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Master·evangeli.net

Today's Gospel + short theological explanation

Tuesday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
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Gospel text (Lk 21:5-11): While some people were speaking about how the temple was adorned with costly stones and votive offerings, Jesus said, “All that you see here– the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down...”

Demolition of the Temple of Jerusalem

EDITORIAL TEAM evangeli.net (based on texts by Benedict XVI) (Città del Vaticano, Vatican)

Today, starting the "Eschatological Discourse", we find again the announcement of the dramatic end of the Temple of Jerusalem. The "Lord of History" neither was wrong nor was He exaggerating... Indeed, on the 5th of August, 70 AD (about 40 years after his Ascension) there was an event of great consequence for the history of religions: because of the shortage of the necessary elements, the daily sacrifice in the Temple had to be suspended. Shortly after that, it was demolished by the Romans.

For Judaism, the cessation of slaughter and destruction of the Temple had to be a terrible shock. The Temple and sacrifice were at the center of the Torah. And even more: God, who had put His name in the Temple and lived in it mysteriously, abandoned it, and it was no longer His home on earth. The Old Testament should be read in a new way!

—It is the Blood of the Lamb of God (Jesus) that takes away the sins of the world; the blood of killed animals was just a figure of that supreme reality.