Consecration Louisville Cathedral

A READING ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY AS THE NEW TEMPLE,

FROM A BOOK BY FR JEAN DANIELOU.[1]

It is the manhood of Jesus that is the Temple of the new Law, but this manhood must be taken as a whole, that is to say, it is the Mystical Body in its entirety; this is the complete and final Temple. The dwelling of God is the Christian community whose Head is in heaven, and whose members are still making their earthly pilgrimage; it is the true Temple of which the Temple of stone was the figure. “Be you also as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ”(1Pt2,5). “Now therefore you are no more strangers and foreigners: but you are fellow citizens with the saints and the domestics of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone: in whom all the building, being framed together, grows up into a holy temple in the Lord”(Eph2,19-21).

There is a basic difference between the Temple at Jerusalem and the Christian Church. Under the old law, the presence of God is connected with the building of stone; under the new law, it is connected with the spiritual community. The church of stone is not in the succession of the Temple, but of the synagogue; it is the assembly, the ecclesia, the meeting-place. Or rather, at the same time it continues both of them, since it is the normal place for the sacrifice. But it can be dispensed with; it is not necessary that it should be there for the celebration of the Mass, while the community is necessary.

Thus is fulfilled the saying of Jesus: “Where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”(Mt18,20). It is the essential condition required for the offering of an acceptable host that is presented in the Sermon on the Mount, where it is written: “If you offer your gift at the altar, and there you remember that your brother has any thing against you, go first to be reconciled to your brother: and then coming you shall offer your gift”(Mt5,23-24). No offering is accepted save that which is made in charity, in community. For there the temple is, the one and only place where man is in the presence of God.

This is an extraordinary fact, as extraordinary in its own order as the presence of God in the Temple at Jerusalem. God enters into relationship not with isolated souls, but with the community. Through the baptismal rites, the entry of the catechumen into the church of stone is a figure of entry into the living Church, into the community which is the place of meeting with God. Of this meeting the Eucharist is the permanent sign, being at once the sacrament of the mystical body and the sign of the real presence, and bringing about at the same time union with God and the strengthening of the bonds of charity. Sin has the effect simultaneously of alienating the sinner from the presence of God, and of separating the sinner from the community. The primitive discipline of the Church made this clear when it excluded the sinner publicly from the community. The sinner still remains excluded from communion; and reconciliation with God is necessarily required by the community as intermediary. This is the meaning of confession, in which the priest represents the people, which itself represents God.

This is why the Church has the deposit of the living Word of God. It is in her that the Word mysteriously dwells, thus continuing the Incarnation of the Logos. We come to faith in Christ not by the study of dead literary documents, but in a preliminary way through the living witness of an organism sustained and animated by Christ, through the teaching of the living Apostolic Church; in a full and effective way by immediate contact with the living Christ in the Church, through the operation of grace acting in all its fullness in the sacrament.

    [1]The Presence of God, Jean Danielou, Baltimore 1958, 29-31.