Razing the Temple

Convivium, 18 April 2019

In the light of Good Friday, the Holy Week burning of Notre Dame de Paris provides spiritual illumination for the broken – then gloriously resurrected – body of Christ, writes Convivium’s Father Raymond de Souza.

The fire at Notre Dame de Paris has been widely lamented as a cultural event of the highest order, but at the same time underplaying that that Notre Dame is principally a place of cult, of worship, a church. That point was made well by John Robson in the National Post, where I also commented. Our own Rachel DeBruyn commented here at Convivium.

Yet that point will not be missed by faithful Christians this Holy Week. On Good Friday, as many reflect upon the text of the passion in St. Matthew’s Gospel, they will hear the testimony against Jesus against the news of the near-destruction of Notre Dame: “At last two came forward and said, “This fellow said, ‘I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.’” (Mt 26:60-61)

It is a reference to throwing out of the moneychangers from the temple. The account from St. John’s Gospel includes not only the provocative action, but an even more astonishing, scandalizing claim:

The Jews then said to him, “What sign have you to show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he spoke of the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken. (Jn 2:18-22)

The global reaction to the fire at Notre Dame gives us some sense of how astonishing that exchange in John 2 must have been to those present. The temple of Jerusalem meant more to the Jews than Notre Dame means to France. It would not be too much to say that the Chosen People were chosen precisely for the sake of a future temple, that a “house of prayer for all nations” (cf. Mk 11:17) would be built in which the one true God, the God of Abraham, would be worshiped in spirit and in truth (cf. Jn 4:23-24).

The calamity of the destruction of Solomon’s temple was accompanied by the exile and dispersal of the Jewish people, the apparent failure of the covenant, the loss of the promised land. The return to the land of Israel, the restoration of the promise, the renewal of the covenant, was not truly fulfilled until the temple was built anew.

So while Notre Dame holds a unique place in the history and identity of France, the temple of Jerusalem was so much more. It was for Jews not a symbol of God’s presence, but the singular, veritable Presence. So to speak of the destruction of the temple to a Jew was a much more grave thing – even a blasphemous thing – than to speak of the destruction of Notre Dame to a Parisian.

Continue reading at Convivium: https://www.convivium.ca/articles/razing-the-temple