Chapter 7 of the Second Book of Samuel recounts a conversation between King David and the prophet Nathan. David was settled comfortably “in a house of cedar” (v. 2) in Jerusalem, the city he conquered. Israel’s situation had been largely stabilized, the threats of its enemies contained.
But David is bothered: while he dwells in an elegant palace, “the ark of God remains in a tent.”
The tent contained the Ark of the Covenant, the tablets of Sinai. It’s hard to explain their significance to Israel. In one sense, they were Israel’s constitution. But the Ark of the Covenant was no traveling National Archives. The Sinai Covenant was more than a document. Written with the finger of God, these tablets were the basis of who Israel was—God’s people—and who Yahweh was to them.
Given their significance, David feels a disproportion between where he and they dwell. He proposes—and builds—a temple for them.
But God is never outdone by human effort (of whose inspiration he initiates through grace). Although Nathan tells David to do what the king has in mind (v. 3), he subsequently adds how God intends to match and exceed David. David might build the Lord a temple for a house, but God will make the “house of David” last forever through a Messiah from that lineage (vv. 11-16).
Man wants to build a physical house. God wants to make man himself a home in which to dwell. Man’s efforts are always so clumsy that Scripture sums them up as “he did not know what he was saying” (Luke 9:33) when Peter’s response to Jesus’ transfiguration (to which we are also called at the Last Judgment) was to propose building Sukkot tents. Or to giggle from inside a tent when the Divine Visitation offers a son in one’s old age (Gen. 18:9-15).
God would, by prevenient grace, create a human ark of the covenant, the Blessed Virgin Mary, to carry Jesus, the promised fulfillment of the Davidic house.
But if Jesus “fully reveals man to himself” (as both Vatican II and Pope St. John Paul II repeatedly insisted), God’s homebuilding did not end with Jesus as the eternal King. God aspires to do similar construction work among men through his Habitat for Divinity program.
In his conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus makes clear that the physical locus of worship is less important than that man worship God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). It’s not that a sacred place is unimportant, but that its locus has changed.
Elsewhere, St. Paul makes that clear when he asks, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is within you?” (1 Cor 6:19). That doesn’t mean the Church is unimportant: a church is “the house of God” because he is really present there, in the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the tabernacle.
But the house in which God really desires to dwell, the tabernacle in which he prefers to be really present, is the human heart, the heart that worships him “in spirit and in truth.” That is why that human temple is sacramentally sanctified: blessed and consecrated in baptism and confirmation and fully rendered a tabernacle by the Eucharist. It is the dignity of that temple that spurs St. Paul to deplore its sacrilege.
In the Book of Revelation (ch. 21) the heavenly Jerusalem has no temple. The mediating structure of temple—of Church and sacrament—is no longer necessary in the Beatific Vision (see Lumen Gentium 48), for “we shall see him as he is” and “be like him” (1 John 3:2). Revelation describes the heavenly Jerusalem as “God’s dwelling place . . . now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (21:3). What goes around comes around. David’s temple containing the Ark of the Covenant is replaced by God’s own temple, in which Jesus himself is the covenant by which man can be God’s people and he their God.
The practical consequence: building ourselves, through cooperation with God’s grace, into ever more fitting temples in which the spirit of God can dwell. The warning that we “work out our salvation in fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12) should make us aware that we can fail at the task—not because God does not enable us to succeed, but because we can refuse his grace. “If God does not build the house, in vain do the builders labor” (Ps. 129:1) does not mean there’s a shortage of people working on futile human construction projects. History is littered with them, building the “new man” without God. Joining our work with his grace, however, enables us to stand up houses—temples—on rock instead of sand (Matt. 7:24-27).