Why preaching for the feast of this building matters

The Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome—a feast about a building—can intimidate preachers. The temptation? Mention it briefly and move on to the readings. But Sylvester Tan, S.J. says this feast is worth the work of preaching well.

In this episode of “Preach,” Sylvester, a Jesuit theologian and local superior in Dallas shares his homily for one of the few feasts that actually replaces the regular Sunday liturgy when it falls on a Sunday. Then he joins host Ricardo da Silva, S.J. to reflect on three challenges: How can preachers use history without boring people? “Our faith is a historical faith,” he says, “and history is always messy. God doesn’t reject history; he works through history.”

They also discuss why we shouldn’t skip difficult feasts—“Where we get uncomfortable, there’s always an invitation to go deeper”—and how to preach about divine anger without losing sight of divine love. 

Sylvester explains that when Jesus cleanses the temple, his anger flows from grief, not cruelty. When Jesus sees the temple turned into a marketplace, he’s heartbroken for the merchants and money changers just as much as for everyone else. “The true face of God is obscured,” Father Tan says. And as Ricardo observes, sometimes preachers need to remember that the tables needing overturning might be our own—the places where preachers, too, resist the conversion they preach.

Scripture Readings 

First Reading: Ez 47:1-2, 8-9, 12
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 46:2-3, 5-6, 8-9
Second Reading: 1 Cor 3:9c-11, 16-17
Gospel: Jn 2:13-22

You can find the full text of the readings here.

Homily for the The Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome by Sylvester Tan, S.J.

Brothers and sisters, on November 9th, we celebrate the Feast of Saint John Lateran. This is a spectacular feast, and it’s a feast so important that it can even take the place of the Sunday readings when it falls on a Sunday. So what makes this feast so important?

Who is St. John Lateran? But that’s a trick question, because there is no person named St. John Lateran—and that’s part of what makes this feast already intriguing. St. John Lateran refers to a church. Today, we celebrate the dedication of a church—a church building, a physical space.

And if we were to say, “Okay, fine, but why do we call that physical space St. John Lateran?”—because it was the family property of the Lateran family in Rome. When Christianity was legalized, this property was chosen as the place where the Church would build its first public worship space after legalization. And this church would become the Pope’s cathedral, the Pope’s basilica.

It’s so intriguing—Catholic churches are not normally named after people who are not saints. And so, in the name of the church, at the very end, is actually a reference to a family—not even a Christian family initially.

And then you could say, fine, okay, but John is a Christian name. But which John? It’s funny, because over the history of this church, two different St. Johns have become attached to it, and it’s dedicated to both of them—St. John the Baptist and later St. John the Evangelist. So it’s dedicated to St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, and it recalls the, as it were, pagan history of the place.

Some people might say, “Wow, oh my goodness, that’s so messy! The Church is about holiness—we need to get away from all sorts of interference or mixing with secular realities. We are trying to propose something spiritual. Why don’t we get away from that? Why don’t we just start over? Why don’t we cleanse ourselves of all this messiness?”

But I think that would be a mistake—and so does the Church. In reality, the name of this church, as we will hear, helps us to show how much God’s providence values and wants to work through the things of this world—this world as it is, not some other world of our imagining.

Let’s reflect on the history of that. In  Samuel 2:7, we hear David reflecting upon how he’s built a great big mansion for himself. And now he’s thinking, “Well, God has done so much for me. I’ve been able to build this great house for myself, but God doesn’t have a place to live, as it were. There’s no temple—we just have this tent, this tent that we’ve been carrying around since the time of Exodus, which is the tabernacle, as it were, where God’s glory abides.”

And so David tells Nathan that he wants to build God a house, a temple. And God gives Nathan a message for David, and I’m going to read this line because it’s so profound. It’s from Samuel 2:7. God says to David, through Nathan: “Would you build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house since the day I brought up the sons of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent for my dwelling.”

And so God tells David, through Nathan, in that chapter, that God himself will build a house.

Now, what is the house that God builds? The Christian tradition says that the house God builds is Jesus. Jesus is the Lord’s house—Jesus, God himself. In Jesus, the Word was made flesh. The Word wasn’t made idea; the Word wasn’t made a moral principle. The Word was made flesh and pitched his tent among us, dwelt among us. But there’s still that reference to the tent—he pitched his tent among us. It’s not a tent that we created for him; he pitched his tent among us in his body.

And when Jesus was born, that Word made flesh was laid in a manger, in a feeding trough. We can see resonances of this in today’s Gospel reading from John 2—the reading for the Feast of Saint John Lateran. We see how much God values fleshy reality, and how much what he wants to inaugurate is not just a change in our hearts—that is, a spiritual change—but a change in both spirit and flesh.

Because Jesus, at the beginning of John’s Gospel, once he’s begun his ministry in John 2, right after the wedding at Cana, goes to the temple area. And he sees the temple—this temple that David had wanted to build so many centuries before, this temple that his son Solomon actually had built but that was destroyed and then rebuilt. And what does he see in that temple area? He sees those who sold oxen, sheep and doves. And he’s kind of disturbed by this. He wants to give his father glory.

He says, “Take all these things out of here and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” He really does see this physical temple, which is the work of human hands, as a place that should be sacred. And so he made a whip out of cords, drove all the vendors out of the temple area, spilled the coins of the money changers, overturned their tables. And the disciples thought, “This is the fulfillment of ‘Zeal for your house will consume me,’” which was right.

