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Saturday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time Memorial of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Ezekiel 43:1–7ab
Early in the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet sees a terrible vision.
The glory of the Lord leaves the temple.
This is not because God is weak.
It is because the temple has been polluted.
Idols are there.
False worship is there.
Priests worship the sun.
Leaders bow before images.
Women weep for Tammuz, a foreign god of fertility and vegetation.
And the whole land is wounded by injustice.
The Lord does not remain where His name is used,
but His will is rejected.
He does not remain where worship is beautiful,
but hearts are far from Him.
So the glory departs.
This is one of the saddest moments in the Old Testament.
The temple is still standing,
but the glory is gone.
The building remains,
but the Presence has left.
Today, Ezekiel sees the opposite.
After judgment,
after destruction,
after purification,
he sees a new temple.
And the glory of the Lord returns.
It comes from the east.
It fills the house.
And the Lord says:
“This is the place of my throne.”
This is a vision of hope.
But it is hope rooted in memory.
At the end of Exodus, when Israel builds the tabernacle in the desert,
the glory of the Lord fills it.
No one can enter.
Later, when Solomon completes the temple in Jerusalem,
the glory of the Lord fills the house again.
Again, no one can stand there to minister.
God’s glory is heavy.
It is not decoration.
It is not atmosphere.
It is the living presence of the Holy One.
When Jesus enters the temple, something similar happens.
His presence is heavy.
He does not allow business to continue as usual.
He drives out the sellers and buyers.
He overturns the tables.
He stops the temple from becoming a marketplace.
But then, like the glory of the Lord in Ezekiel’s earlier vision,
Jesus leaves the temple.
And He does not return to it in the same way.
The future of God’s dwelling will not be only a building of stone.
In Ezekiel, the new temple is the place where God dwells among Israel.
But in the Book of Revelation, the vision becomes wider.
John sees the new Jerusalem.
There, the whole city becomes God’s dwelling among all peoples.
And there is no temple in the city,
because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.
This is the final hope.
God returns.
God dwells.
God fills everything with His glory.
And the Blessed Virgin Mary already shares in this glory.
She reminds us where the Church is going:
toward the city where God will be all in all,
and where His glory will never depart again.
Biblical Reflections on the Gospel of Matthew
Scripture Attribution
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition,
copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Content License
© 2025 Krakus.
Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
(Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial).