The building’s present condition
reminded me of a recent archaeologist’s report which seemed to think that under
the Temple in Jerusalem was a huge storage area, a vault, like an underground
car park, similar to the Cathedral’s dark empty building space, and this was
almost certainly the area where the booths of the money-changers stood, and the
pens of the animal-vendors. It’s quite a powerful image: a vast echoing
chamber, with a few slits for light right at the top, perhaps some flares or
oil lamps, deafening noisy, smelly, airless, and overcrowded. It’s easy to
imagine the panic and uproar in this crowded space when a dusty and unkempt
northerner pushes over a few stalls and sets the pigeons loose and begins to
shout incomprehensible biblical quotations about prayer and all nations and the
evils of commerce in a holy space. 
As has often been pointed out, we’ve no reason to suppose there is anything wicked going on in that dark and noisy vault. Traders of (no doubt) average honesty were doing what such people do the world over, providing a necessary service as efficiently as they could, similar to the present day retail operations at the cathedral. The noise and the smell and the crowding were doubtless unfortunate in some ways, though we shouldn’t apply Western standards too rapidly here, anyone who has been to other religious shrines around the world will realise that the idea that silence and solemnity are necessary for reverence is a new and strange one to a good part of the human race. We can’t assume that what was going on was exceptionally squalid or exploitative. So what exactly was wrong?
The traders could reasonably say that they had to be there: they weren’t an agreeable but optional extra, like a cathedral shop, but part of the very business of the Temple. To go in, you had to empty your pockets of foreign, idolatrous coinage and acquire approved Temple currency, and of course, you had to have animals and birds for sacrifice, pleasing things to offer to the Lord. The trade was essential to the system, a condition of the Temple worship continuing as usual. If the authorities chose to see an attack on the traders as an attack on the sacrificial system, perhaps they weren’t so far wrong: and when St John associates Jesus’ action in the Temple with the words “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up,” he was not wrong. There is more at stake here that an attack on wicked grocers.
The Temple attacked by Jesus was once a sign of grace – the spot where God chooses to make his name to dwell (as in Deuteronomy), where he makes himself “public” and “accessible.” You go up to Jerusalem to see the God of gods in Zion, as Psalm 84 tells us, you go to seek his gracious presence, from which, according to
psalms 42/43 it is pain and humiliation to be cut off by exile or sickness. The temple served as the focus of identity, religious, national, social, you name it – for some it stood as the architectural and symbolic centrepiece of their most important city – a city that played a key role in their most cherished memories, and a location that would figure in a hope-for future when God’s promises would be fully materialised.
In the last days, the prophet said, the Temple hill would tower above all hills and draw all people to it like a beacon. But what has it become? A place where rigorous and complex conditions of entry, conditions that generate a whole cottage industry around the Temple: the right coinage, the ritually pure animals and so on, have to be supplied. Religious activity, seeing God and serving God, had become a busy, satisfying and distinctive area of human action and experience. The temple had become a place of barter and exchange, haggling and bargaining, where poor people were cheated, swindled by clever and capricious scoundrels. What was sacred and holy had now become profane. The real and proper activity of the temple had been replaced by commercialism and greed; ordinary people searching for God had been prevented from doing so by avaricious traders who made the atmosphere of worship impossible.
Jesus comes into the subterranean Temple’s precincts as a strikingly secular figure - we know from the gospels, in his acts and parables, that Jesus was unconcerned to ask questions about the status or purity of those who come to him, you may remember the woman at the well, Nicodemus, Zaccheus, the blind and the lame. In the light of his proclamation, the Temple makes perfect sense as a sign of promise, a space consecrated to the openness of God’s invitation to the world, a space that we may recall in another parable where all the birds of the air can find a space, a roost, and a nesting place. It is a space that is free, open and available to all. God’s temple does not and cannot make sense as the centre of a bustling religious sub culture, devoted to satisfying the demands of God and God’s purity. And the story we tell later in Lent, in Holy Week, presses this point further still: Jesus consecrates himself, makes himself holy, as he goes outside the city to a godless and cursed death in an unhallowed public place, a rag and bone heap beside the road, where he is stripped naked and nailed up like a scarecrow. And as he dies, says the evangelist, the partition between the Holy of Holies and it forecourt is torn apart. In that week the holy is redefined and recreated for us, not the temple, church or cathedral - the Temple is now rebuilt as the body of the crucified Christ. His body, this temple, this holy space is not a place of exclusion, a house of merchandise where we must barter to be allowed in, trading our daily lives, our secular joys and pains for the sacred currency of ritual and the acceptable pure gifts that will placate God; but the cross by the roadside, unfenced, unadorned, the public and the defenceless place where God gives us room. It is this that has become a holy space.
