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Yesterday we began our journey among the places of the Holy Week story, out on the streets of Jerusalem. Tonight I want to take us into the very heart of the city – into the temple.
The temple is a constant feature of the Gospels, perhaps most vividly in Luke. Jesus is taken there as a baby; and greeted by Simeon and Anna, who foretell some of what will pass. At the age of twelve he is discovered there, among the teachers, having gone missing on a family visit to the capital. We could have read tonight from chapter 19, where he casts out the merchants from the temple, or from chapter 20 where he is preaching there. The very last sentence of the Gospel describes how, after the resurrection appearances the disciples “stayed continually at the temple, praising God”.
Jesus takes the temple very seriously – it is a special place where God is particularly closes. A place hallowed by God’s promises and human worship over centuries. Holy places matter, and you can’t get more holy than the temple. Its closeness to God makes it particularly appropriate for prayer, for offering, for teaching, for prophesy – hence Jesus’ anger that these activities are being interrupted or squeezed by the trading in religious paraphernalia. I’m not arguing against the discreetly placed Fair Trade or book stall, they are a long way from the haggling and bartering, the squawks of birds and animals, that turned the temple into a noisy Middle Eastern Market.
The prominence of the temple in both Old and New Testaments challenges us to both make and guard holy places. Perhaps the one thing I miss most through being a bishop is that I no longer live next door to a parish church in which I can easily go to be quiet before God and say my prayers. There is something hugely powerful in buildings that have been centres of worship for hundreds of years. The curtain between heaven and earth is especially thin when we pray in the same places that our ancestors have prayed. When Henry VIII kicked the pope and his friends out of the Church of England (to quote the wonderful “1066 and all that”) the buildings stayed and continued to be the worship places of the English people.
The respect that Jesus has for the temple in Luke’s Gospel is not diminished by his warning in today’s Gospel that it will be destroyed. (Incidentally, in Luke we never hear Jesus being accused of threatening to tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days – Luke just doesn’t want to go there). The temple will have to go not because it is wrong in itself, but because the way people have treated it has made it for many an obstacle to God rather than a pathway to him. In fact, let me put it even stronger, the temple and its associated meanings and activities have become a substitute for God (That’s something Jesus alludes to when he speaks of how people swear oaths at various parts of the temple and its activities).
In the words of that great English writer George Herbert, “a man who looks on glass, on it may stay his eye”. And the danger is that we think the glass is the reality beyond it. It’s all too easy, in our magnificent historic churches to make the same mistake. We transfer truths about God onto the building, and the building cannot bear them. Because God is changeless we resist any alteration to the fabric or furnishings of the church. Or we become unable to worship him through any form of language or style of hymns that differs from what we were brought up in. The church becomes a monument to the past, or to our revered ancestors, instead of representing the fresh proclaiming of the eternal gospel in every generation.
Jesus leaves the temple shortly after tonight’s gospel passage, never to return. With blistering irony the one supreme sacrifice – greater than all the millions that have been held within its walls – will take place outside the city, on the rubbish heap, a few days later. As we journey on with him, to the next place on our pilgrimage, we give thanks for this building, and its many sisters, and pledge ourselves to use it as the means of approaching God whilst never letting it take his place.
Bishop David
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