2 Maccabees 5:10: The Holy Place and the Holy People
Saturday, November 15, 2025
But the Lord did not choose the nation for the sake of the holy place, but the place for the sake of the nation.
So many times we get things backwards. We forget that we become weak in order to be made strong, that we serve in order to lead, and that we die that we may live in Christ. We have looked at the books of Maccabees many times before and just last spring we spent time with this chapter reflecting on the stark difference between mystery and problem, impatience and trust, pride and humility, anxiety versus openness to God’s awesome power, sedition versus fidelity. Here is some of what we were thinking.
We need to relax into the mystery of life more. We need to adapt a humble stance with our Creator and a willingness of heart to do as we are bidden. We need to immerse ourselves in God who is always with us rather than trying to swim upstream or downstream with God. We need to move away from sedition, death and the slandering and killing of fellow pilgrims. We need to move toward the light, toward the mystery, and allow it to embrace us.
We can view the mysterious way that God moves in our lives with awe or with skepticism. We can choose to believe or to disbelieve that Christ overcomes the barrier that death presents to the rest of us. We can choose to be faithful to our covenant agreement and call, or we can strike out on our own to find another God to worship, or we can even choose to worship ourselves and our own ideas. But none of this will satisfy because we will be making holy places where there is no holiness. We will be creating holy communions where there are none with whom to commune, for nothing can be made holy without God’s presence.
In 1 Corinthians Paul tells us several times in the opening chapters do you not know that you are living temples of God, members of the body of the living Christ? He echoes this on his other letters when he asks us to step away from immorality, from idolatry and to turn to the one true source of life: God the creator, God the redeemer, and God the love that exists in an inscrutable way deep within the mystery of each of us.
This is all that we are asked to do; yet we so often make life much more complicated than it really is. We are a holy people who come together when God calls us and thus we make holy places in which the Spirit will abide. And in so doing we will rise even amidst the worst of circumstances, even above the pillaging of the temple to be sheltered in God, to live eternally in the Spirit, to be renewed in hope and forged in fidelity, to remain of and in Christ. For we are his holy people, and he is our holy place.
A re-post from October 21, 2011.
Images from: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/The_Temple.html , http://www.urbanchristiannews.com, and http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/The_Temple.html
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