Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
I have a lot of nostalgia for an old Carmelite monastery where I used to go on retreat. It was located in my favorite place in the world, in Colorado, and the retreats I made there were always rejuvenating. I wish I could return, and go on retreat there again, especially in times when my spiritual life is in upheaval. I feel sure if I could just go there, things would be better.
But the catch is that the monastery is no longer there. It broke apart some years ago, and while some of the people remain the same, they've moved on and begun doing new things with their lives. So there is nothing to return to, and I am stuck with the mere memories of those fabulous retreats. It may well be that the retreats have improved in my memory, from what I experienced at the time!
Nostalgia is a difficult thing to contend with, especially in spiritual life, because nostalgia causes us to love what does not exist, and even to make past events, places, and people into idols. But today's scriptures have something to offer us against nostalgia.
The first reading (Isaiah 38:1-6, 21-22, 7-8) describes a desperate time in King Hezekiah's life. He suffers the double whammy of being on his death bed while the kingdom of Assyria is threatening the lives of his people. What is especially important in this passage, though, is the place of the temple. God promises Hezekiah that he will be able to go to the temple.
We cannot underestimate the importance of the temple for Jewish people at the time (the time of this passage is probably roughly in the 8th century before Christ). The temple was where God lived in his Ark, so being in the temple was quite simply to be present with God. In a different passage, Isaiah calls it a "special house of prayer" that will be a house of prayer for all people (Isaiah 56:7). All of the sacrifices that God demands in the law can only be done in the temple. (Synagogues are not places where sacrifices are done.) And in King Hezekiah's case, being in the temple gives him the extra added sense of hope that God is on his side in his war against Assyria. The temple has been so important to Judaism, in fact, that it was rebuilt twice; and it was so important for later Muslim conquestors, who claimed the site for their own mosque. Today, the site of the former temple remains significant to modern-day Israel. The place itself is important and immovable. We cannot rebuild the temple just anywhere.
So, the first reading serves to remind us about the central significance and role of the temple. No wonder Hezekiah recovers his hope when he learns that he will be able to make it back to the temple in three days. It is the presence of God, I think, that makes the temple so vastly important.
But in today's gospel passage (Matthew 12:1-8), Jesus seems to be reminding us not to focus so much on the temple building itself that we miss the point. God is present to us and close to us even without the temple (as important as it is). Jesus proclaims himself Lord of the Sabbath because he is the new temple, the new place where God resides. But if the temple is now a person, specifically a person who is both God and man, that means that we are no longer bound to an immovable place but instead we go where Jesus goes.
Nostalgia for what happened in the past, for what is over and done with, is very much like an immovable temple. If we wish to follow Jesus, we will have to shake off that nostalgia and follow him wherever he leads us. But in doing this, we know that we are in God's presence every step of the way.
Today, let us reflect on where those immovable temples are present in our own lives. When do we focus so much on what is past, that we miss where God leads us today? And let us ask for God's grace to lead us from those temples toward Jesus, the New Temple.
- Jana M. Bennett