Friday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

Today's first reading from the Second Book of Kings is a powerful and important reading. Perhaps many of us do not feel the power and importance of this reading, but it is. This reading tells of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple in Jerusalem. To this day, if you go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the remains of the Jerusalem Temple, you can hear people weeping, wailing out loud, which is the reason the wall is sometimes called the Wailing Wall. These people weep and shriek because of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, not the first destruction which we read about in today's reading, but the second destruction under the Romans in 70 A.D. Keep in mind, this was the one and only true Temple of God, in the city of God, the holiest place on earth, in the holiest city on earth, smack dab in the Promised Land, which God promised to the Israelites already back in the Book of Genesis. And what had happened? God's kingdom, which He promised would last forever, was divided between the North and the South. The Northern Kingdom had been lost forever, to this very day, in the Assyrian exile. And now the Southern Kingdom appeared to be lost forever as well, with the death of the king's sons. What happened to God's promises?

We hear Israel's lament in Babylonian exile in today's responsorial psalm. And yet, we know the end of the story. The remnant of the Southern Kingdom is returned to Jerusalem, and the Temple is rebuilt, although, only to be destroyed again. And yet, the slaughter of the king's sons explains how an early Jewish reader of Jesus' genealogy in St. Matthew's Gospel could be so excited about reading a simple genealogy. A son of David survived, and Jesus is the heir to the thrown of the Kingdom of David, which in the Books of Chronicles, is equated with the Kingdom of Yahweh, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of the Lord.

Jesus is the true Temple, as we see in the Book of Revelation where the Temple is God and the Lamb. Like the Israelites, we too are not at home no matter where we live on this earth. Our home is in heaven. Let us not forget our heavenly Jerusalem, which our hearts long for. Rather, let us lift up our hearts, our minds, and our eyes, to Jesus, raised up for us on the cross, raised up for us from the tomb, and raised up for us in heaven as our eternal Temple in the Eternal Jerusalem. For, by contemplating the heavenly realities, we may be motivated to strive to live holier lives, lives of service and lives of love.

Jeff Morrow