Today as we celebrate the feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica we not only remember Holy Mother Church but what it means to be Church.
Church is where God’s presence dwells. How awesome that we all have a parish Church we can congregate, praise, worship as One and receive Holy Communion. St Paul reminds us that we individually are God’s sacred Church too! For the Spirit of God dwells in our heart. We must therefore strive for purity and Holiness.
Let us be built up like living stones, into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood. Amen
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First reading
1 Corinthians 3:9-11,16-17
The temple of God is sacred, and you are that temple
You are God’s building. By the grace God gave me, I succeeded as an architect and laid the foundations, on which someone else is doing the building. Everyone doing the building must work carefully. For the foundation, nobody can lay any other than the one which has already been laid, that is Jesus Christ.
Didn’t you realise that you were God’s temple and that the Spirit of God was living among you? If anybody should destroy the temple of God, God will destroy him, because the temple of God is sacred; and you are that temple.
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Gospel
John 2:13-22
Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up
Just before the Jewish Passover Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and in the Temple he found people selling cattle and sheep and pigeons, and the money changers sitting at their counters there. Making a whip out of some cord, he drove them all out of the Temple, cattle and sheep as well, scattered the money changers’ coins, knocked their tables over and said to the pigeon-sellers, ‘Take all this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market.’ Then his disciples remembered the words of scripture: Zeal for your house will devour me. The Jews intervened and said, ‘What sign can you show us to justify what you have done?’ Jesus answered, ‘Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this sanctuary: are you going to raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the sanctuary that was his body, and when Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the words he had said.
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