Psalm 122
OT Reading: Haggai 2.1-9
NT Reading: John 2.13-22
Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up (John 2.19).
When Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers, he was giving dramatic expression to a strand of fierce concern for social justice that was deeply engrained in the prophetic tradition, alongside the devotion to the temple and its worship. I want to spend a few minutes this evening exploring both sides of that ambivalence, before considering where Jesus stood, and what his action might mean for us.
On the one hand, the Jews looked back with a mixture of pride and nostalgia to the glory days of the early monarchy, symbolized by the magnificence of Solomon’s temple, and continually celebrated in such well-known psalms as ‘I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord’. Their prophets were inspired by the conviction that God would never abandon his people, even if for a time they might be suffering in exiled captivity, with the temple itself in ruins. After the exiles were allowed to return, the prophetic dream was rekindled in such visionary passages as we read this evening from the prophet Haggai, who encouraged them to believe that their impoverished city and its shattered temple could one day be restored to outshine even its former glory. ‘In a little while … I will shake the heavens and the earth … and all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendour. The latter splendour of this house shall be greater than the former splendour, and in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts’ (Haggai 2.7-9). Perhaps Simeon and Anna caught a glimpse of that splendour when the baby Jesus was brought to the temple in his mother’s arms, but it doesn’t sound from Luke’s account as if anyone else paid much attention to the strange ramblings of two elderly worshippers. They were probably a bit confused, bless them. You can almost hear the officious stewards shepherding the young couple and their baby politely but firmly towards the exit. Move along now, please.
The alternative tradition, equally embedded in the Hebrew scriptures, was much more sceptical about all that surrounded the temple and its worship. You will remember that God took some persuading before giving his blessing to David’s project in the first place. He rather liked the idea of living in a tent – a tent which could stay put when the people needed time to remember God or just to rest, a tent which could move on when the people needed to move on, both physically and spiritually. He understood and in the end accepted the generosity of David’s heart, but the prophets continued to express their reservations, even after it was built. Isaiah, for example asked how anyone was to build a house for one for whom Heaven was his throne and earth his footstool? (Isaiah 66.1). Any house would be too small, any location too limiting.
And then there was the whole business of sacrifice. The symbolism was all very well, with the smoke and the incense rising to heaven like the prayerful devotions of the people, but there was always the risk that sacrifice would take the place of true devotion, that people would come to feel that they had done their duty to God when they had fulfilled their sacrificial obligations. The formal practice of religion, particularly when it gets tangled up with fund-raising, can all too easily lose sight of its true purpose, and even become an abomination. Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? rails Jeremiah, as he attacks those who lie and steal and murder, whilst coming to the temple with their loathsome sacrifices (Jer. 7.11). ‘But this is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word’ – Isaiah (Is 66.2). Or Jeremiah again: ‘This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God and they shall be my people’ (Jer. 31.33). True religion was not a matter of temples and sacrifices and tablets of stone – all these were external manifestations. What really mattered in God’s choice of those who would serve as the instruments of his loving purposes, was the unswerving devotion of the heart. For what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8). The Old Testament recounts the exploits of Israel’s great kings and priests and prophets, but it also values the devotion of humble folk like Elkanah and Hannah (Samuel’s parents), or Ruth the widowed Moabite refugee from whom King David traced his lineage,
Jesus himself was brought up within the faith of temple and synagogue. He seems to have accepted and valued the formal practice of religion, following the rhythms of the liturgical year as he knew it. What Jesus would not tolerate was the use of religion to exclude those who were marginalised by society on grounds of gender, age, social status or poverty. In the temple the use of coins which bore the heads of pagan deities, including the Roman emperor, was not acceptable, so the common currency of the city had to be changed for the Tyrian coins which were acceptable. Fair enough, perhaps, but not if a group of money-changers, under the protection of the temple authorities, were taking advantage of their privileged position to make unreasonable profits at the expense of poor pilgrims. That made him as angry as Jeremiah; their tables had to be overturned. In the same way I think we can be pretty sure Jesus would have no patience with the use of ecclesiastical privilege to shelter and protect corruption or child abuse.
We come now to the crux of the story. What sign can you show us for doing this? (v18). ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’ (v19). In the other gospels his response is understood at once as a challenge to the temple and the Jewish religion, and is twisted into a form that brings about his trial and judicial murder. In St John’s gospel, the Jews in the temple merely mock him as if he were mad. But John knows that this second sign of Jesus’ power is another step along the road that will lead to his death and resurrection.
If the purpose of a temple, or a great church for that matter, is to bring together the things of earth and the things of heaven, so that we are helped to draw nearer to God, helped to find our true place in the world that he has made, then Herod’s ‘grand projet’ to reconstruct the Temple in Jerusalem had already lost its way. ‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up’. The temple was becoming a focus for religious authority and Jewish nationalism, and Jesus knew that it was doomed.
But ‘he was speaking of the temple of his body’ (v21), his crucified body that would become the perfect meeting-place of humanity and divinity. It is that Body that we receive in Holy Communion, that Body of which we become a part within the Church which is the crucified and risen Body of Christ, the true temple into which we are built as living stones. And it is by the power of his death and resurrection that we are enabled, as we dwell in Him and He in us, to live a life of service to all his children which is at the same time an act of worship.
In the words of our Mission Statement, it is perhaps as we encounter in worship the Divine, that wee learn to explore and express our true humanity. And that will sometimes make us very angry.