The Only Church That Matters Is the Temple of Christ's Body
33rd Sunday of the Year
When I was in seminary—maybe as you can imagine—I was a part of many conversations, discussions, and debates about church art and architecture. How should we build our churches? How should we decorate them? What is appropriate for a church, and what isn’t? There was always a deeper issue there in the background of these conversations that sometimes came to the surface: what is beauty and how important is beauty to the Christian life? For myself, what I came to understand is that the question of beauty and the Christian life is more difficult to answer than we might think. Christ is born in the poverty a manger; he is scourged and then nailed to a cross; the first liturgies in the history of our Church were celebrated in dark rooms with dirt floors on cheap wooden tables under the constant threat of arrest. There is a real way in which ugliness is right there at the center of our faith, and I think that any conversation about beauty or how we build our churches needs to take that kind of ugliness into consideration.
The good news for us is that no matter how we think churches should be built or decorated, Christ tells us in the Gospel today that our churches will not survive the horrors of history. We can adorn our temples with precious stones and votive offerings, and still the time will come when our churches, our cathedrals, our basilicas, will be torn down stone by stone. These warnings of Christ have always challenged the Christian faithful. Some say that Christ in these verses predicts only the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in the First Roman-Jewish War about 40 years after his death. Others say that Christ predicts the end of the world as we know it, giving to us a list of signs to look for that will assure us that the end of all things is drawing near. A better interpretation is that what Christ gives us in the Gospel today is a theology of history: Christ teaches us about what the Christian life looks like generation to generation, century to century. And the Christian life—generation to generation, century to century—is hard. It always has been, and it always will be.
What will make the Christian life so hard? Christ gives three answers.
First, there will be division and schism within the Church:
See that you not be deceived,
for many will come in my name, saying,
'I am he,' and 'The time has come.'
Do not follow them!
False prophets will profess false truths and threaten to lead the faithful away from Christ and the Church: do not follow these false prophets, Christ warns.
Second, there will be war and suffering in the world:
When you hear of wars and insurrections,
do not be terrified . . .Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
There will be powerful earthquakes, famines, and plagues
from place to place;
and awesome sights and mighty signs will come from the sky.
There is violence in the world and Christians will live as witnesses to the horrors of history. We will see with our own eyes the suffering that comes from war and natural disaster, a pattern of destruction that repeats throughout time and across all cultures.
Finally, there will come persecution for the faithful:
Before all this happens, however,
they will seize and persecute you,
they will hand you over to the synagogues and to prisons,
and they will have you led before kings and governors
because of my name.You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends,
and they will put some of you to death.
You will be hated by all because of my name . . .
When I was in seminary, I was also a part of many conversations about the persecution of the Church. There were many seminarians who made regular, dramatic claims about the persecution of Christians in our country. For my part, I always thought those claims a little far-fetched; look back through time or out into the world today and you will find Christians confronting much more direct and immediate forms of persecution. As far as it goes, I think we still have it pretty good. But there is no doubt that Christians suffer persecution, and Christ assures us in the Gospel today that we too—no matter how good things might be at the moment—will experience that kind of suffering. That is simply a truth about the Christian life.
So, what is a Christian to do? How is a Christian called to respond to the hardship and suffering of history? St. Paul gives us a simple answer in our second reading today:
You know how one must imitate us.
For we did not act in a disorderly way among you,
nor did we eat food received free from anyone.
On the contrary, in toil and drudgery, night and day
we worked, so as not to burden any of you.
Not that we do not have the right.
Rather, we wanted to present ourselves as a model for you,
so that you might imitate us.
What is the Christian to do? Work. How is the Christian called to respond to the hardship and suffering of history? By laboring for the good of the Church and for the good of the world. When St. Paul wrote this Second Letter to the Thessalonians, the Christian community in Thessalonica was very young and experiencing already profound suffering and persecution in history. The letter that St. Paul sends is a work of consolation and encouragement. And the work that St. Paul speaks about is not a personal labor for the sake of personal salvation. St. Paul is not advising that we build protective walls of prayer and holiness around ourselves so that we might endure the suffering while the world burns and the Church suffers. The labor St. Paul speaks about is social; it is the work of love and charity. How many times in Luke’s Gospel during these weeks of the liturgical year has Christ told us that the one who seeks to save his life will lose it while the one who seeks to lose his life will save it? Confronted with the horrors of history the Christian is called to labor for the good of the Church and the world; to save a life by way of losing it. There is the Christian response. Personal holiness is built upon the foundation of charity, or it is not built up at all.
There is a final claim I want to make. What I want to say is that the Christian response that St. Paul gives—the response of laboring for the good of the Church and the world—also resolves the question of beauty and the Christian life. Christ is not concerned with stone temples, gothic cathedrals, or neoclassical basilicas. The only temple that matters to Christ is the temple of his body, which is the Church. Christ warns that while temples built of stone and adorned with jewels and votive offerings will be torn down, the gates of hell will not prevail against his Church. The promise of the Christian life—the hope for the Christian life—confronted by the horrors of history is found only in the Church. The Church is the presence of the eternal within time, and the rest of the world is perishing and passing away.
When we labor for the good of the Church and the good of the world, when we do the work of charity in the midst of a world marked by division and war and famine and persecution, we share in the mission of the Church: to reveal the presence of the eternal within time. And there—in that kind of revelation—is real beauty. Where is the glory of God more visibly seen than in the birth of the Christ-child into the poverty of a manger? Where is the love of God more manifest to us than in the body of Christ scourged and hung upon a cross? Where is the transcendent power of God more clear to us than in a liturgy prayed in a dark room with a dirt floor and a cheap wooden table under the threat of arrest? It is good that we build our churches, and that we want our churches beautiful. But the only Church that matters—the only Church that will stand the test of time—is the temple of Christ’s body. And that temple—that Church—is made beautiful when she is adorned by our labor, our work, and our charity.
Homily preached on November 12th/13th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.