But you know, there’s something more. Because when Jesus comes to the temple at the end of the synoptic Gospels in Matthew 24 the disciples are admiring the temple buildings. They’re like, “Wow, look at how great this is!” And Jesus says, “You see all these things, don’t you? All this glory, all this is built for God’s glory.” And then he says, “Amen, I say to you, there will not be left here a stone upon a stone that will not be thrown down.”

And I think that’s so important for us to remember, especially when we building. We Jesuits—we like to build institutions because we appreciate their importance, and that’s right. But there’s a way in which we can get attached to those things in such a way that we can think that those things themselves are the kingdom.

The real temple is something else. And then there’s this hint in John 2. Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” And people are shocked: “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and you’ll raise it up in three days?”

Ah, but the Gospel then adds: “He was speaking about the temple of his body. Therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they came to believe the Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.

Now, if we turn to the second reading for this feast,, we see something really interesting. Because if Jesus is at the temple and wants to cleanse the temple, he wants to cleanse the temple in a way that helps us to understand that it serves him—and the real temple is his body.

St. Paul tells us in Corinthians 1:3: “Brothers and sisters, you are God’s building.” Because God could do everything on his own, but God wants to involve us in his work. St. Paul says, “According to the grace of God given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another one is building on it.” The foundation is Christ.

If we think that we can live God’s life in any other way, then the life we’re living is not the life that Christ is offering to you. He’s speaking to people who have heard the word, who have been baptized in Christ. But he says that we have to be very attentive, because we need to make sure that we treat not just our spirit but our body—which means our fleshy existence, the way that we treat one another, the way that we act in the world—with reverence, because God wants to dwell in the temples that we are.

And so he says, you have to be careful, because if anybody destroys God’s temple—which you are—God will destroy that person. For the temple of God, which you are, is holy. The temple of God, which you are, is holy.

The actual name of the church is actually the Archbasilica, or the Basilica of the Most Holy Savior. At the very heart of the church is Jesus—not just Jesus as a historical figure, but Jesus as our Savior.

What is salvation—that’s the topic of every homily. Ultimately, salvation is sharing the life for which we are created, which is sharing God’s own life offered to us in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is what makes us holy. Jesus Christ is the one who alone is holy, the one who alone is Lord. Right? We say that in the Gloria hymn every Sunday.

And so, what makes Saint John Lateran holy is Jesus—his presence there, the fact that it has been dedicated to him, and the fact that in that church building we are fed by him through the Word, through the sacrament, through Christian community.

It’s so important that our faith not be an abstract faith disconnected from the reality of the world, but that it be lived actually in physical spaces—because we live our lives in physical spaces. When we run away from physical spaces, we get into big trouble, and we dehumanize ourselves.

Jesus was born in a physical space, right? And he occupies a physical space even now. He ascends into heaven with his body. And what he promises isn’t just to be in heaven with him forever—though that’s part of it. He actually promises a new heaven and a new earth. We talk about the resurrection of the flesh.

And so here we can think about the physicality of our own temples—the temples of our bodies—and how they transform the physical space around us, how God wants, through the holy temples that we are, to transform the whole world.

And I think that one of the best ways to do that is to go back to the first reading of the feast, which is Ezekiel 47. 

Ezekiel 47 is a vision in which the prophet is brought to the entrance of the temple, and he sees water flowing out of the temple. It’s going out in the four directions. This image is so powerful—it’s picked up by scripture over and over again, and it’ll appear again in the Book of Revelation.

But here’s the thing: he sees a river flowing out of the different entrances of the temple, and he says, “Wherever the river flows, every sort of living creature that can multiply shall live.” There’s a cosmic dimension to it—God never abandons his creation. And what is the river that’s flowing from the temple? It’s the river of God’s grace.

God’s grace is flowing out from the temple—the temple that is, first of all, Jesus Christ in his body—but also the physical spaces where Jesus feeds us with his body, places like St. John Lateran. That’s why we dedicate such places. And the grace that flows out from that temple is the grace that also should flow out of our lives when we receive the Eucharist and are transformed into what we receive, when we become those temples.

And then we read further in Ezekiel 47: “Wherever this water comes to the sea, the brackish sea, the water shall be made fresh. And along both banks of the river, fruit trees of every kind shall grow. Every month those fruit trees shall bear fresh fruit.”

That all becomes possible because of that grace. The fruit of grace is a transformed creation—a creation in which all things serve love, in which we can truly live for God’s greater glory, because we are God’s glory.

And I think that’s why we celebrate this Feast of St. John Lateran. It is a feast of Jesus Christ, even if Jesus is hidden—because you don’t even see the name “Most Holy Savior” in the name of the feast. I mean, you could say, “Well, we should be saying the Feast of the Dedication of the Church of the Most Holy Savior in John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.”

No—it’s hidden. But isn’t Christ so often hidden? And often when we point to Christ in a way that distracts—just to put ourselves up on a pedestal—sometimes Christ is truly obscured, because we’re misrepresenting Christ. Christ himself wants to be the meek, the humble one—the one who brings salvation to the whole world. And he does that not by shunning the ambiguous realities of the world, but by transforming them.

He creates spaces for us like Saint John Lateran, which is dedicated on November 9th, which we dedicate so that we might recognize that we are called to enter into those spaces and let the spaces that we occupy—first of all, with our bodies, but also by going to those places with our bodies—each one of those places should become a temple, a temple of the Holy Spirit, a temple of God.

And so, let’s give God thanks for this feast, and let’s ask God to help us truly appreciate the value of the flesh and everything that he offers us, so that through that flesh, God may become present in our lives and in the whole world.

Amen.

• Facebook
• X
• Mail