Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Health Vailankanni

About the sabbath (...) he also tells them: “I have no patience with your new moons and sabbaths” (Is 1:13). You can see what he is saying there: “It is not these sabbaths of the present age that I find acceptable, but the one of my own appointment: the one that, after I have set all things at rest, is to usher in the Eighth Day, the commencement of a new world.” And we too rejoice in celebrating the eighth day; because that was when Jesus rose from the dead, and showed Himself again, and ascended into heaven. We come now to the matter of the Temple; and I will show you how mistaken these miserable folk were in pinning their hopes to the building itself, as if that were the home of God, instead of to God their own Creator. (...) But what we have to ask next is: Can there be any such thing as a temple of God at all? To be sure there can - but where He Himself tells us that He is building it and perfecting it. For it is written: “When the week draws to its close, then a Temple of God will be built gloriously in the Name of the Lord” (cf. Tb 14:5). From this I must infer that there is indeed such a thing as a temple. Only, mark that it is to be “built in the Name of the Lord”, for in the days before we believed in God, our hearts were a rotten, shaky abode, and a temple only too truly built with hands, since by our persistent opposition to God we had made them into a chamber of idolatry and a home for demons. But now “it will be built in the Name of the Lord”. Make sure, too, that this temple of the Lord shall be built “gloriously”, and listen to the way in which this can be done. When we were granted remission of our sins, and came to put our hopes in His Name, we were made new, created all over again from the beginning; and as a consequence of that, God is at this moment actually dwelling within us in that poor habitation of ours.

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Friday of the Fifteenth week in Ordinary Time

"Something greater than the temple is here"

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