Temple Eternal

Tower to Heaven, by Robgigidabert

  

Propers: The Third Sunday in Lent, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Never underestimate the Temple in the hearts and minds of the authors of the Bible.

The Temple wasn’t just a synagogue or a church building or a mosque. It wasn’t simply a convenient place for people to gather in worship. The Temple was the house of God on earth, His tent, His tabernacle, His footstool and His dwelling. We might best think of it as a sacrament, a holy mystery of God’s indwelling presence, the intersection of Creator and Creation, indeed the very gateway to Heaven on earth.

Here all the stories of God’s people Israel intersected. Here in ancient times had Abraham encountered Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king of God. Here on Mt Moria had he nearly offered up Isaac his son. Here had David united the disparate Tribes of Israel into one confederation, with one king and one capital city. Here had he brought the Ark of the Lord, the sacred box containing the commandments of the covenant, serving as the mercy seat of God.

Here had Solomon fashioned a mighty Temple to house the Ark of God, so that the Shekinah, the concealing cloud of the divine presence, descended upon the structure, just as God had descended to speak with Moses atop Mt Sinai. Here were all the sacrifices carried out, the sin offerings and guilt offerings, the dedication of the firstborn, and the grisly slitting of the throats of all the Passover lambs.

In the heart of the Temple sat the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Holy of Holies, empty but for the Ark and a pair of mighty cherubim guarding not God but humankind, shielding us from the unfettered glory of the Lord. One man, the High Priest, on one day of the year, the Day of Atonement, was permitted to wrap himself in white and pass beyond the mighty veil separating the sanctuary from the Holy of Holies, the veil over which the prayers of countless thousands passed as incense.

And there he would make penance for the sins of all his people, there amongst the angels and the sons of God, there beyond the portal between Heaven and this earth. The other priests within the sanctuary would tie a cord about his waist, so that should he be struck dead, overwhelmed by his exposure to divinity, they could pull the corpse of the High Priest back out from incorruption into this mortal realm. A bloody red thread would be tied to the door of the Temple on the Day of Atonement, and when the forgiveness of sins was announced, that thread would miraculously turn white. It was a house of wonder, a house of miracles, a house of mysteries. The House of God.

Imagine, then, the trauma when the Babylonians burned it down, and dragged the people of Jerusalem, and all but the poorest of Judea, off into Exile in a foreign land. For 70 years in Babylon the Israelites, the Judeans, remembered who they were, as People of the Book, remembered their covenant with God, and yearned to return home.

And then one day they did—delivered by Cyrus, the Perisan messiah, their nation raised up from the dead—and of course the first order of business was to rebuild the holy Temple. It never was quite the same, however. No matter how Herod built it up in the days of Jesus Christ, no matter how new dynasties asserted their legitimacy over the High Priesthood, many factions believed that the Temple had been corrupted, perhaps irretrievably so.

Broken down, rebuilt, defiled, usurped. Yet still beloved. Still, for many, the House of God. Such was certainly the case for Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. Clearly it was central to their faith. Jesus called it His Father’s house. He went there at least three times a year, throughout His ministry: for Passover, Pentecost, Sukkot, and even Hanukkah. Indeed, His insistence on celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem would ultimately get Him caught and killed.

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus has come to the Temple for Passover, as He does every year of His life. And there He sees in the Court of the Gentiles, the outermost court of the Temple, all the livestock merchants and the moneychangers sitting at their tables. The merchants made their living selling sacrificial birds and beasts to the 400,000 or so pilgrims packing into the city in order to celebrate the festival. Obviously it made no sense to bring their critters along with them, when they could simply buy their sacrifices there.

But of course most of the money circulated throughout the Roman Empire would be standard Greco-Roman coinage, with pictures of pagan gods and deified emperors stamped upon the silver. This violated the 10 Commandments: no false gods, no graven images. And so the moneychangers, for a tidy profit, offered to exchange the idolatrous coinage for good semitic shekels, appropriate for use within the Temple’s sacred grounds.

Such were the economics of religion. And this time, it seems, they proved too much for Jesus. Making a whip of chords—to spur animals on, mind you, not to harm people—He drove the sheep and cattle out of the courtyard, and overturned the moneychangers’ tables, scattering their coins across the cobbles. “Stop making of my Father’s house a marketplace!” He cries.

This is a bold and remarkable outburst. How could Jesus get away with this? Did no-one try to stop Him? The Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke place this event at the end of Jesus’ earthly life, in Holy Week, just before His Crucifixion. That makes a certain sense, given the crowds of supporters who welcomed Him on Palm Sunday, and the city’s simmering tension, which gave the Romans pause from summarily drawing their swords. Jesus would be dead in a few days nonetheless.

But John tells us of this Cleansing of the Temple toward the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, a curious choice, which has led certain interpreters to surmise that this was His regular practice. Jesus might have cleansed the Temple more than once, on an annual basis. The Synoptics make it clear that Christ’s concern in doing so is toward the poor. Here is the religious establishment taking advantage of widows and orphans, selling the sacred for scrip. And He will have none of it, not in His Father’s house, not in His Father’s name.

John says that He does this for zeal, and connects it to Jesus’ prophecy that should the Temple be torn down—this ancient and incomparable center of communal life in God, under renovation for nearly half a century—Christ would raise it up again in but three days.

And that right there is precisely the connection that John would have us make. He wants us to know from the get-go, from the start of Jesus’ ministry, that Christ is the Temple of God: the presence of God, the face of God, the miracle and the mystery tabernacled in flesh. He is for us what the Temple was of old, the place where all the stories converge, where all our hopes are housed; the intersection of God and Man; the gateway to Heaven on earth.

And the seeming loss of Jesus Christ, His Passion and Crucifixion, His agonizing public death, with His body hastily wrapped and sealed into another man’s tomb, was as searing and traumatic a psychic wound as was the loss of Solomon’s Temple. Indeed, by the time that John is writing, the Temple had been destroyed again, this time by the Romans, and never to be rebuilt. It was the end of the world as Christians and Jews had known it. Yet unlike the stones of the Temple, Jesus rose in but three days, having shattered the grave and harrowed hell, and ascending to hallow the heavens.

In Jesus Christ, God is with us, God is for us, God is one of us. He can never be taken away, He can never be lost to us, and He can never be killed again for Jesus Christ has conquered death. No sacrifice, no money can earn His forgiveness and favor, which have been won for us all by His Cross, and poured out freely in His grace. This is His final, eternal Passover, from death unto life, from our slavery in sin to immortality in Him. In three days, is His conquest complete. In three days, He rules all that there is.

Easter is our Passover, Christ both our Temple and High Priest. And nothing and no-one in hell or on earth can separate us from our God. His house is here forever.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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