word-nov-3-web

The Lateran Basilica in Rome is not the home parish for many of us, though some might have visited it. It is the pope’s own cathedral, but we are parishioners at churches closer to home, with less ancient and lofty origins and nicknames like St. Joe’s and St. Mike’s. Our home parish is where we attend Mass, run the scouting den and bake cookies for the fall festival. For all of its foibles and problems, our home parish is, well, home. We can speak of the church in abstract terms, but the church is embodied in particular people, who together make up the body of Christ, and the particular buildings in which we worship.

So the feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome appears remote, celebrating a building far away in which most Catholics have never set foot. Yet for all its antiquity, including the beautiful fourth-century baptistery, and its centrality for centuries as the cathedral of Rome and, once upon a time, the pope’s home, the Lateran is just a particular manifestation of the home parishes we find scattered throughout the world. It is a physical symbol of the spiritual body of Christ, the stones a sign of the “living stones” (1 Pt 2:5) that make up the church.

God does not need buildings to dwell in, but we need places to worship in order to offer our sacrifices to God and to worship with the people of God, who are not abstractions but ordinary flesh and blood people. Churches create a locus for worship and a forum for the community of God to gather.

These are ancient needs. Temple language, which permeates the Old Testament, reflects the need for a holy place to worship God. The temple is a place of God’s holiness and a place where God’s people can grow to be holy. In the vision of the future temple foreseen by Ezekiel, life-giving waters flow from the temple, bringing life to the trees around it “because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.” The future temple was later re-envisioned in the Book of Revelation, in which John says, “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (21:22).

It is God who is our ultimate desire. Church buildings, whether in Rome or down the street, do not create this need for God or satisfy our desire for holiness, but they do offer a place for us to gather and meet these needs. Jesus himself was often at the Temple to worship, and his criticisms of the Temple were not of the place as such, but of the way the house of God was treated as a marketplace. Jesus also points forward to the true temple of God when he says that his body, raised from the dead, will be the true temple.

The Apostle Paul continues to use a temple metaphor to speak of the whole church as the body of Christ, describing the church in Corinth—though it could be any particular parish church today—as “God’s building.” Each Christian is a part of this building, built on the only true foundation, Jesus Christ, “for no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.” Paul goes on to speak of all the members of the church as “God’s temple,” in which “God’s Spirit dwells.” This temple must be treated with care, for “God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”

In stone and mortar, and in spirit and truth, we embody the church of Jesus Christ, as the body of Christ, given up for us and dwelling in us. A particular church in Rome, the Lateran Basilica, is a specific symbol of all of these images of the church and speaks to one other sign: the unity of the Catholic Church across the world, which might worship in a humble cement block structure, a 1960s open style or a beautiful local basilica, but is everywhere the same people of God gathered together as the body of Christ in order to worship the living God, who himself is the true temple.

This article appears in November 3 2014.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.