The irony shouldn’t escape us. Our churches, chapels and cathedral are often a long way from that rubbish dump outside Jerusalem. The church has determined its own access policies, rightly or wrongly as to who can approach God, where to sit and in what position, books to use and sing from, look at our own baptismal and communion policies. It is too easy to distort the worship of Almighty God with self serving complacency, consumerist greed and hunger for control.
And so we must tell ourselves again and again. Beneath this shrine, beneath the words we say and hear today, as beneath the old Temple, is a lightless, deafening, choking and smelly vault, a place we are constantly in danger of slipping away to without noticing. We brush aside the rumour of the scarecrow on the cross and stick with a God we can do business with. This God is pleased with our bustle, our committees and structures, our willingness to make him an absorbing even expensive hobby. He is pleased that we treat our worship as something isolated and special, pleased by our religious professionalism. He is delighted that we so successfully manage the conditions under which he may be approached, saying yes to this one and no to that one and possibly if you do the following things, like removal one’s hats and switching off the mobile phone as we enter the cathedral, you can sit here, have you been confirmed to receive communion? The scribes sit and discuss who is pure enough to come to the communion table, and the anxious crowds’ mill around to find where they can acquire the right coinage to come into the sacred precinct. Religion and morality become religiosity and moralism. The wholeness of persons – their sin and their need and their thanksgiving – is broken down, as bits are exchanged for the acceptable equipment of the cult.
Of course the crowds aren’t that much in evidence these days. I can get 12 for worship at Stanhope, 8 at Wolsingham, look around the cathedral at it’s empty seats, it is now so easy to think of the cathedral as a concert venue run by the National Trust, rather than a place of prayer. To most people, the hectic activity of that vault where we worship is both comical and alarming, most people find traditional Christianity morally, socially and politically irrelevant. Perhaps so strikingly seen as the protest occupy movement outside St Paul’s Cathedral, London, now disbanded, has shown. The church through vacillation and division has missed the chance to contribute anything meaningful to important issues of global capitalism, poverty and the financial world. The response of St Paul’s to the angry, scruffy and loud occupy movement has been a lost opportunity to reach out to a wider population and thus perhaps to construct a new and compelling narrative for itself in years to come. Perhaps after a decade of fundraising – £42 million – it is easy to see why St Paul’s has lost its way, it is just too easy to worship Christopher Wren and not the God who spoke of the rich having to give up all its possessions. The camp maybe dead, but long live the campaign.
The tragedy is that our church members suppose that these cathedral precincts are holy places, the Temple of God. And for all of us who are religious, who dutifully perform the rites of our faith and especially for those who like me are professionally religious, clergy and so on, there is enough of that hot and crowded vault somewhere not too far from the surface to give plausibility to that error. We live down there a good deal of the time without even noticing, with the God who needs both pleasing and managing – an occupation that substantially eats into the time we have for the concerns of the world.
And so it is my plea that as we move deeper into Lent our work and worship in places like this should not fail to lead us back to the central fact of grace, God’s gift shown in the depth of human pain, that scarecrow in a public place, unfenced and unadorned, open for the whole world to see. Then the vault where we spend most of our church life work can be emptied, because the service of our holy God sets us free from the setting of boundaries and conditions. That service can call forth the
riches of imagination in prayer and music, the quiet dedication of all those who help in other ways, and even the long winded labour of us ministers. There can still be life, thought and vitality and beauty in the service of holiness, perhaps even more when we are set free from the manic and obsessive God and the hectic airless religion of the subterranean vault. But what will matter is the patterning of all this towards the truth at the centre of the world, God’s cross, in all its openness, all it secularity and unprotectedness.
John’s Jesus reproaches his people for making the Father’s house a place of merchandise: Go is not served with bargaining and managing. The Jesus of the other gospels says that the traders have made the holy place a den of thieves: the honour give to the God of the traders’ vault is taken from the true God. The real Lord of the real creation, God with us, is robbed of love and trust and service by the fantasies of religious busyness, robbed of those who are his scattered children by the way we men and women of faith so readily make our churches defended fortress. Lent and particularly Holy Week with all its intensity of ritual and imaginative elaboration, come paradoxically to break down the walls of self-contained religion and morality and to gather us around the one true holy place of the Christian religion. Jesus himself, displayed to the world as the public language of our God, placarded on the history of human suffering that stretches along the roadside. This is a time for learning not management, bargaining and rule keeping, but naked trust in that naked gift.
Amen
Readings: Exodus 20: 1 – 17; John 2: 13 – 22
Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit
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