The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

One can easily understand the outrage of the Jewish establishment at Jesus’ seemingly ridiculous claims to rebuild the Temple in three days. John is perhaps teasing the Jews in having them refer to the 46 years it had taken to build the Temple; clearly, if Jesus is going to reconstruct in three days, then it is by some supernatural power that he will do so. It’s obtuse to be talking about human lead times for construction projects..
But I suspect that it’s not the human absurdity of demolishing and rebuilding a huge building so quickly that really annoyed the Jews. More I think it was the insolence of destroying a building so close to hearts of the Jewish nation. It is apparent from the gospels that Jerusalem and the Temple was the spiritual centre for Jews everywhere. A poor family, like Mary and Joseph made the journey to Jerusalem to present their first born and they visited Jerusalem every Passover. At Pentecost we are told that Jews from the whole Diaspora were crowded into the city.
There was also a huge financial investment in the Temple. When Titus destroyed it in 70AD, the loot was enough to bankroll the Roman Empire for several years. The size and magnificence of the Temple gave Jerusalem, and so the Jews, a world renown- What insolence for an itinerant rabbi, from Galilee of all places, to suggest he could topple the lot and put it back together in a few days!
More speculatively, I think the irritation may have gone even deeper, touching a raw spiritual nerve in the Jewish religious psyche, exposing an ambivalence that still lurks under Christians’ skin too. The formalities and ritual of Temple worship were established by the Torah-but there was no Temple when the Torah was handed down and there was a strain of Jewish thought that maintained that there should be no single Temple to house the Ark of the Covenant which was an essentially portable object; like God himself it should not be pinned down to single place, nor a building built by human hands.
There was equally an ambivalent attitude to the ritual of Temple worship, involving essentially sacrifices; Isaiah speaking for God says:    
“I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.”
These are ideas were not friendly to the wealth and ostentation of the Temple and the sacrifices it was designed to serve. It is noticeable that after the destruction of the Temple by Titus, at the council of Jamnia, the Jewish religious leadership could lay the foundations for modern rabbinic Judaism which does not (except in its most extreme and eccentric wings) seek to re-establish a temple in Jerusalem.
Jesus develops the idea that religion and morality are not matters of outward observance but require inward conviction. Christian thought has shared this ambivalence toward both ostentatious display in its buildings and the worship that goes on in them. Christian history has seen frequent swings back and forth from the pursuit of worldly magnificence (generally in the ascendant) to spiritual simplicity, and Puritanism. But back in 1st century Judea it was, I suggest, the existence of this more introspective and spiritual view of religion that that made Jesus’ teaching generally, and particularly his wild claims about the Temple, so dangerous, and thus so obnoxious, in the eyes of the Jewish establishment.
As John tells us, it was only afterwards that the disciples realized that what Jesus had meant was that his body was the new Temple which would be destroyed but would rise again on the third day, implying for Christians at least the symbolic destruction of the Temple and what it stood for. They, and we, understand by Jesus’ body, the community of believers, the Church. Religion has moved from being about a building and propitiatory sacrifice to being about a group of people and what they do.
But “Church” remains an ambiguous term; it’s much more often taken to mean a building than any sort of community. How well have Christians lived up to being the body of Christ? How well have we resisted worldly temptation to turn religion into a building and what goes on in it?
For the first few centuries, perhaps by force of circumstance, the record is good. Christians do seem to have been a community worshipping in each others’ houses without anything which we would recognize as churches. No doubt the constant threat and frequently actual persecution kept Christianity low key, if not literally underground.
The centuries of persecution and secrecy lead to huge reaction once Christianity was tolerated and then promoted by the Roman state. Constantine transformed Rome with vast church building programme the magnificent results of which can still be seen. This was in part a human reaction to the constriction and poverty of the past, and in part a political gesture to establish the new regime for the future. Herod the Great’s temple had shared this motivation.
But early Christian building had a spiritual element too, as Christians sought to venerate the martyrs of the previous years. Christ had deigned to take human form, so holy men and women, who had come close to God, especially by martyrdom, might continue to influence and benefit those left behind, by relics and a cult based around shrines specific to the place of their execution or other notable testimony of their power. Ironically, the holy men who fled from the world only exacerbated this trend as shrines and great complexes grew up around their pillars and their hermit’s caves.
These developments set the trend for church building and Christian ideas of space for the following centuries. On the one hand buildings express the glory, perhaps even the triumph, of the Christian God. They are primarily designed to impress and move by their beauty. Occasionally, in my experience very rarely, a building will by the design of its space succeed in creating its own reverence. Many buildings are beautiful but very few manage to make me feel that are Godly spaces, somehow expressing and even capturing something of the divine nature. More common is the experience of the divine in some numinous place- those places which Celtic Christianity calls “thin” where the Earth comes close to Heaven. These trends bring the Christian Church back to the Temple; it too expressed the magnificence of God (and men), it attempted to be a divine space most notably in the Holy of Holies and it marked a holy place, Mount Moriah where Abraham had been about to sacrifice Isaac. And what remains, the Western Wall has, of course, become a place of extraordinary numinous power for Jews.
But is the way Christianity has developed right? Jesus destroyed-or at least superseded the Temple and replaced it with his resurrected body; has the Christian interest, almost obsession, with building been a huge distraction from what we should be doing? The same question would also apply to church music, paintings, stained glass- and all the other ways in which we try to make our churches and worship beautiful.
I accept that any work of beauty has something of the divine in it; as we believe that love is central to our morality, so beauty should be central to our creativity; making beautiful things is partaking in God’s creative activity and it is one way in which we express our love for his creation. Where better to do that than in church? But this is a rather theoretical argument; it’s not often that something that I see or hear as beautiful, really speaks to me of the divine .Perhaps we should just accept instead, that so much art, if not the buildings it is in, has a didactic function; the decorative scheme  of a Gothic cathedral, or a Romanesque cloister,  is not mere decoration, it has a story and a message that was more evident in societies less dependant on literacy than we are.
Much more importantly my critique ignores the fact that churches are functional buildings, built for a purpose; some tiny oratories for private devotion, some vast barns for preaching but most of all churches are designed for the celebration of the Eucharist the moment when we are most acutely aware that we are Christ’s body. This is sometimes difficult to see as ideas of how the Eucharist should be celebrated have varied so widely in time and place; think of the huge upheavals caused by the Reformation or by the Council of Trent which led to the often brutal rejection of older decorative schemes and then the even more revolutionary (and some would day equally brutal) rulings of the Second Vatican Council. The stark and airy circular concrete churches of the 1970s and dark little Byzantine basilicas with their rows of smoke stained saints share the same purpose; to be a fitting house to recognize God as his body in bread and wine.
And in this, despite all the other paraphernalia, beautiful and instructive as it may be, we are faithful to the belief that the church is a body of people that are Christ’s body, proclaiming his good news and fortifying themselves to carry out his good works here on Earth. But we need to keep in mind that churches and the worship that goes on in them are means not ends; they are the way we go about proclaiming the Gospel; windows and tympana, vestments and anthems are themselves not what it’s all about. Amen.