Thursday in the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, September 23, 2021

Haggai 1:1-8

On the first day of the sixth month in the second year of King Darius, The word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai to the governor of Judah, Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, and to the high priest Joshua, son of Jehozadak: Thus says the Lord of hosts: This people says: “The time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord.” (Then this word of the Lord came through Haggai, the prophet:) Is it time for you to dwell in your own paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins? Now thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways! You have sown much, but have brought in little; you have eaten, but have not been satisfied; You have drunk, but have not been exhilarated; have clothed yourselves, but not been warmed; And whoever earned wages earned them for a bag with holes in it. Thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways! Go up into the hill country; bring timber, and build the house that I may take pleasure in it and receive my glory, says the Lord.

The Prophet Haggai worked in Jerusalem around the year 520 B.C., as we know from information provided in the book of his prophecies.  He is said to have been a young man at the time of the return of the Jewish exiles in Babylon to Judea.  The returning Jews were filled with religious zeal and they began to restore the worship of God as soon as they reached Jerusalem.  They began to rebuild the Temple, though short of money and materials, but a few years later work came to a standstill as a result of flagging zeal and years of bad harvests.  The work ceased for some sixteen years, and it was during that time that the word of the Lord came to Haggai, to urge the work to be resumed. 

A note of interest regarding the words in the reading which precede the actual prophecy.   Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, is mentioned as an ancestor of the Lord Jesus according to his human nature in the genealogy at the head of St. Matthew’s Gospel.  

“The time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord.”  Haggai gives the popular opinion of the time that other matters had to come before the Temple.  The political situation of the time was marked by uncertainty and instability, as well.  The Samaritans, for instance, actively tried to thwart the rebuilding of the Temple.  This opinion begs the retort that the perfect time for building the Temple or for beginning any project will never arrive.  As the commandant of my high school told my class once, “If you wait until you have enough money to marry, you will never get married.”  “Is it time for you to dwell in your own paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?”  The Lord contends through Haggai that the people had their houses while their God did not.  It would be as if the master slept outside while the slaves slept in their quarters.  

“You have sown much, but have brought in little; you have eaten, but have not been satisfied; You have drunk, but have not been exhilarated; have clothed yourselves, but not been warmed.”  Through the Prophet, Almighty God sums up the situation of the Jews at this time: they have indeed returned from Babylon, but their life was not magically transformed after they returned.  They still had to plow fields and sow seeds and harvest grain and fruit in order to eat.  In addition, their life was made hard by the fact that Jerusalem still lay largely in ruins.  The walls had been pulled down by the Babylonians and the city burned.  Besides this, drought on successive years had led to hunger and increased poverty.  Truly, the returning Jews had eaten, but not been filled.

“Consider your ways! Go up into the hill country; bring timber, and build the house that I may take pleasure in it and receive my glory, says the Lord.”  The Lord indicates to them that their lot will improve only when his House is restored, so that he may dwell among them.  Of course, the Jews did not believe that the infinite God could be contained in a house or that he needed one for any reason.  The Temple meant the restoration of their religion and a rededication of themselves as servants of the one, true God.  Service to God must come before taking care even of oneself.  As the Lord Jesus would say five hundred years later, “He who loves father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10, 37).  As for the improvement of the lot of those dedicated to the service of God, Jesus says, “Be not anxious therefore, saying: What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or how shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the heathens seek. Your Father knows that you have need of all these things. Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6, 31-33).

For nearly five hundred years, the second Temple, built on the site of Solomon’s original Temple, stood modestly in the Holy City.  King Herod the Great , in the years before the birth of the Lord Jesus, began an extensive overhaul of the structure so that it regained much of the glory of the first Temple.  It was in this Temple that the Lord Jesus prayed, taught, and performed many miracles.  He who had spoken through the prophets, including Haggai, at last came to speak himself.

We can understand the Temple of God, as Paul did, as ourselves: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God: and you are not your own?” (1 Corinthians 6, 19).  We become Temples upon our baptism.  We are consecrated to God’s service, and he dwells within us.  When we sin, we drive the Lord from his Temple, and when we fall from the Faith we tear it down, as the Babylonians tore down the first Temple, and as the Romans destroyed the second, sending our souls into a bitter exile away from God.  But when we recover our faith, by the grace of God, we return from our exile and rebuild our Temple so that he may dwell within us once again as our Sovereign and Savior.