A new temple

Passage for reflection: John 2: 13 - 22

This Sunday’s passage in the lectionary has Jesus getting rather angry. We don’t often see Jesus getting hot under the collar. The times he gets mad are when there is blatant injustice and when the holy in life is profaned. 

Imagine Jesus arriving in the temple and seeing all the commotion of buying and selling, commercialism and greed over what the space should be used for. I love the tussles in the New Testament between Jesus and the Jewish authorities. Part of the reason they contrive to get rid of him is that he is a pain in the neck! His way is too radical, too outspoken, not law abiding enough. He is furious because they should know better, claiming to know God well. And here was absolute commotion! 

A preacher named Mary Zimmer describes the scene this way:

“The courtyard of the Temple smelled like a barnyard. Underneath the bleating of sheep and cattle noises you could hear the doves cooing in their cages. At low tables sat the money changers. The clink, clink of heavy coins was constant. And irritated, impatient voices were raised in arguments over the rates of exchange. The Temple courtyard was full of intense, busy people trying to get the best deal on an animal for the year’s Passover offering. Even the most righteous Jews would have trouble praying in this place.” 

Perhaps there are two lessons in this Scripture for us. 

One is respect for the holy space. I’m finding people are missing the discipline in lockdown of “going to church.” I’m finding providing zoom worship at the time we would normally be gathering is helping people. I’m also convinced in normal times people are drawn into holy space to think, to be still and to pray. So even in a multi use church building, we need to have a sanctuary space we open and keep sacred (in my opinion!) 

As our passage ends, Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The confused Jews responded, “It took forty-six years to build this temple! Will you raise it up in three days?” And then John writes in verse 26, “But he spoke of the temple of his body.”

The temple could no longer serve as the dwelling place for God’s Spirit. In cleansing the temple, Jesus also pointed to its replacement. Jesus would tell us that genuine worship is when we come to him. He would be the new temple, the place where the divine-human encounter takes place.

We need to make sure that we don’t let our environment (physical churches) and our souls (our inner life) become so cluttered that we miss the essence of real worship. When we come into the presence of Jesus Christ, he brings us to the joy of the love of God.

Then there’s this sign that something new would soon be coming. Let’s think a bit more about this new temple idea. We are all beginning to think about what sort of church we will be when all the coronavirus restrictions are lifted, perhaps in the summer. Is Jesus calling us to be a new temple? Surely we cannot simply put back everything we were doing which will have been stopped for over a year. Is this a time to be a people of resurrection rather than struggling to keep going? 

Two thoughts strike me:

One that we should be less separate and more together as one church body. We have work to do together. The other evening, from my study, I was leading a Lent group for the Methodist and Anglican communities around Boroughbridge. Six of us were there on the screen, an Anglican vicar, a Methodist minister, a URC minister, two Methodist folk and one Anglican man. At the same time, down the hall, my wife was sharing the same course using the same material with a group from Ripon cathedral where she is a member. How fabulous was it across a diversity of people and traditions we were sharing some profound stuff. While still celebrating our stories and our denominational emphases perhaps the new temple will sing together and celebrate together a lot more. I’m a passionate ecumenist! 

Then just maybe it’s just about going what we should be doing. Jesus was about to rebuild the temple in three days! The old was about to die and something new was about to be established.  Maybe the pharisaical ritual even today needs to die for the spontaneity of God’s spirit to burst out. Maybe we need to just trust a bit and chill out a bit, because perhaps the new temple will not be to a script or predictive and it might surprise us as new life happens. And we are that new temple. The late Rachel Held Evans wrote this about the Church:

“The church is not a group of people who believe all the same things; the church is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the centre.” 

Go back in your mind into that temple. This act of Jesus was an act of disruption: not disrupting the events of that day in the Temple but an act of disruption that cut to the core of the historic Jewish faith and all it stood for. This is a moment of crisis: not for the dove sellers and the money-changers: there would always be more doves to sell, more currency to trade. This was a moment of crisis for the people of God.  Jesus was saying that the old way of doing faith was no longer appropriate, that the heart of faith had become lost in the ritualism, that it was passion for God that had sold out, not pigeons for sacrifice. Jesus is confronting the people of God with a deeply uncomfortable truth: this was a moment for them to re-assess. Was it enough for them to be tied to their ritualism or did they need to find the heart of their faith once more?

What needs overturning in your church today?