It’s a rare thing that St. John the Lateran is celebrated on a Sunday. It’s the solemnity. I want to tell you about how this came to be a feast day and the importance of what it meant for all of us as Christians.
Beginning in the very early times of the church after Jesus suffered, died, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and gave his gift of the spirit to the apostles, from that time on the apostles would go out to all the ends of the earth, but they would all be persecuted and martyred, including St. Matthias, who was martyred with an axe. From the very beginning, the church was being persecuted. Jesus promised this to the apostles, he said that just as I have suffered and died you too will suffer and die. At that time the entire world was kind of under the power of Rome. Rome was the superpower of the day. Romans were all pagans. They literally worshipped different gods, and they had different idols that they worshipped.
Because St. Peter had gone to Rome and began to convert Rome, all of a sudden Catholics began to grow and surge in this city. At that time, because Catholics were growing and they weren’t worshiping the god of the Romans, they were seen as a threat. So, Rome began to persecute all of the early Christians. They weren’t allowed to celebrate the faith publicly, and if they were caught celebrating the faith publicly, they would be martyred. We have many martyrs from the early church. At that time as well, there was no place for the Catholics even to bury the dead, so outside of the city walls they would buy little plots of land. Unknowingly in these little plots of land they would dig deep into the earth, and they would make tunnels all throughout the ground. That’s where they would bury the dead. Because they had no place to worship, late at night they would light their lanterns, they would go into the catacombs and they would find a slab where the martyrs had been buried. They used that for the first altars. For the first couple hundred years of Christianity, it literally was an underground church. They would celebrate at the bones of the martyrs. This would go on for the first couple hundred years. All of our first Popes were actually buried in these crypts. You can still go see them today. This persecution would last for three hundred years.
From the earliest days of the church, we didn’t have a church. The church was known as the people of God. That was the church until the time of Emperor Constantine. Emperor Constantine lived in the early three hundreds, and he was fighting this war with the rest of the world. He had a dream one night, and in his dream, he was a Pagan by the way, in his dream, Jesus came to him as Christ the King, and he gave this message to Constantine about how he was to win this war. When Constantine won the war, he remembered Jesus Christ the King. He had at some point received this plot of land from this family called the Lateran family, and this plot of land would be called The Lateran. Because he made this promise to Jesus, he decided that, first of all, he would legalize Christianity.
For the first time in all of history Christianity was legalized, and he gave this family plot of land with this big building called the Lateran, to the Catholics. It was at that point that the church finally had a place to worship. St. John the Lateran Basilica would become the first church, and it was the Cathedral of Rome. We often think of St. Peter’s as being the big place in Rome, and it is. That’s where Peter is buried, but that was built much later. St. John the Lateran was the first church, and it became the Cathedral of the Pope where he would live for many, many centuries until there was a fire. That’s when they moved to St. Peter’s.
Paul says something really interesting in the second reading. He’s talking to the people; he’s encouraging them during their persecution, during their hiddenness, during this time when they had no safe place to worship, the temple where the Jews worshipped was going to be destroyed.
Paul said to his disciples, “You are the temple of God because the Holy Spirit dwells in you and you are holy.” Have you ever heard that about yourself (pointing to people in the congregation)? You are holy, you are holy, you are holy, you are holy, you are holy. We are God’s temple, and from those early times when the church began to discover who they really were and to begin to be able to thrive and to grow as a church and not be persecuted, they would often say, there was a line that came from the second century, but they would say, “Without the Eucharist we have no life.”
The reason that they met every Sunday and risked being martyred was because they realized that they cannot live without the Eucharist. We know that the Third Commandment of the church is to keep Holy the Sabbath, and it’s also the First Precept of the church, to never miss a mass on Sunday. Yet I often hear people say to me and I sometimes get shocked that they’re saying it to me, but they’ll say like, “Father, we had a busy weekend. We had sports all the time and we just had no time for mass.” I think, wait a minute, they were martyred because they didn’t want to miss mass on Sundays. They gave their lives because they wanted to have this holiness within them. Sometimes people will say to me, “Father, I just couldn’t get up. I was tired and I just didn’t feel like going.” I think, no! They were martyred for their faith! Sunday was that important. The latest one now, and people might be watching, “Father, I just stay home and stream it.” And I think, no! You cannot receive the Eucharist on line. And I think, you have to gather together.
We come together to receive the Eucharist into us. This is the Eucharist that we cannot live without. This is the Eucharist that we need to sustain us every week. The Eucharist is what makes us the temple of God. When we leave Mass every Sunday having received the Eucharist, you become living tabernacles. You go out into the world, and Jesus is in the world because he is in you and because the Holy Spirit dwells in you, and you are holy.
Let us never miss an opportunity to receive the Eucharist. May we realize what the apostles and the early church martyrs went through just to receive the Eucharist on Sundays. I know it was often said that this isn’t the church (signaling the building), this is the church (signaling the congregation). The church is the living body of Christ. We cannot be his body if we are not joined together and if we do not receive his body into us. As we celebrate this great feast of St. John the Lateran, we also realize what a gift it is that we can come together publicly and worship. We’re not going to get murdered for coming to Sunday Mass. Isn’t that great? It’s so important for us to come together on Sunday to worship together, to be his body, and to receive the Eucharist so that we may continue to be holy.
