Gospel Reflection: Church: building or body?
Today’s Gospel is from John and gives us an example of Jesus showing his humanity, his anger, frustration and righteous indignation at the way His Father’s house, the Temple was being used like a market place.
In the Gospel we hear how Jesus drove out the money changers and the pigeon sellers. When asked by the Jewish authorities to justify his actions Jesus said, ‘Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will build it up’. This didn’t make sense to those around because the Temple had taken 46 years to build and still wasn’t finished. Of course, Jesus wasn’t talking about a building, he was talking about his body. And as we hear in the Gospel, the disciples remembered his words when he rose from the dead.
We talk about Jesus being the head of the Church and we are the body of Christ; we are the Church. As St Paul says in one of his letters to the Corinthians, we are all parts of that body with different roles to play. Some of those roles are public facing and therefore more visible and obvious but we are all called to play our part, even if what we do isn’t always visible to others.
"One Body, Many Parts"
by Tyler Neyens
is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
As the final line of the Gospel says, Jesus could tell what a person had in them, so maybe as we pray this week we can ask how we can help Jesus to continue to build his body the Church in Lancaster.