Titian’s painting of Sacred and Profane Love, is in the Villa Borghese in Rome. You have a feeble reproduction with your pew sheet. It depicts two women sitting on either side of a tomb, a sarcophagus; one is dressed in a handsome white wedding dress and has an urn which seems to contain jewels. She looks out at the viewer with a slightly quizzical expression. The other woman isn’t wearing much at all. With her left hand she raises a small urn from which flames emerge and she looks at her dressed companion as if encouraging her to look up to the flame, and perhaps further. The painting was only given its title in the 18th Century but it is obvious that some comparison is being made between the women and pretty obvious too that we are in the Love department here. The painting is known to have been commissioned to celebrate a wedding. But death is not far away as a putto fishes around in the sarcophagus. Rather than sacred and profane, the distinction may be a comparison of earthly love and heavenly, which isn’t perhaps very different.
What strikes me first about the painting is difficulty in deciding which woman is which; my initial reaction is to think the naked one is the earthy, profane, carnal one. She is undeniably attractive. The other, in white would then signify purity, modesty and perhaps chastity and her enquiring expression suggest the pursuit of wisdom and higher virtue. Actually, the better view is that it’s the other way round. The gorgeous wedding dress and the jewels symbolise ephemeral worldly concerns (emphasised, by the tomb on which they sit); the honest unadorned nudity suggests a more classical purity and her gesture is towards heaven. I don’t have a shred of evidence, save perhaps something I shall note at the end, but I like to think that the ambiguity is intentional; that love and death, the sacred and the profane and the earthly and heavenly are never far apart and often mixed up; that we can see the holy in the mundane, and the body may show what the spirit is like.
What, in our reading from John’s Gospel, was the “zeal for his Father’s house” that so consumed Jesus? John sets his version of the story of the cleansing of the Temple at the start of Jesus’ ministry, not in Holy Week, like the other Gospels, but context remains the festival of Passover. A feature of Passover, is the emphasis on purity; the Passover meal itself symbolises among other things the simplicity and innocence. Most notably the bread is unleavened, uncorrupted by yeast. The priests will not enter Pilate’s house for fear of defilement before the feast. This is the background to Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple.
The story uses two words for temple which are not distinguished in most translations. The animals and money changers are cleared out of the hieron. In Greek religion the hieron was the sacred area set aside for worship, or cult practice. It usually contained a building, what we normally think of as a temple- a naos in Greek in which typically the cult statue would be found, and where the God in question resided, or was anyway, most accessible. Sacrifice would happen at an altar outside the naos in the hieron. The Jerusalem temple followed this pattern with the major difference that the holy of holies, the naos was empty; it emphatically did not contain any idolatrous image. Jesus drives the cattle and sheep and pigeons from the sanctuary precincts, the hieron; but he makes his extraordinary claim to rebuild the naos in three days. I don’t suggest this is any more plausible, in a literal sense, but his metaphor is a little less surprising in the original, where it is easier to see, as the disciples do see later on, after the Resurrection, that Jesus proclaims himself as the way to the Father. He is the way in which God becomes accessible and indeed God abides in him, as Judaism saw God abiding in the heart of the Temple.
The essential idea of the hieron/temple is an area cut off and dedicated to God. Another word for temple precincts in Greek is temenos, which literally means cut off and so special. This cutting off and dedication is an ambiguous affair; the purpose is only partly to remove the sacred from profane surroundings; it is also to make the deity accessible to humanity, in controlled circumstances and often through the mediation of a priesthood and/or by some ritual such as sacrifice.
In John’s Gospel Jesus’ concern is not that the dealers catering for sacrifice were corrupt (and it seems unlikely that they were), but simply that they are there. The reason they were there was in part convenience; it was much simpler to buy your ox or your pigeon for sacrifice on the spot, than bringing it down from Galilee. It was also to maintain purity, ensuring the animals were unblemished and fit for sacrifice; the moneychangers were changing the money in common circulation, most of which bore an idolatrous image of Caesar or another sovereign, into currency acceptable in a holy place. Jesus appears to have almost contradictory motives; on the one hand seemingly, objecting to the noise, mess, and general earthiness of an animal market in the Temple; on the other, suggesting that the commercial world and its coinage should be allowed in. The underlying objection is to a deeper commercialism; the system of sacrifice that made God a commodity. “Make not my Father’s house an house of trade”. Jesus’ own sacrifice will make the Temple and animal sacrifice simply redundant.
This is explained, albeit ironically and elliptically in the odd exchange with “the Jews” representing the Jewish Establishment. They ask for a “sign” which would give Jesus authority, or justify his eccentric behaviour. What they get is the bizarre claim to be able to erect a building in three days. We can see with the benefit of hindsight and many hints in the Gospel that Jesus’ body and person replace or become the place where God is to be found. He replaces the temple as his sacrifice of himself makes other sacrifice unnecessary; his body has indeed become the new naos.
That body, as the incarnation of God, retains all the ambiguity of the sacred and profane. It is worshipped as a baby in a squalid cattle shed and when stripped and flogged and mocked and nailed to a cross it is for John the moment of glorification. The same body, which strangely resurrected from death is at once corporeal and ethereal is an explosion life and love that comes out of death and despair. That body breathes life into the small band which is the embryonic church. They, and we following them, become Jesus’ body and we share the same equivocal nature. We are a holy people set aside, a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God. But we are placed on an earth full of squalor, pain and misery. And it is in that misery that we will find God and by working to alleviate suffering that we will exercise our holy calling.
So the woman, in the fine clothes leaning on tomb but playing with jewels represents the world and its concerns, but her clothes cover a simpler and refined spirit which is drawing us upward to heaven, a heaven we shall see fully only when we are dead. The two women are in fact the same, although you can hardly see that in the tiny reproduction. They represent the inextricable mingling of sacred and profane; they represent our own desire for simplicity and purity in a complex and contaminated world. Like Titian’s women we are mortal but can aspire to the immortal. They represent our calling to bring the kingdom of Heaven to earth. Amen.