The violent act by which Jesus cleansed the Temple in today’s
Gospel has long been a subject of debate.
Was Jesus speaking out against market forces; attacking the religious
cult of his time; or trying to reassert the true purpose of a sacred space?
For the Israelites the Holy of Holies, the innermost part of
the Temple, was a place like no other.
It was the place God was encountered in a unique way. When the Temple was destroyed by the Romans
just a few decades after the crucifixion the Jewish leaders of the time argued
that now the home, and the table where the Sabbath meal was shared, had become
the ‘small sanctuary’ for a faithful people scattered across the world.
For Christians that place of meeting with God is even more
personal than where a meal is shared in the home. God comes among us and within us. Charles Wesley uses that idea in the hymn I Thou Who Camest from Above when he
wrote: ‘kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart’. In his poem Love George Herbert similarly portrays the encounter with God as
intimate and direct: “’You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’ So I did sit down and eat”.
Beliefs shape us and influence the course of our lives. It seems to me that the outrage of Jesus
about the market place invading the Temple was about the creeping tendency of
trade to fashion our relations not only with one another but with God. It may be that the free market is the least
harmful of various alternatives, but when left to operate without restriction it
poses major threats to human wellbeing. It
is about more than just buying and selling.
Writing about the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers
William Kenan argues that:
“capitalism constitutes the
human self in a very particular way: as an individual, autonomous, rational,
self-seeking, cost-benefit-calculating consumer.”
Human beings have always traded and probably always
will. But when that trade defines our
relationships in religion we lose the place to reflect on the very purpose of
that trade. We know the price of
everything and the value of nothing. The
Temple was somewhere that put the rest of life into perspective. The value of those who went there shouldn’t
have been defined by the wealth of what they could buy to sacrifice. As Jesus made clear in the parable of the
widow’s mite, the market cannot evaluate the true cost of giving or the depth
of someone’s relationship with God.
In 2 Corinthians 6:16 Paul writes that “we are the temple of
the living God”. Like the Jewish homes
with their ‘small sanctuary’, the Christian has a place set aside where true
values are treasured and acted upon. It
is both within us and shared in the company of the Church. When we meet together in worship our value
isn’t defined by wealth but by love: and we are invited to see the value of the
world in the same way.
Chris Swift
Lead Chaplain at Leeds NHS Trust Hospital
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