When I was a student, one of my Jesuit professors told us how he had a unique relic of Jesus himself. Eagerly we asked him what it was. “It’s the stone that Jesus could not find to lay his head on!” he replied.
Stones. We humans love stones: Ħaġar Qim, Ġgantija, Mnajdra, Mosta Dome – what a heritage! Add to them our modern temples created by our frenzied construction industry – luxury villas, hotels, glass towers, high-rise offices and apartments – modern monuments to our wealth and stupidity. One is tempted to say that we are still living in the Stone Age, even if concrete and glass have become the modern version of stone.
Such was the impressively beautiful Jerusalem Temple for the Jews – a source of pride, superiority and so-called devotion. Jesus’ reaction was shocking: “All that you see here, the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone...” (Mt 24:2). These stones you are admiring will one day become rubble and ruins.
We need dwellings and homes. So, like our Stone Age ancestors, we imagine that God also needs a fixed address where we can find him. So we build glorious and marvellous temples, churches, chapels... But is it for God’s glory or for ours? Is it God’s needs or our needs that we have in mind?
This applies also to the temples we build to our modern, false gods – money, fame, power. What our Neolithic ancestors did, we still do today – build temples for our gods. Only our gods have changed. Their name is power, greed, money and pleasure.
The true, one and only God chose to live among us in Jesus. When asked for his address he simply replied: “Come and see...! Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” (Mt 8:19-20)
God is like a beautiful bird in flight. But our instinct is to catch him and build for him beautiful, golden cages that we call temples, little realising that our aim is to imprison him, just as a trapper puts a beautiful bird in a cage for his own pleasure and convenience.
We have a tough time accepting that our God is the beauty of life that is free and wild and cannot be tamed, possessed or controlled by us his creatures. So we change his name and nature, and build for him impressive stone, glass, steel or simply golden cages.
Jesus refuses to play the game. He refuses to be locked up in any temple, church, high-rise building or luxurious villa. He loves us too much to remain our prisoner. He breaks open all doors and locks to show us the way to freedom that makes our life full and real.
Jesus breaks open all doors and locks to show us the way to freedom that makes our life full and real
The big, heavy stone blocking the tomb of our greed will one day be moved out of the way so that a new, real life will emerge.
We still have a choice. Let us make our temples and dwellings beautiful and welcoming places where people live, love and give life. Everything in stone, steel or glass will end up in rubble, but in Jesus, life and love will always emerge victorious over the stone heaps and ruins of our blunders.
The alternative is sliding back to the Stone Age.