Monday, November 10, 2014

Extraordinary in the ordinary

Most of us don’t want to live dull lives. While we’re young, we like things to be exciting and new, fresh and unusual. We cling to the latest invention, song, personality. Sometimes we forget that everything passes and what is new is always replaced by something that is newer. The worst thing some people can think of themselves is ordinary. Who wants to be ordinary? Most of us want to be special. We want to be extraordinary.

The readings for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica each define a little differently the word “temple.” An angel shows Ezekiel a vision of the temple as a source for life in Israel - water flows from the temple to irrigate the land and provide food for the Israelites, nourishment for people. This is an extraordinary example of God’s care for his people.

Paul then describes the first Christians as buildings which God constructs and then encourages them to build upon the foundations knowing they are made for God. This too is an extraordinary example of God’s care for his people.

In the Gospel Jesus flares up in anger at the way in which the Jewish temple is desecrated, misused and abused by those failing to respect its purpose and meaning. This is a really extraordinary example of God’s care for his people because he reminds them not only what they must do but also what they must not do.

Here is another example of a major feast of the Church being celebrated on a Sunday displacing the ordinary Sunday feast. Like All Souls, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, SS. Peter and Paul, we’ve seen a number of church feasts since the spring replacing ordinary feasts. We might think of these as a little more extraordinary but they vary. Today’s feast of the Dedication of St. John Lateran doesn’t mean much to most of us because the building is not widely known among Catholics outside Rome. It is the cathedral church for the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. It is not quite as big as St. Peter’s and is not located in Vatican City but it is the oldest church in the West. It was dedicated in 324 A.D. Of course, it was more than 1,500 years before it was completed as we know it today. It is considered the mother church of Roman Catholicism. It is quite splendid and extraordinary and there are those who know beautiful churches who prefer it to St. Peter’s. 

So we celebrate a piece of architecture that is quite extraordinary. The anger of Jesus regarding the abuse of the temple in Jerusalem is a testament to the inability of the merchants to regard the temple as something extraordinary. The angel with Ezekiel helps him regard the temple as the extraordinary resource for life in Israel. And Paul reminds us that we ourselves are temples and perhaps more extraordinary than any building humans can make. We are extraordinary because we are holy. The temple in Jerusalem was a sign of holiness for the Jews. The Lateran basilica is a sign of holiness for Catholics in Rome. But the holiest object of all of this is the person who comes to the temple, to the basilica. Human beings make the basilica holy because God has deemed us holy. There is ordinariness in our lives, witnessed by the repetition and sameness of much of life. But our lives made extraordinary because of God’s work in us. We ordinary people are the stuff with which God works in order to realize the extraordinariness of the saving task of His Son Jesus.

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