3rd Sunday of Lent B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2021

 You are comfortable, I hope, with the Gospel of John. John’s Gospel approached Jesus’ life differently from the other three Gospels. He drew on a few incidents, shaped them to suit, and then gave an in-depth reflection on their relevance and importance to the lives of Christian believers of the late first-century. He hoped that they would “believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing this, [they] might have life in his Name”.

Today’s Gospel passage is found in all four Gospels. John is the one who used it to reflect on the deeper mystery of Jesus, right at the beginning of his narrative. He used the magnificent Jewish temple as a symbol of Jesus’ own risen body, his crucified and glorious humanity, where the mysterious God would dwell. Through the risen humanity of Jesus, as the Gospel would go on to say, everyone could access God and “worship God in spirit and in truth.” In one of his epistles, St Paul extended the metaphor from John’s Gospel, and spoke of the concrete humanity of us human believers as “temples of the Holy Spirit”.

I think we need to pause to take in what they say, to reflect with faith-enlightened eyes, quietly to contemplate and embrace the mystery of Jesus and of ourselves, to learn to realise and to rejoice that God indeed dwells in ourselves and others. What does it say of our human dignity? What fascinates me is that Jesus referred to his risen humanity using the metaphor of a destroyed and rebuilt temple. It was the crucified Jesus who later stood risen before the disciples — not the once crucified, but the still-crucified, the always-crucified, the still-bearing-his-wounds, Jesus risen. And like him, indeed with and in him, it is we, the knocked-around, still-unfinished, often disfigured human persons that we are, who are “temples of the Holy Spirit of Jesus”.

Monday will be “World Women’s Day” when people around the world are invited to pause and take note of, and truly to celebrate, the human dignity of every woman. It has taken virtually a revolution, a still-in-process revolution, for the various human cultures around the world to address the issues realistically — a work still in progress. Even the Church, our largely top-heavy male Church, is still struggling to work out and joyfully to embrace the practical consequences of the fully human dignity of every woman. It is so hard to see things differently — yet that is what Jesus challenged us to do when he insisted that we all “repent” and change the habitual, in-grained, rusted-on attitudes we inevitably absorb from our culture.

Our TV screens this past week have been full of issues topically highlighting the practical difficulties that arise when encountering cultural change. Conclusions differ. Emotions run high. As individuals, we are all entitled to our personal opinions. As disciples of Jesus we are called to base our approach on a firm respect for the dignity of those with whom we disagree. We may feel strongly. That can be quite appropriate. But emotions will not solve our problems. Along with a non-negotiable respect for whomever we are talking to, we need quite consciously to seek to listen to those we disagree with. We may even learn something, see things somewhat differently, fine-tune our thoughts. If we want them to listen to us, we need to control ourselves so that we speak calmly, and as reasonably as possible.