The Lord Takes Delight in His People"

Today's Mass Readings

In today’s first reading from the Book of the Prophet Haggai, we find the same theme that has been building all week, concerning the Temple in Jerusalem. King David wanted a Temple to be built to the Lord. The Israelites in the Wilderness had the Tabernacle, which moved around from place to place, but fulfilled the decree from the Book of Deuteronomy, stipulating that animal sacrifices to the Lord should only be in one place, unlike their polytheistic neighbors. It was not until King Solomon, however, that the Israelites built a Temple, and it was such a temple, that people from all over the known world came to it to learn the wisdom of God. the Temple was built with an outer court for gentiles so that they too could pray to the one God, creator of all. When the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem, burning the city to the ground, they destroyed the Temple. This was the most devastating and crippling blow to ancient Israelite religion. It was a major impediment to Israel worshipping God in the way they had been commanded to worship. God met with His people, however, and showed that no obstacles could be put in His way. Now the people were back in the Promised Land, and were in the process of reconstructing the Temple, but they knew that they could not complete it the way it was completed under King Solomon. There was no way they could build as extravagant and magnificent a Temple as was the first Temple in Jerusalem, made from Solomon’s great wealth. God tells the people to build the Temple anyway. In fact, later in Haggai, when the people are upset that the Temple is so impoverished, God explains how much more magnificent this Temple is than the first one under Solomon. It was not that it was physically more magnificent, but spiritually so, since, although they did not have the same wealth of Solomon, and could not construct it as lavishly, they built it out of love and with what little they had, and that is what made the Temple even greater. (Today is also the feast of St. Vincent dePaul, who spent his life in service of the poor. He built for God not a material temple but a temple of God's poor people).

The final construction of the Temple was not complete for hundreds of years, until a generation before Jesus’ time, under King Herod, and was thus known as the Herodian Temple. The Temple would be destroyed again by the Romans in 70 AD, roughly 40 years after Jesus’ death. It is difficult for us to grasp how important the Temple was, and still is, for Israelite and later Jewish religion. To this day, if you go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, you can hear people screaming and crying out loud (hence sometimes the wall is labeled the “Wailing Wall”). And they are screaming and crying out loud over the destruction of the Temple which occurred nearly 2,000 years ago, in hope that at some point in the future the Temple will be rebuilt.

The Letter to the Hebrews explains the many ways in which Jesus has replaced the very purpose of the Temple. In fact, the Temple we see discussed in Haggai, is but a shadowy image of Jesus. In the heavenly vision of the city of the Heavenly Jerusalem, in the Book of Revelation, we see that the Heavenly Jerusalem had no “temple,” because God and the Lamb, we are told, are its Temple. Reflecting on this history, on what was written in Haggai, we should be even more appreciative of what we have in Jesus, and especially in the Eucharist. For it is here that we see and receive God’s glory. Jesus is our temple, Jesus is our sacrifice, Jesus is the priest, Jesus our our God. I hope we can appreciate the beauty of our Catholic faith.