Zeal for Building the Lord’s House, Thursday of the 25th Week of Ordinary Time (I), September 26, 2013

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Thursday of the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of SS. Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs
September 26, 2013
Hg 1:1-8, Ps 149, Lk 9:7-9

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today the Church continues to give us reflections on the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem after the exile, which is meant to help us ponder Jesus’ resurrection (the True Temple), the temple that is the Church, and the temple that is meant to be each of us together with Jesus.
• In the first reading, we see how the Lord sent the Prophet Haggai to wake up the people of God whom the Lord had freed from exile. It was during the time of King Darius, the son of Cyrus, who had allowed the Jews to return and helped them to start rebuilding the Temple. The Jews built something quick and temporary on the Temple Mount, but then started to prioritize their own affairs. They were saying, “The time has not yet come to rebuild the House of the Lord.” They were delaying the things of God for their own affairs, and building their own luxurious paneled houses instead of the Temple. Haggai, speaking for the Lord said, “Is it time for you to dwell in your own paneled houses, while this house [of God] lies in ruins?” He then went on to say that they would never find fulfillment in sowing, eating, drinking, clothing, or money making. The forceful appeal of the Lord was “Consider your ways!” He told them to go get timber and begin to build the house of the Lord “that I may take pleasure in it and receive my glory.” That might seem like an egocentric statement, but it’s not. The Lord takes pleasure in loving us and his glory is, as St. Ireneus would say at the end of the second century, “man fully alive” through the vision of God. God wanted a house so that we would fittingly worship him because it is through that worship that he builds us into a holy temple.
• It starts, however, with that zeal. Before the first temple was built, we see an opposite attitude to that of the post-exilic Jews in King David who was eaten alive by the fact that he was living in a palace while the ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was in a tent. He wanted to build a fitting temple, but God, through the prophet Nathan, replied that He instead would build a temple for David. That temple was obviously David’s own descendent according to the flesh and God’s own Son, Jesus. We’re all called, however, to have the same zeal to build a house of the Lord because that’s the way the Lord in fact makes us his temple.
• In the Gospel, Herod was curious to meet Jesus, but Jesus will never be able to build a temple for him to dwell within us by curiosity. There needs to be a true relationship, a union, with the Lord, a hunger for mutual indwelling, something that Herod never had. Pope Francis this morning in his homily in the Vatican said that we have to know Jesus, to enter into a dialogue with Him, at three different levels, the language of the mind, of the heart, and of action. Through the language of the mind, we get to know Jesus through books like the Bible and the Catechism, where we get to know Jesus more deeply. But that’s not enough. There is also the language of the heart, in which we speak to Jesus in loving prayer and allow him to speak to us in the core of who we are. And then there’s the language of action in which the love of Jesus within us overflows into our love of others. Pope Francis asked whether we have that zeal, whether, for example, in the 20 years since the Catechism was published we’ve read it, whether we put prayer above watching television, whether we put charity above caring for ourselves. These are all instances for us to ask whether we’re more concerned with building a house for the Lord — not just a building where he dwells, like this parish Church of St. Bernadette, but also his house within us — or building a house for ourselves.
• SS. Cosmas and Damian were saints who focused on getting to know the Lord in each of these three ways. They were doctors who never charged for their services, something that made so many of their non-Christian patients seek to know the source of their generosity and come to discover Christ, whose generosity inspired them both. They knew Christ, through study and prayer, and were able to bring many to him. Their most definitive house for the Lord was built through their martyrdom in persecution. They give a powerful witnessed of those who lived together with the Lord in this life so that they might enter into the eternal temple not built by human hands in heaven. Similarly, like Cosmas and Damian, like King David, like Jesus himself, zeal for the Lord’s house should consume us too!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
HG 1:1-8