Adorning Temples

Gospel: Luke 21: 5-11

The context of Jesus speaking about wars and natural disasters is the fact that people are fawning over the beauty of the Temple building.  It was a beautiful structure, as were many other places made by human hands that are no more.  But these places are non-living structures, and they do not compare to the temple God made - the human person who is a living being and who has an eternal destiny, neither of which these buildings possess.  The building will be destroyed and be no more; the human person will live on.  

Yet we spend so much of our time enamored of our buildings and their adornments, often at the expense of human beings, the temples of God.  We marvel at the Temple, forgetting it was built through human slavery and degradation of other human beings.  We are aghast at any impropriety in temple buildings, but we think so little of abasing other human beings and exploiting them for our benefit.  We are fully immersed in the idolatry of false temples to the neglect of the true ones.  

Jesus spent his entire ministry healing, liberating, and nourishing the temples of God he encountered each day - people.  He was utterly indifferent to buildings and structures like the Temple.  He preferred the work and worship of the Good Samaritan to that of the priest and Levite.  If we claim to be followers of the Lord Jesus, if we claim to care about idolatry, then let us follow his example and care more for the temples God has created with eternal destinies and less to those we have made that do not.