Has it ever struck you that most of the paintings that we see of Jesus show him with no or virtually no clothes on, either on a cross or in a manger? This very corporeal iconography is later than St John’s Gospel and in fact the crucifixion is not common in early Christian art and such depictions as there are show Jesus fully clothed. And yet this obsession-it’s hardly too strong a word- with Jesus’ body is well grounded in John’s Gospel.
That body and ideas associated with it make a number of appearances in the Gospel, as they do in Paul’s letters where the idea that the church, the body of Christian believers as Jesus own body, pervades his writing. Paul’s imagery is, I think, easier to take than John’s as it’s somehow easier or at least more sympathetic to think of Christians as the church, carrying on Jesus’ work after he has ceased to be a physical presence on earth.
John’s imagery-if indeed it is mere imagery and not something more tangible, even tasteable – is harder to swallow, because presented in such physical terms. The most startling example must be that in the long discourses in Chapter 6, which follow John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand. The bread that Jesus fed to the hungry crowd was, he asserts, his own body; this is met with the same outraged incredulity as we heard this evening, as Jesus says he’ll rebuild the temple in three days. I feel uneasily uncertain how I am to react to these passages; I can’t help sympathising with the outraged Jews, and all the more because Jesus seems so unnecessarily provocative. Despite those misgivings, I do think Jesus was saying something profoundly true, however superficially ridiculous, and I’ll try to say why.
But first we might consider some of the other quasi body imagery used, as for example Jesus calling himself the Lamb of God alluding to the sacrificial nature of his life and death. Or the idea that he should abide among us, and even within, making each of us the tabernacle that became God’s home on earth. These ideas come together in equally odd notion which we heard this evening, that Jesus’ body was a temple, indeed The Temple.
For the 1st century Jew, the Temple was the focus of religious and thus national life; the foundation of the first Temple by Solomon had been in part in order to unify (and perhaps control) sacrifices taking place at sites other than Jerusalem, David’s new capital. It remained the centre of Judaism, visited at festivals by Jews from all over the diaspora as we read – at unpronounceable length- in Acts’ account of Pentecost. The Temple was also a fitting house of God and suitably richly furnished from foreign lands-as we heard in the reading from Haggai. It was perhaps this concentration of wealth that had given it a commercial character; Jesus remarks about destroying the Temple follow hard on his overturning of the moneychangers’ tables and clearing out of the animals on sale for sacrifice.
It was, however, sacrifice that was the principal function of the Temple along with housing God. Sacrifice was the physical manifestation of the Jews’ relation with God. To thank God, for
example for the birth of a child, or seek forgiveness and atonement for sin, a sacrifice was made, individually or as a nation. It was not just a hot-line to God but where that God as the inspiration, guardian and judge of the Jewish people, His people, resided, albeit invisibly and mysteriously, on earth. It would have been these ideas that made Jesus claim to be able to destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days so ridiculous and offensive.
Perhaps not entirely or universally offensive. After the total destruction of the Temple and sack of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 AD, probably before John was writing his Gospel, the Jewish religious authorities, notably Rabbi Akiva, were developing a more Torah based and rabbinical (as opposed to priestly) version of Judaism which despite continual yearning for the Temple and return to Jerusalem, would become the norm to this day.
We can, I think, see some of these ideas in Jesus’ teaching most notably that it was the individual’s response to God that mattered and that Jesus’ own life was a fulfilment of the Scriptures. The Law and the Prophets mattered because they were the background, if not the basis, of Jesus’ own teaching and actions, beside which the formalities and sacrifices of the Temple religion were unimportant, even irrelevant.
If my shallow and conjectural analysis of contemporary Jewish thought has any truth, it would mean that Jesus’ claim to destroy the Temple would not be seen as quite so radical in some quarters and Jesus’ provocation was of conservative Temple based religious leaders (the ones who would later condemn him to death), but not necessarily all contemporary religious thinkers.
This does not, however, explain how his body becomes a replacement for the Temple. For that we must look at some of the ideas with which I started; Jesus saw himself as bread which would nourish the spiritually hungry and his body on the cross as a sacrifice achieving atonement, once and for all for everyone. In these ways Jesus body replaces the functions of the Temple. The Eucharist becomes both a thanksgiving and a sacrifice for forgiveness and reconciliation individual and corporate. Instead of residing in the Holy of Holies in the Temple, God instead resides in each of us which have shared the bread which is his body.
These are ideas which are just as extraordinary as demolishing a temple and rebuilding it in three days and they pose for us perhaps an even greater change and challenge- that we should be incorporated into what has become Jesus body on Earth. This is of course not only a challenge but also a great comfort. Happily, as a challenge it is one that we are by grace equipped to meet if we will but try to the best of our ability, however feeble that may be, to make our bodily existence follow the pattern set by Jesus in his life on Earth. Amen.