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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
The prophet Ezekiel sees water flow from the Temple to give new life. Jesus is the New Temple that gives us new life in baptism.
Jesus is the Temple
It’s not mentioned in today’s gospel that these are Pharisees, but I think it’s important for us to understand that the image we have in our head of Pharisees is pretty inaccurate. First of all, there wasn’t one kind of Pharisee. And secondly, they had a very important function.
Their important function really had to do with the promise of a Messiah. See, the promise of a Messiah would be fulfilled when there was the fulfillment of a way of life that God laid out for the Jewish people. That until such time as the way of life mingled together with the world in which they lived, there would be no Messiah. That in other words, what was really important is that until the law was lived and the rules were followed, the Messiah wouldn’t come.
In fact, the temple, which we hear about in both readings, was critically important for this coming together of the law of God and the lived example of people. And in fact, we know on some level that this is true because we can’t live in a rule-less society. We have to have rules. We don’t function without them.
We tend only to chafe at a rule when it’s one we don’t like. We tend to be quite harsh, quite serious, quite austere with certain rules that are quite important to us. But what the gospel is getting at today is a fundamental shift in what it means to have these rules.
See, in the reading from Ezekiel, the temple is the source of life. It is in the temple that people experience the coming together of heaven and earth. It is in the temple that people profoundly experience the presence of God. It is from the temple that water flows forth to give life. And that’s why Ezekiel gets this long experience of water coming out of the temple, but making everything clean, even the salt water.
But in the gospel, we get a different experience. The man is rightly waiting in the temple. He’s hoping for cure. He’s hoping for healing. And he’s been hoping for 38 years. He’s a lot more patient than I am. I think I might have just tossed myself into the water. Stir it up or not.
But what do we miss if we’re not careful? If we just focus on the Jews, whoever they happen to be, that they’re concerned that he’s carrying a mat on the Sabbath. We miss the point. Jesus is making the most dramatic claim. The temple where this guy is seated is not the true temple. The true temple is the Lord Jesus himself. It is in the Lord Jesus that humanity and divinity come together. And it is in Jesus himself that this man now is healed.
And we, in fact, enter into this temple, not by watching it flow and making trees bloom, but we enter the waters of baptism. That what we see in Jesus is, quite frankly, the way in which God has fulfilled the promise. This is critical. John is among the most Jewish of the gospels. It may not seem that way, but he spends a lot of time showing how it is that Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise.
It’s John, for example, who talks about blood and water flowing from the side of Jesus, just as blood and water flowed out of the side of the temple during the slaughter of the lamb for Passover. In our lives, we can get caught up sometimes in the wrong rules, or we can put rules as a barrier to the more important goal of the spiritual life, a deep and personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
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