Recognizing, Touching, Becoming God’s Awesome Abode, 14th Monday (I), July 10, 2017

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
July 10, 2017
Gen 28:10-22, Ps 91, Mt 9:18-26

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we see various stages of God’s progressive plan for the sanctification of the world. The world, as we know, was created good and very good by the Lord, but after the Fall, that goodness was often obscured. Even though “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness” (Ps 24:1), man in various ways had lost sight of that connection. In order to restore a sense of the sacred to the entire world, in order to redeem his creation in other words, God took various steps.
• The first step was to consecrate specific places on earth for the worship of God. The whole world couldn’t be seen as holy unless certain places were. And hence in today’s first reading, we encounter Jacob’s dream and his response to it. He had lain down resting his head on what seemed to be an “ordinary rock,” but the whole earth, including rocks, are charged with God’s grandeur as Jacob would soon discover in the dream as he rested upon that rock. He say a stairway reaching from the ground to the heavens on which God’s angels were ascending and descending and he heard God say to him that he was the God of his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac, that he and his descendants would dwell in that land and become a blessing to all nations, that he would be with him to protect him and never leave him. When Jacob awoke he said, “Truly, the Lord is in this spot, although I did not know it! … How awesome is this shrine! This is nothing else but an abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven!” He hadn’t known that the Lord was there; often we, too, don’t recognize God’s presence all around us. But he saw that place as God’s abode and because it was the place of the encounter with God the door, the gateway, the ladder, the staircase to heaven: it wasn’t heaven, but it was where one would begin the ascent to heaven. This first step of setting aside certain places as God’s abode — like the Meeting Tent, the Temple of Jerusalem, the Synagogues, the house Churches, the great Basilicas and Cathedrals, this Chapel  — would continue through history. There are some great Churches I’ve visited in Europe that have written in Latin these words from today’s first reading, “How awesome is this shrine. This is nothing other than an abode of God and the gateway to heaven.” We come to these places to seek God, to find God, to listen to God, to be loved by God, to love God back, and to be transformed by him. We need to grasp that this place is holy, awesome — something that should make us tremble! — the dwelling place of God and the gateway to heaven.
• In the Gospel, we would see the next stage in God’s plan. Jesus would become that temple, that awesome shrine, that dwelling place, that stairway to heaven. The fullness of God dwelled in him. God was tabernacled among us in him, growing within Mary’s womb. When Jesus would be asked for a sign for driving out the money changers from the Temple of Jerusalem, he said, “Destroy this Temple and in three days rebuild it,” speaking about the Temple of his Body. A few years back, I led a pilgrimage of journalists to Rome and when we attended Pope Benedict’s general audience, he spoke specifically about Jesus as this Temple. As I was translating from Italian to English for them, I knew I was listening to something extraordinary. Talking about St. Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin before he would be stoned to death, Pope Benedict said, “He reinterprets the whole of the biblical narrative, the itinerary contained in Sacred Scripture, in order to show that it leads to the ‘place’ of the definitive presence of God that is Jesus Christ, and in particular his Passion, death and Resurrection. … He affirms that Jesus is the Righteous One foretold by the prophets; God himself has made himself uniquely and definitively present in him: Jesus is the ‘place’ of true worship. Stephen does not deny the importance of the Temple for a certain period, but stresses that ‘the Most High does not dwell in houses made with hands’ (Acts 7:48). The new, true temple in which God dwells is his Son, who has taken human flesh; it is the humanity of Christ, the Risen One, who gathers the peoples together and unites them in the Sacrament of his Body and his Blood. … The Body of Jesus which he assumed in order to offer himself as a sacrificial victim for the expiation of sins, is the new temple of God, the place of the presence of the living God; in him, God and man, God and the world are truly in touch: Jesus takes upon himself all the sins of humanity in order to bring it into the love of God and to ‘consummate’ it in this love. Drawing close to the Cross, entering into communion with Christ, means entering this transformation. And this means coming into contact with God, entering the true temple.” (May 2, 2012).
• We see the awesome things that happen in this abode of God in Jesus in today’s Gospel: a woman with a hemorrhage, merely touching the outer garment of that Temple’s clothing, is totally cured, because she touched that Temple with faith and didn’t just bump into him as many others in the crowd doubtless did. And when Jesus reached out to touch daughter of Jairus who had died, we see that in Jesus’ touch we have the power of life, of resurrection. Jesus’ touch of the little girl was like God’s touching matter and creating Adam. Jesus does take upon himself our illnesses, our sins and even our death and consummates them in his love, as Pope Benedict says. He brings them and us into his own temple and transforms them and restores us. This is the second stage in God’s plan.
• The third stage is that entering into communion with God, becoming one Temple with him through this type of “contemplation,” we in turn become temples of God, awesome shrines, God’s abode and gateways to heaven. St. Paul would write, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16) and, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:19-20). God has come to make us, individually and in communion, his holy dwelling place. He has chosen to take us his dwelling within us, to make us his awesome shrine. And once we begin to grasp that we are God’s dwelling place, it begins to change the way we look at others, look at Churches, look at the whole world. We begin to see God in others, in Church, in nature, in short throughout the world he created. And with God within, we begin to behave differently.
• The place where all of these truths come together is at Mass, where we reach out and touch Jesus and he touches us on the inside. The angels ascend and descend upon this altar and each of us. We become God’s temple and are able to become the hands of his mystical body going out and touching others. In Mass we have the fulfillment of what happened to Jacob, what Jesus himself described to Nathaniel in the Gospel, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will see the sky opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” As we renew our trust in him as we prayed in the Psalm, we say about this Chapel, this house, this world, and our bodies and souls that are about to receive within the same divine Savior who lived in Mary at the Annunciation: “How awesome is this shrine! This is nothing else but an abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: