ time, as the preferred residence on earth of God, where God was in some ways most accessible. We are familiar, from the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth and infancy, of Simeon and Anna, two beautiful exemplars of Jewish spirituality, for whom the Temple had meant so much. Even Mary and Joseph took the Temple rituals quite seriously. Obviously they meant much to them both. I wonder what it was.

Let me read a few verses from one of the Hebrew Psalms, that Jesus himself would have sung on occasion: “How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord, God of hosts. /My soul is longing and yearning, / is yearning for the courts of the Lord…/The sparrow herself finds a home/ and the swallow a nest for her brood./They are happy, who dwell in your house, for ever singing your praise. / One day within your courts/ is better than a thousand elsewhere.”

How many of us would feel something like that in regard to our relationship with Jesus? Today’s Gospel can be an invitation to us to read again Jesus’ Last Supper Discourse to the Disciples. And what better time to do it than now during Lent? Give ourselves the chance to hear Jesus say to us personally:

“If [you] love me … my Father will love [you], and we shall come to [you] and make our home with [you]”. 14.23

“Make your home in me, as I make mine in you”. 15.3