The temple which
Jesus attacked, during that last week in Jerusalem, was once a sign of
grace. It was the place where God had chosen to make his name to dwell, say
the ancient scriptures. In the Psalms,
you go up to Jerusalem to see the God of gods in Zion. It is experienced as pain and humiliation to
be cut off from this place by exile or by sickness (Psalms 42, 43, 84). You might excuse me a Scottish paraphrase of
Isaiah ch.2:
To this the joyful nations round, All tribes and tongues
shall flow;
Up to the hill of God, they’ll say, And to his house we’ll go.
The beam that shines from Zion hill Shall
lighten every land
The king who reigns in Salem’s towers Shall
all the world command.
No strife shall rage, nor hostile feuds Disturb those peaceful years;
To plowshares men shall beat their swords, To pruning hooks their spears.
No longer hosts encount’ring hosts Shall crowds of slain
deplore;
They hang the
trumpet in the hall, And
study war no more.
But now, when
Jesus comes to Jerusalem, the temple has become something else. The priests, the scribes and the pharisees
are managing a system deeply compromised by its political relationship with
Rome and with wealth. There are now strict
conditions of entry to the sacred precinct – what was once for all nations is
now only for male Jews and for the ritually pure. There is a vast stinking animal market and
money exchange next door, with all the graft and corruption pertaining thereto, and it was working at full pitch during these
days of the Passover.
My Father’s house, says Jesus, is a house of prayer for all peoples, but you have made it a den of
thieves. What was originally given
as a place of grace and peace has been subsumed into the culture of noise and
violence, greed and privilege, gatekeepers and status.
And so in the
Easter story that temple becomes as it were reconstituted – once again for all
peoples, Jew and Greek, rich and poor, male and female, black and white, slave
and free, Catholic and Protestant, saint and sinner, gay and straight – the
temple is reconstituted for ever in our symbolism as the Body of Christ,
crucified and risen. The veil of the
temple, we are told, was torn from top to bottom. Judaism burst its legalistic bounds, to
become what was always its best vision, to be a light to the nations, a way of
peace. The temple is reconstituted now
no longer on Zion’s holy hill, but on a squalid and foetid dump outside the
holy city, a place in which all human hopes may seem to have perished, but nevertheless
the place where God now chooses his name to dwell.
That now is this
place. It is anywhere we are. It is especially where we stop and wait and
choose silence and stillness. It is the
place where God’s healing creative stillness is very near, where our many unanswered
questions tend to recede from centre stage, where life takes over from death,
and all is well.
Are these all just
words, perhaps? (Teaching spirituality
can be a dangerous thing if you are good at words.) But in fact we never know except in a
discipline of stillness and silence, a relinquishing of power and control, and
a peaceful ready consent to both life and death. Raimon Panikkar, one of our great
contemporary teachers, says that we can’t speak of God any more except from an
interior silence. And so, that is what
we do.
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