Posted by The WORD in other words (2021) by Fr Raymund Festin SVD – Rome
3rd Sunday of Lent – B
“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” Jesus tells the Jews in today’s Gospel. But they crucially misunderstand Jesus.
No. He is not referring to the physical Temple in the holy city of Jerusalem.
Jesus is speaking about the Temple of his Body. It is not a symbolic or allegoric reference. It is a literal, factual assertion.
When the Divine Logos—the One who dwells “in an approachable Light, whom no one has ever seen or can see,” as St. Paul describes God’s Word—entered into human history (space and time), He assumed the humble nature of humans, taking on a human body.
The human body, the flesh is the most distinguishing and defining attribute of a human being. Angels and Seraphim do not have bodies. Nor does God have one, since “God is spirit,” John’s Gospel says.
But Jesus has a human body, for the Word became flesh. The entire mystery of human salvation twists and turns around this most impenetrable truth.
Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, once said that a human person is neither beast nor angel. She is somewhere in between. By becoming human like us, Jesus chose to be in that between, where eternity meets finitude.
This explains why Jesus knows exactly what it means to be human. To hunger and thirst, to feel tired and sleepless, to weep and to laugh, to be sick, and to feel pain—that’s what it means to have a human body.
The dignity of human beings was elevated to limitless heights when Jesus became like us, embodied, limited beings. St. Athanasius said that “the Son of God became human, so that we may become God.”
The main reason why the human body is so sacred and inviolable is simply because Jesus has a human body. By taking on the mortal coil, He made it holy and godly.
To disrespect the human body, to abuse it or injure it, to degrade it, to torture it, to strip it or sell it or buy it, is a monstrous sacrilege on the ground that Christ sanctified it when He took on the human form. That makes abortion, prostitution, and human trafficking the most heinous examples of moral wickedness.
Do we take good care of our bodies? Or do we abuse it by overeating, overworking, using drugs, and drinking too much alcohol?
Do we respect the body of the other?
St. Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19): “Don’t you realize that your body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God?”
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