It is good to read the Old Testament with Christian optics to be able to understand who Jesus is as the savior. But if we don’t go further to understand the Old Testament culture, we will lose much of what is being said there. When I was in the seminary, in a class on Wisdom literature from the Old Testament, one of my classmates asked a question from the Christian perspective. The professor was so disturbed by the question that he simple replied: “What am I going to do with you Christians?” Without an understanding Old Testament life, we cannot understand the reading today from the prophet Ezekiel nor the depth of what Jesus says in the Gospel today and who we are as a Christian community.
Israel had only one temple in all of its territory. It was the center of all life and relationship with God. The arc of the covenant was there with the tablets of the ten commandments. All ritual sacrifices were made there, and only there, because God resided there. It was the only place where one could make atonement for sins and be reconciled with God. It was Israel’s visible, physical point of connection with God.
The Word of God comes to Ezekiel to announce that God saw how the people of Israel had based their lives on violence, pride, worship of idols, trust in gold, perversities, and a disorganized moral urban life. Yet the most serious charge is that people stopped blessing and adoring God. They stopped speaking well of God and proclaiming their faith in God. Simply put, the charge is that they curse God by saying: Yahweh has abandoned the country, Yahweh cannot see.
In his vision, Ezekiel hears God order the defilement of the temple and the destruction of the city. Then he sees the Glory of God raise up and leave the temple through the east door and go out into the mountains to the east of Jerusalem. God left the temple. This is a devastating catastrophic event for Israel. Even the beautiful temple built later by Herod the Great just before Jesus’ birth lacked the presence of God. It was the largest construction project in the whole Mediterranean over a period of several generations – yet God was not there. When Ezekiel goes out to proclaim his vison that the Glory of God had left, people drop dead from shock.
When Jesus is born into us as a human being, he comes as the return of the Glory of God. God recreates our own being, our soul and heart – not a stone building. When he goes to the temple in Jerusalem, he enters as the returning Glory of God and he cleanses it by throwing out the merchants and declares that he will rebuild that huge, beautiful temple in three days. Today’s reading from the Gospel is about the importance of living out our vocation to be a true temple of God’s presence, the true Glory of God through our relationships with each other and with God. Communal correction, calling each other to conversion, blessing and adoring God (not cursing God), and living in peace serving each other are signs of being the temple of God in the world.
The exit of the Glory of God from the temple in Jerusalem as seen by Ezekiel was a catastrophic moment that endured for centuries in the life of Israel. What Jesus says in today’s Gospel is just as shocking and revolutionary. It points to God’s deep abiding love for each of us and the importance of our mission in the world. Jesus puts the Christian community on the same plane as the Old Testament temple:
For where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them.
Image: ChatGPT CJ Dunn 07 August 2026 “Make an horizontal image of the glory of God leaving the Jerusalem temple and going off to the east Ezekiel 9:1-7; 10:18-22”.