The cleansing of the temple
A friend of mine lives in a small market town, and the first time I visited him, he took me to see the medieval parish church. It was quite a big church, and the whole nave was taken up with stalls selling everything from bricabrac and electronics to books and clothes. In one of the side-aisles relaxed customers sat on sofas and chatted by a coffee bar. In the distant chancel the weekday services went on as normal in the midst of all this. I wonder how that congregation feels this morning on hearing today’s gospel. The story of Christ’s cleansing of the temple makes us feel a bit uneasy about any moneymaking in church. However I don’t think Christ would be so angry about this market in a parish church, and I’ll come back to that shortly.
The temple at Jerusalem, although it wasn’t one of the official 7 wonders of the world, was nevertheless renowned in those times for its size and beauty and the lavishness of its worship. It had been built in response to the people’s encounter with the living God. They constantly fell back, and the temple was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. Christ didn’t treat Temple worship as a part of his message, and yet for him it was a living sign of Israel’s relationship with God. The story in today’s gospel portrays his indignation at the way it had become a place of moneymaking, sharp practice, and the fleecing of simple people. Where was the awe and reverence for God? Where was the self-abasement in his sight? Israel had domesticated their God, and they were doing with him what they willed. And we know from the crucifixion that God just lets that happen to him. Although the temple is not a core element of Jesus’ message, to him it was important, as the vehicle for Israel’s walking with God, and he wanted people to live up to what the temple was. With the Apostolic Church, St Luke tells us that after the ascension the eleven and their companions were continually in the temple blessing God. St Paul at one point offers sacrifice in the temple, and at another he goes through a seven-day purification rite there.
On the other hand, Jesus said the temple would be destroyed, with the implication that the rebuilt temple would be his body. Later, St Paul said that we are now a temple, built of living stones. This didn’t mean that Christians, as soon as they could, didn’t start to build special places for worship. There is even evidence of dedicated places for prayer going right back to St Paul. It’s something human beings naturally do, to create special places for special things – such physical places are not something we can do without.
This I believe is the right kind of context for understanding the story of the cleansing of the temple. What had gone wrong? What had led to this situation? People had done something to this holy place that is an ingrained human habit. It works something like this: something starts as a strong experience and brings from people a response of awe and reverence. Then, gradually, it becomes not special, but everyday, ho-hum, ordinary, part of the daily round. Our tendency is to domesticate, to shrink what is exalted down to our eye-level. We end up just getting on with our own business in our own way. The people in the temple had lost sight of God’s majesty and God’s sovereign call, and God’s ethical demands.
We are no different. In the Exodus reading we heard at mattins we are given the 10 Commandments: they include loving God with all our heart, our soul, our mind and our strength. Surely this is what we need to be doing. But you can’t do these things simply out of our own human efforts, trying hard to be good – it needs God’s help – the grace that comes from faithfulness in prayer, and in worship. It’s not enough simply to try harder. We need to wait on God.
The commandment to love God with the whole of ourselves is about how we see God. But there is also the question of how we see ourselves. So we come to this morning’s first reading, from 1 Corinthians. Paul tells us that we have to give up any pretence of being wise and accept that we are foolish. For instance, in the monastic life we in our community spend several hours each day singing rather unstraightforward texts. Probably a majority of people today would think that this was batty. Well, we have to accept that we are all batty, according to their picture of things. In recent days we have had an outstanding example of this kind of battiness, this foolishness, in Alexei Navalny. Almost fatally poisoned by the Russian government, he chose crazily to go back to Russia. Despite the treatment he received, he retained a sense of humour – on the day he died , he was in court in the morning, and his jokes were so funny that they made everyone laugh, even his guards. When he was asked some time ago , “what if you are killed”. His reply was: “ we’ll know then how strong we are”. Navalny’s folly was to think that amongst friends, family, his own cause, and his own safety, there was something higher than them all, something bigger than all of us that made the prime call upon him. His message was strong, clear and unwavering. He had been an atheist , but he came to Christ through reading the Bible. In his life and in the circumstances of his death he is something of a John the Baptist figure. It is this sheer persevering singlemindedness that contrasts so vividly with the people in the Jerusalem temple.
So we come back to the market in that parish church. This is different from what was going on in the temple – it’s good to experiment in such ways in such times as ours. The key thing will be whether the world of the market in the nave takes over the sanctuary, or whether the opposite happens.
So may we always treasure our church buildings and holy places.
May we always be ready to look foolish to the wisdom of the world, and may we beware of slipping into habits that sideline God’s infinite majesty, ever vigilant not to replace God with mediocrity .