Hanukkah

Homily for Friday of the Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time

In less than two weeks, the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah begins. A nine branched candleholder marks the eight nights of this holiday. Today’s first reading provides the origin of this holiday – the rededication of the Second Temple of Israel. Prior to the coming of Christ, the temple was the most sacred place on earth; for it was the singular place where God dwelt among the people. However, the Temple of Israel was more than a place of worship. It also functioned as the school for young Jewish boys, as well as a place for families to gather to celebrate their own anniversaries. The eight-day feast celebrated how God’s people had rebuilt, cleansed, and re-consecrated the temple after it had been desecrated by pagan invaders. So important was the removal of the disgrace that had been present, that it was to be celebrated annually.

That is an important context for today’s Gospel text. Seeing the temple being defiled, not by outsiders who didn’t believe in the Lord God, but by God’s own people, infuriates Jesus. His anger is not simply because a few people decided to sell things in the temple, but because of the casualness with which God’s people treated what they believed was a historic, sacred place of an encounter with God.

This rare instance where the Gospels captured Jesus enraged is meaningful because it demonstrates the passion in his heart not just for God the Father, but for his people. He is not simply picking a fight to make the physical building a place of prayer. He is emphasizing that the hearts of every man and woman are to be a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Although many churches dot our landscape, every diocese or local church has its central place of worship – a cathedral. Usually, they are very large and ornate places of worship. Building such a temple is an arduous task that sometimes goes on for hundreds of years as we can witness in Barcelona, Spain, even today. These churches are monuments of faith. In many instances, they were built by our ancestors and to display the zeal that they had for the house of the Lord.

However, more important than these great edifices are the temples that inhabit every human being who has been baptized. Together, as a community, we provide a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. To treat another person with anything less than the dignity that it requires is too profane God’s holy dwelling as much as the pagans did, and as much as those who used the temple as a marketplace.

This place, this altar, is the image of God among the people. Here dwells the Lord Jesus in our tabernacles. Here we celebrate the most important form of prayer that we know – the Eucharist. Let our zeal for this place make it a place that is holy, set apart, from all other places in which we dwell.