Christmas occupies such a large part of the Christian imagination that the absolute supremacy of Easter as the greatest of Christian feasts may get obscured at times. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, an Italian biblical scholar, suggests that we might begin to appreciate how Easter changed everything—and gave the birth of Jesus at Christmas its significance—by reflecting on the story of Jesus purifying the Jerusalem Temple, at the beginning of John’s Gospel.
In this prophetic and symbolic act, Ravasi writes, Jesus draws a sharp contrast between a religion of superficiality and self-absorption and a pure faith, centered on his person. God can no longer be present in a Temple that has ceased to be a place of encounter, the “meeting tent” of the ancient Hebrews; that Temple, however magnificently constructed, had become a place of superstition and self-interest. In cleansing the Temple, Jesus is declaring that God is now present to his people in a new and perfect way and in a new “meeting tent”: the incarnate Son, “the Word … made flesh” who dwells among us, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). He, Jesus, is the new Temple, and to recognize that and live in this new mode of the divine Presence one must “remember,” as St. John writes at the end of the Temple-cleansing story (2:22).
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