The Cleansing of the Temple

  Lent 3 2009.

‘You shall not make my Father’s house into a market.’

+ In nomine …

Temples and markets, religion and trade, what do they have to do with each other? When I was in Kenya, Sunday services seemed to me to include a rather tasteless obsession with money. In addition to the offertory there was often a lengthy mini-liturgy somewhere in the middle of the service where those who had something to be thankful for (who usually seemed to be the wealthy members of the parish) would bring their envelopes of thanksgiving to the front and receive a blessing … and a round of applause! Even more bizarrely, in the middle of one service they suddenly began to have a very lengthy auction of vegetables …   To us, such things seem awkward and inappropriate, mixing the spiritual with the worldly. And this is how many read our gospel story of the cleansing of the Temple today, as a warning against the tendency of religion to degenerate into another area of business, a profiteering racket. Now clearly this sort of corruption is a real danger in every culture, from the sale of indulgences in medieval Europe, to the tat shops of Lourdes, to the prosperity-gospel preachers who drive round in their porsches while promising salvation to those who dial in a donation…      

          But I think we can get a bit too pious about this, as if religion was something purely ‘spiritual’ and unconnected with our daily lives, and as if trade was somehow something dirty and wicked. This separation lets everyone off too easily, leaving religion with supposedly pure hands while the business world can go to hell. In the world of ancient Israel the Temple was much more bound up with trade and finance, acting as a sort of national treasury and provider of basic charity for those in need.   

Christ’s cleansing of the Temple has more to say to us, about the transformation of our world. This story is one of the most dramatic from the life of Christ and is recorded in all four gospels. Here we see not the Gentle Jesus meek and mild of popular piety, but the angry passionate confrontational Christ, making a whip and driving people out of the Temple like any radical activist. Here the Lord comes in judgement to his Temple, as Malachi promised. 

           The question at stake here is: what is the Temple? What is the Father’s house of which Christ speaks? Of course at the most obvious level it is the Jerusalem Temple. But it is also much more than just a place of worship. Here Christ is picking up the long prophetic tradition which has seen the corruption of the Temple as the sign of the corruption of the whole of Israel, and its renewal as the sign of the renewal of the whole of Israel. So by purifying the Temple Christ declares his role in purifying and renewing the people. But of course, Christ understands this renewal in a new and deeper way from most of his contemporaries. Here he points to another meaning of the Temple, when he says: ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ As the gospel writer comments, here he spoke of the temple of his body. Remember those words from the beginning of John’s gospel: ‘and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us’ – the supreme place where God’s presence dwells on earth, the place of meeting where he makes himself known, is now revealed to be not a building made by human hands, but flesh and blood, a human life, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Christ is the New and Everlasting Temple. 

          But perhaps we shouldn’t stop here. For the fathers of the Church pointed out that the Temple which Christ is purifying can also mean the Church, our own souls and the entire world. The Church after all is Christ’s body and the temple of the Holy Spirit, according to St Paul. Christ comes to purify a people for himself, to make a temple for God in the world, to show a different way of living. This is how we can see the cleansing of the Temple as applying to us, as not just something about religious buildings but as a judgement on how we all live our lives, a judgement which seeks to transform the world. 

          As the G20 leaders met together yesterday to discuss their response to the current international economic crisis, we need to attend to Christ’s action more than ever, from the personal level right up to the highest level of international markets and finance. For many years it seems as if the entire world has been turned into one great market and this market has become the golden calf that we worship, apparently able to solve all our problems. In our consumer society everything can be purchased, and we are addicted to the impossible satisfaction of our endlessly titillated virtual desires. Here we are all slaves and prostitutes. Ownership is everything, and so we gradually whittle away the ancient areas of common ownership until everything, land, water, even ideas, are someone’s private property. We need to recall that not everything is for sale! Underwriting all this is the increasing detachment of profit-making from real useful activities. Fortunes are made through the increasingly virtual exchanges of debts, currencies, insurance and so on. While this seemed as if it would go on for ever we should hardly be surprised that the bubble eventually burst.  The Christian tradition has maintained a constant wariness of this sort of profiting through usury, and we should not be surprised that those organisations which largely avoided such excesses are those who now find themselves in the most healthy situation. 

In Kenya I was struck by the effects of all this in our two-thirds world. In the end, in this country, people may experience extraordinary stress, job loss, even repossession, but we are unlikely to end up starving on the street with nothing. In most of the world there are not these safety nets to catch people when things fall apart. 

Christ’s teaching on money is as uncompromising as any anti-capitalist activist: ‘You cannot serve two masters … lay not up for yourselves treasure where rust and moth consume … how difficult it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ To our market world Christ says: ‘You shall not make my Father’s house into a market.’   

          It is all too easy to rant here of course, whether from a political platform or a pulpit. This crisis may perhaps provide a real opportunity for some long-overdue reforms at the international level and for the end of one sinister myth. As the Prime Minister has said, we need free markets but not value free markets. So perhaps we should be hopeful. 

But what can we do personally about all this? We must not despair as if any resistance to this idolatry is useless. Surely we can make our own small starts to change, to allow Christ to purify the temples of our souls, so that we become a people who live a bit differently. Imagine a Church which was a sign of how the world might be different! Lent provides us with a timely opportunity to think how we might begin to do this. Imagine if we just had a go at using our money like Christians! Money and trade are certainly not bad things in themselves. They can become the means for much good. Perhaps this Lent we need to be asking who we are investing with, buying from, what we are actually buying, a bit more. And I’ve said before that tithing, giving away ten per cent of our income to good causes and those in need, should be a minimum for Christians. The extraordinary results of the Comic relief appeal show that people can still be generous even when facing their own difficulties. Just imagine learning to enjoy giving money away! Then people might believe us when we claim to be followers of Christ. So let us pray that Christ may begin to purify the temple of our souls, casting out the idolatry of money so that this world might be transformed from a market into the temple of the Holy Spirit.        

AMEN.