The Holiness Within Us


	Fr. Roger Vermalen Karban

The readings for Sunday, November 9, 2003, the Thirty-First Sunday of the Year, are Genesis 28:11-18; I Corinthians 3:9c-11, 16-17; Luke 19:1-10.

Those who select liturgical readings have a problem when it comes to biblically scripting feasts of church dedications. The only churches which early Christians knew were communities of Jesus’ disciples who gathered in homes to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. During the period in which the Christian Scriptures were composed, no one had yet dared call a building a church. Such an unchristian use of the word was still several centuries away.

Today’s passage from I Corinthians tells us that Jesus’ first followers believed the place in which God most dwelt was in the individual Christian. “You are God’s building,” Paul reminds his readers. “… Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” Paul’s theology was a quantum leap forward from his Jewish roots. But on another level; yet those roots prepared him for that leap.

In his ground-breaking work, “The Sacred and the Profane,” Mircea Eliade showed that people in the ancient world presumed God had designated certain places to be holy from the moment of creation. We think places are holy because holy things happened there; they believed such places were holy simply because God decided to create them holy. These places were the connecting links between heaven and earth. Human beings were expected to discover such sacred spots and set time apart from their profane surroundings. This happens in today’s first reading.

Jacob, running away from his brother Esau’s death threat, arrives at a pagan shrine. He sleeps there, not because he believes it’s holy, but because it offers him safety. Then the unexpected happens. He discovers that, though it’s pagan property, it’s one of Yahweh’s holy places. His dream depicts Yahweh’s messengers going up and down the spiral staircase which twisted around all pagan ziggurate temples. Then Yahweh appears and promises him descendants and the land of Canaan. The key verse is Jacob’s proclamation, “Truly Yahweh is in this spot, although I didn’t know it!” No one would have expected that a pagan temple was “an abode of God … the gateway to heaven.”

Jesus’ first disciples seem to have rejected the concept that God designated certain geographic places holy. They believed that, because Jesus as God had become one with us, we were holy. Yet, discovering our personal sacredness was just as difficult and amazing as discovering sacred places in the Hebrew scriptures.

Jesus is our guide in this process. Notice in today’s Gospel that he’s the only one who uncovers Zaccheaus’ holiness. As a tax collector, he’s forbidden to even visit Jewish holy places. Yet Jesus perceives that even this notorious sinner is “a descendent of Abraham.” If Zaccheaus can’t go to God’s house, then Jesus will go to Zaccheaus’ house.
Once the tax collector discovers his own holiness, his behavior changes. “I give half my possessions to the poor,” he declares. “If I have extorted anything from anyone, I shall pay it back four times over.” A holy person is starting to do holy things.

Perhaps our practice of calling buildings, not communities, churches is a sign that we’ve lost some of the charism of the early Christian community. It’s far easier and less threatening to construct a holy building than to discover the holiness God has embedded in each of us. If certain buildings are holy, it can only be because holy people use them for holy purposes. Ironically, had it not been replaced by the Lateran feast, we would have heard the Marcan passage today in which Jesus bemoans a poor widow who has been cajoled by religious authorities to give her last few cents for the upkeep of a holy building, the Jerusalem temple.

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