Don't be deceived

The gospel today is a response to some people’s remark about the Temple, how it was adorned with fine stonework. Solomon’s temple had always occupied their mind as a great structure they had in the past. The second temple was not as glorious as the early one. Now, Herod makes a temple for them.

Let us keep in mind two things from the response of Jesus, “All these things … will be destroyed,” and “Take care not to be deceived, because many will come using my name and saying, “I am he” and, “The time is near at hand.”

What are we excited about? What are we really proud about? Our worship places? Our rituals and traditions? Our ways of understanding about God? Our social structures?, How much place is there for God in all these, though they are all in the name of God? If we cannot find in them the presence of God really alive, they will definitely collapse!

Unfortunately, we create super-GODs in our own liking and re-form our life according to the demands created by these self-made beloved GODs. They cannot give life, because they are empty of God.

Sacred traditions make us rooted in the original inspiration. They meaningfully place us in the present and carry us to the future. Traditions have an inspirational content which cannot be static but dynamic. There is a healthy blend between novelty and continuity in growth and transformation of traditions. However beautiful and perfect they are, any attempt to conserve them as a thing of the past within particular cultural frames will be like leaven preserved in a laboratory. Though in the name of God and faith they are in reality concerned about preservation of institutional structures and ideologies. They will be exclusive in nature and arrogant in approach. They cannot respect all people with their human dignity, but they define how one needs to be human, they define what is to be believed, they define how others have to conduct their lives.

It has happened and it can happen with us too that everything is centred on temple. Righteousness depended on how much you are fulfilling duties towards the temple. God himself was so condensed into the temple walls that outside the temple matters, everything was worldly. Priesthood was meant to be only a part of the cultic system of the temple. Jesus said that he is the temple. In him humanity sees God alive in our midst. He is the sacrifice and the offeror. Jesus also said that we are the temple in whom God dwells. Empty of God, empty of Christ we cannot be the temple. Keeping Christ aside, none of our definitions and social structures can hold the divine within them.

Jesus has taught us that God is loving Father, our basic religiosity is to be defined by a loving relationship with God. Many are around in his name. Don’t be deceived! Think for a moment what Jesus would say, how he would explain, how he would intervene. Then we shall live.