There Is A Stream Whose Runlets Gladden The City Of God

Sunday Celebration: Feast of Dedication of Lateran Basilica 2025

Today’s commemoration stems from a very happy time in human and Christian history. After enduring an on-and-off Roman persecution for three hundred years, the victorious emperor Constantine legalized the Christian religion, which at that time meant the Catholic Church. And he put his money where his decree was. He underwrote the construction of a bishop’s principal church in Rome. It would be built on the Lateran hill and would be huge compared to the several pagan temples in the capital city. It is called the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, dedicated to Jesus Christ our Savior, and named for both John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. But we are celebrating a lot more than a building.

The key phrase in today’s Scriptures is from St. Paul. Writing to the church of Corinth, Paul lays out a rhetorical question, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” The Greek word translated here as “you” is ?st? (este) and that is a plural pronoun. We Texans would translate it “you all” or “y’all.” That is important. The Church is the Christian Temple, and the prime meaning is not of a thing, a physical building, but a gathering of people, a community of believers.

One of the commentators on this passage in First Corinthians suggested that we get an understanding of what a Church is by thinking about holograms. Webster tells us that “a hologram is a picture of a "whole" object, showing it in three dimensions.” It is a way of preserving and communicating information. If you cut a small piece out of a hologram, it contains all the information.

Every Christian has properties of the Church or at least should have them. Each of us should have faith that is built on Christ. A family of Christians should have its faith built on Christ. Moreover, we should exhibit the virtues seen in Christ, as individuals and as families. We should together and individually show patience, charity, hope in our salvation, courage, temperance, modesty, chastity and the rest. These virtues show us to be holy. We must be careful how we build upon the foundation, which is Christ, confessing and being purged of any vices so they don’t mess up the mortar and cause us to crumble when stressed. God will help us in this endeavor, but He will protect the church from assault either by ourselves or someone else. In that way, Jesus Christ purifies, strengthens and grows the Church as His Bride.

The prophet Ezekiel gives a wonderful picture of the Temple envisioned by God. The Jewish rabbis knew Ezekiel’s vision well, and they must have realized that what Zerubbabel and his contemporaries rebuilt when they came back from Babylonian exile was not complete. The tyrant Herod tried to make the Temple better, but he failed. The Temple he started was finally completed in 66 AD. The Jewish revolt started soon afterward but the Roman general Titus presided over the Temple’s destruction just four years later. First-century Judaism really missed what Ezekiel was describing four hundred years earlier. We must understand that the call of Abraham, continued through Moses and David and only fully realized in Jesus and the Church, is for the building of a Temple for all humankind. A Temple of the Spirit. The trickle of water coming from the threshold of the Temple toward the east is the grace of God. It gets deeper and deeper as it flows toward the Dead Sea, which it purifies. The grace of God is meant to flow into all humanity as more and more humans put their faith in God and avail themselves of the sacraments of the Church. That’s the profound significance of Ezekiel’s vision. It’s a vision of the conversion of the whole world.

That is the kind of world seen by the psalmist. It was sung in the Second Temple, so Jesus and His disciples must have been familiar with it: “Come! behold the deeds of the LORD, the astounding things he has wrought on earth.”

The Book of Revelation, offered today as our Introit, beautifully articulates the consummation of the Church’s union with Christ, the Bridegroom: “I saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband. Behold, God’s dwelling with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people, and God himself with them will be their God.”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus, at the very beginning of His ministry, comes at Passover to the Second Temple and finds it turned into a marketplace selling animals for ritual sacrifice, and bankers converting Roman currency into Jewish shekels. It symbolized everything foreign to the vision the Father had for His people, and Jesus would have none of it. “Stop turning my Father’s house into a retail store.” Then He spoke of Himself as the foundation of a new Temple: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.” That’s exactly what happened in Jesus’s final Passover, His passion, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. The streams of water Ezekiel saw coming from the Temple were the Precious Blood and Living Water flowing eternally from the pierced Sacred Heart of Jesus on the Cross. The Temple of the Church, as St. Peter calls it, a Temple of living stones, exists in fulfillment in heaven around the throne of God. It is our mission in life to be prepared by prayer, suffering and sacrament to be living stones, gathered together forever in the presence of Our Lord.

Indeed, today we are celebrating a great deal more than the dedication of a building, blessed be God forever, Amen.