Making Altars for our God

                                                 

November 9, 2025

All three readings today refer to the Temple, which had a central place in Jewish worship. And it would seem that a temple, a church, a mosque, or in short a formal place of worship, seems to be a necessary element in all religions, a place where we are taught we can experience God. It seems to be our human need to always have something tangible that can help us connect with God.

The Bible offers us various ideas on this theme, namely the human need for a tangible way to be assured we can experience God or gain God’s favour, - whether it be a sacred place or altar, or specific rituals or a physical symbol like a statue, or a holy relic, or even a holy person. In some sense these allow us to have some ‘control’ over our relationship with God, because these allow us to fit God within a frame that fits within our five senses, a frame of our making.   

We can start with the need expressed by Moses, who when appointed by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, asks God:  “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them? For Moses like all of us, there is a need to bring God into a kind of frame of reference that he and his people can understand, and a name gives him something to hold on to. But  in the Hebraic tradition, names were powerfully symbolic, for knowing a person’s name was equated with having some sort of power over that individual.  This is the symbolic meaning behind Adam being asked by God to name the animals (Genesis 2 19-20 ) and also of Adam being the one who names his wife Eve (Genesis 3; 23). But God responds to Moses sharply by saying: “I am who I am’   (Exodus 3:14).  Or in other words, God is admonishing Moses by telling him that he does not need to know God’s name, because he cannot expect to fit this ultimate God into a human cage of understanding. But then the Jews, like all human beings, need a name, and so the first four Hebrew letters of this response of God were put together to get the letters, YHWH, and this was pronounced as Yahweh.

The Prophet Mohammed was very aware of this tendency in human beings to cage God within tangible things, and therefore,  in his attempt to stop his followers from falling into this ‘sin’, he prohibited his followers from ever keeping idols and images of even his own likeness, and certainly not of Allah. And this is so powerfully ingrained in the Islamic mindset that till today, the Muslims do not pray to an idol or even keep any images in their homes, not even of the Prophet. Even in their architectural design of their mosques, there is never any likeness of human beings or even of animals. But this need to fit God within a tangible frame of reference is so strong in human beings that it could not be completely resisted even within Islam, with the result that today, the holy Koran and the Kaabah in Meccah are still treated with the same respect, and even what one could call the kind of adoration that Christians, for instance, give to the tabernacle in the Church.

Building a physical place of worship where God will dwell is still another way of trying to  ‘tie down’ this God who refuses to be tied down.  And therefore it is also important that this place of worship is as grand and awe-inspiring as we perceive God to be, so that in Kerala, India, for example we have a church in the diocese of Ernakulam where much of the interior parts of the Church are gilded in real gold. The Jews too lived in an environment where all their neighbours had elaborate temples of worship, while all that they had was a portable sanctuary called the Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting, in which was housed the Ark of the Covenant. This ARK was a gold-plated wooden chest that held the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.  And so, once they settled down in Canaan after their 40 year journey through the desert after they fled Egypt, the Jews were not satisfied with this quite unimpressive central symbol of their faith. And so they keep pleading with God for a temple, and King David in fact goes ahead and tries to build one, though God stops him from doing so.

And Isaiah, speaking on behalf of Yahweh castigates the Jews for this focus on building a temple and asks sarcastically: Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; so what kind of house could you build for me, what sort of place for me to rest?’ (Isaiah 66:1)    In other words, when the entire universe is mine, and I am above all this, what kind of house would you be able to build for me?  Stephen, the first recorded Christian martyr, recalls these words of Isaiah and insists that ‘the Most High does not dwell in houses made with human hands’ (Acts 7:48) 

Of course the Biblical narrative goes on to tell us that eventually God does give in to the Jews’ incessant pleading, and finally allows Solomon to build a temple. But by the time Jesus comes, as we read in today’s Gospel, he finds that the Jews have turned his ‘Father’s house into a market’. Because another way to gain control over our relationship with God is through rituals. And the form of the rituals have become so important that even though people often tend to create a corrupt business around it, as Jesus found, we still feel the need to follow through with it, because it is the only connection we have with God.  Again Isaiah castigates this reliance on rituals when he says in the name of the Lord; Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who kills a human; ..... whoever makes a memorial offering of frankincense is like one who blesses an idol.( Isaiah 66:3) 

 It is in the light of all of this that we can understand what Paul means when he asks in today’s second reading: ‘Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple’.  It is not that there is no role for a place of worship. Yes, it can be a place to bring a community together, or a place where we go to find peace, but when the place, the idol or the ritual becomes more important than the temple that is the human person, when we are willing to slaughter and maim others who desecrate our temples of worship, or when we gild our places of worship with gold and other precious stones when there are many starving for daily bread, then one can truly ask with Jesus whether we have made our religion a business enterprise, rather than what it was meant to be, a way of experiencing God in our lives. This is perhaps the meaning of the Gospel passage that tells us that when Jesus died, the veil of the temple was torn in two  (Mathew 27:51) , namely that the division that we all tend to make between holy places and ordinary living places, was destroyed.  Everywhere and every human being is a temple. Everywhere is the place where we can experience God.

 

First Reading: Ezekiel 47: 1-2, 8-9, 12

The man brought me back to the entrance to the temple, and I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east). The water was coming down from under the south side of the temple, south of the altar.   He then brought me out through the north gate and led me around the outside to the outer gate facing east, and the water was trickling from the south side.

He said to me, “This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah, where it enters the Dead Sea. When it empties into the sea, the salty water there becomes fresh. Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live. Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear fruit, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.”

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 3: 9c-11, 16-17

For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.

By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care.  For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?  If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.

Gospel: John 2:13-22

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.  In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.  So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!”  His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?”  But the temple he had spoken of was his body.  After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.