God zealously purifies us and sends us forth – Ezek 47:1-12, Jn 2:13-22 (Lat. Bas.)

Feast of the Lateran Basilica; Holy Cross Parish.

Today we, the Church, celebrate a church, and not just any church: we celebrate the cathedral church of Rome, the church on whose façade is inscribed omnium ecclesiarum Urbis et Orbis mater et caput – the mother and head of all churches of the City (that is, Rome) and the world.  By celebrating this one church, we’re really celebrating every church, from our marble marvel here, to the grandeur of the Basilica, to the tin roof structure with only three walls I worshipped in when I worked in Mexico.  And we celebrate these works of human hands, because God made us with hands, and with feet, and with behinds, and hearts and lungs… with bodies.  We don’t worship God neatly in our minds, but bodily, and bodies need buildings.

What Robert Wilkin says of the importance of icons can be said just as much of the importance of church buildings: “We tire easily of abstractions and crave visible signs.  The icon [is] a tangible pledge that things [can] become other than they are.  This [is] no less true of human beings.  For if wood and paint [can] depict the living God, then creatures of flesh and blood [can] aspire to likeness with God.”

Ezekiel knew what it was like to lose your sacred space.  Ezekiel was born in Jerusalem in a priestly family and knew the greatness of the Temple, the place where God’s people could come and experience the simultaneous mystery of God’s grandeur and otherness and his intense desire to be with his people, to accompany them, comfort them, and challenge them.  And Ezekiel saw that Temple destroyed, by Babylonian invaders.  He experience forced deportation, robbed of Temple, of Land, of kingdom, of all the ways he knew God’s blessing and love.  But, by Babylonian waters, he discovers something new.  He discovers that God is still present to him, that God doesn’t need those things to reach out and call him into relationship.  He’s gifted with visions, not just for him, but for him to use to sustain his fellow Israelites, to help them survive this time of testing and pain.  But God knows that we need these things, God knows that we need concrete, tangible stuff to form in us an awareness of the reality of his constant accompaniment, so he gives Ezekiel this vision that we read as our first reading today: he shows them that the Temple will be rebuilt.

And the holiness of the Temple is encountered in what flows out of it.  Out of the Temple flows pure, living water; water that can make life grow in a desert; water that gives life to fish and to wondrous fruit trees that know no winter and produce twelve harvests a year and whose leaves are medicinal.  Out of the Temple flows water that creates life and the potential for life to flourish: nourishment and healing for all.  The Temple Ezekiel dares to dream of is one out of which flows the seeds of the new Eden.  Life as life was meant to be comes from this Temple.

What flows from our church?  Or, it might be more proper to ask… who flows from our church?  Food, certainly, flows from our pantry out to families in need in our neighborhood, carried by our St. Vincent de Paul society members.  But, the beating heart of what flows out is us.

What would it look like if we were to be that water Ezekiel dreamed of for our world?  If we were to flow out of this place bringing nourishment and healing to a waiting world?  What can we discover around us that needs that?  And what needs to happen here, in this place, that we might be transformed into such a spring of life?

Because we need to be purified too.  We don’t come here as neutral mules, to carry God into the world unaffected.  No, we come here to be fed and to become what we receive, that we might bring ourselves, purified and revivified and be the sanctification we seek. 

The Temple was rebuilt, as Ezekiel wanted, and it’s that rebuilt, Second Temple, that Jesus stepped foot into.  It’s that Second Temple that wasn’t functioning as a locus of healing, that Jesus needed to purify.  And Jesus acted to purify it, but within a generation or so of Jesus’ visit, that Second Temple would be destroyed by Roman Imperial Power.  But God’s Spirit was not left without a home.  Paul makes the point simply: we are a Temple of the Holy Spirit.  And just like the Second Temple, Jesus acts to purify us.  Jesus acts with zeal that we might be at once Temple and healing river, flowing forth.

We don’t need animals to purchase for sacrifice anymore.  The lamb has been slain for us.  We have our lives to offer; lives God claims as his own, lives God acts to purify, lives that can flow out to glorify God.