In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.
In the name of the Father…
Today we celebrate the dedication of this Church of the Resurrection, this place for which we have so many reasons to be grateful, to be thankful, to celebrate; this place that is simultaneously our workplace and our sanctuary, this place in which we have all already spent so many hours of our lives both in sorrow and in joy (and in many things in between), this place in which our founders rest, and to which, more than likely, we will ourselves be brought when we die, this place which is in many ways more truly our home than the house we eat and sleep in.
And yet, for all the right and proper mood of celebration that comes with this feast, the gospel we have just heard rather jolts us out of any cosy sense of complacency when it comes to this church and what goes on within it. Though the Lord has hard words to say elsewhere, there is nothing quite like this explosion of wrath and violence anywhere in the gospels. And that ought to give us pause. Though familiarity has somewhat blunted its edge, it is, by any estimation, a frightening gospel. And we cannot avoid the fact that what provokes this frightening display of wrath appears to be the misuse of a place of worship. And so as we celebrate and give thanks for this place, it behoves us also not to let this occasion pass without asking ourselves what we think it is for.
How, then, might we begin to describe what it is that goes on in this church? Perhaps the most succinct way of putting it, taking our cue from St Benedict, is to say that the monastic oratory is the place in which a religious community is performed. And what we mean by “performed” in this context is at least two things.
In the first place, the monastic oratory is the place in which a kind of ritual and sacramental version of the Community’s life is daily played out. And in this performance what we might call the Community’s “spiritual imagination” is both expressed and reaffirmed, in other words, what it considers to be most basic to its identity, what it cares about most deeply, what it considers itself most fundamentally to be.At the very centre of this performance, of course, is the Eucharist, in which the Community is formed and re-formed into the Body of Christ. However it is also expressed in a whole range of smaller ritual actions and gestures. So when we enter the church we sprinkle ourselves with holy water as a reminder that the foundation of our life together is our common baptism. We bow to one another. We address one another in a series of prescribed phrases and responses: “The Lord be with you…”, “Let us bless the Lord…”…and each one of these small ritual gestures and phrases is, in its own way, an expression and reaffirmation of the Community’s most basic identity.
More important than any single action, however, is the fact that what the Community does at this level of performance it does as one, as a single body. And that brings us sharply to the second sense in which the monastic oratory is the place in which a community is performed. Because if it is true that what the Community performs in this space, it performs as one, as a single body, then this must also necessarily be the place in which all the many ways in which the Community is not one, in which we lack the unity to act as single body, are exposed. In other words, what is performed in this space, as well as the most elevated principles of the Community’s spiritual imagination, is the hard reality of the Community’s present unredeemed state of being.
And when you put both of these things together, we begin to form a picture of the monastic oratory as the place in which a religious community is most fully and comprehensively known, in which the state of its life and health can most fully be gauged.
And once we recognise this, we begin to get a handle on what is really going on in today’s gospel. What the Lord is objecting to so violently in today’s gospel is not the bare fact of a group of money-changers hawking their wares in the Temple, but the society they represent, a society so spiritually and imaginatively bankrupt that it can raise itself to no greater height of corporate spiritual performance than the empty ritual of the marketplace. It is this atrophying of spiritual imagination that is the target of the Lord’s rage and not any single group of individuals however brazen or mercenary.
And that, needless to say, makes uncomfortable reading for us, for it’s hard to believe any age can have had its spiritual imagination more thoroughly lobotomised by the discourse of the marketplace than our own. We will probably all have been in churches, even Anglican churches, in which there seems to be almost no agenda, no story, except to grow, to be a success, to attract more people, churches in which almost all sense of what we want to attract these people for seems to have gone out of the window. And of course it’s not only in our churches that this kind of imaginative impoverishment has begun to become apparent, it is just as clearly manifest in the parallel concern, expressed in secular circles, about an economy with no other goal or purpose than to grow and grow and grow without end, about a society that seems to have lost the capacity to ask itself what it wants this endless economic growth for. Both are symptomatic of a society in the grip of a chronic loss of spiritual imagination, both are examples of rich and creative arenas of human flourishing contracted to the meagrest level of corporate human performance. And the Lord is angry about that.
It is all too easy, however, in saying this, to imagine that he is angry at someone else. The great danger with this analysis of our society and of our church, is that it leaves us feeling rather smug, leaves us celebrating this monastic church of ours for all the wrong reasons, as a kind of ivory tower holding out against the barbarisms of a philistine church. Not only are we far less immune to the forces I have be describing than we might think, but to the impoverishment of our spiritual imagination as a community we are not immune at all. The question is not whether this house of the prayer becomes a marketplace or not, only what manner of marketplace it becomes. In his little book on St Benedict, Rowan Williams describes what St Benedict is doing in his chapter on the Tools of Good Works, as establishing what the “currency” of the Community ought to be. He goes on to quote a story from Donald Nicholls about a priest ministering in a university who found himself pondering what the “currency” of that institution was. “And one day” says Nicholls “the penny dropped. What did those people exchange with one another when they met?[…]they exchanged grievances[…]the currency of that University was grievance.”” It’s one of those sentences that strikes home with an almost physical force, so precisely does it put its finger on the reality we have all known at one time or another. For all too often this is precisely the currency a religious community comes to deal in, all too often it is in the performance of its grievances that the spiritual imagination of a religious community goes into terminal decline.
And so as we celebrate and give thanks for this Church of the Resurrection today, we pray: “Come Lord Jesus, come with your whip of chords and overturn the marketplace of our grievances, that the offering of this house of prayer, this Church of the Resurrection, may be made a perfect offering in your sight.” Amen.