Jesus and the Temple

Texts: Malachi 3:1-4; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40

Perhaps every generation of human beings is tempted to believe that, only with their own arrival on the scene, have we reached maturity and wisdom as a race. That is certainly true of many people today. If it’s old it has no value – whether we are talking about computers or about ideas. At least, religious ideas.

Now I come to think of it, not many people dismiss Plato, Socrates and Co as hopelessly ignorant, children of their time, pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment or whatever. They are still ‘cool’. But any theologian who is dead, or, of course, who was orthodox in his teaching – well, we now see that he was a poor misguided ignoramus. Fancy believing such rot!! We know better today, of course – we’re modern, or even post-modern.

And the sad thing is that such dismissive attitudes towards some of the greatest religious thinkers of the last two thousand years - correction, the last four thousand years – are found inside the Church as well as outside it. Challenged to show how his views are consistent with the Scriptures or the teaching of the Church as summarised in the Creeds, Professor Geering doesn’t even try. He dismisses the prophets and the writers of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, the gospel writers, St Paul and the other Apostles, the Fathers of the early Church period, and everybody else up to and including the present day who argue for the orthodox Christian teaching, as being pre-modern, pre-scientific and pre-Enlightenment.

A strand of this approach is often found among much less exalted members of the Church. I often hear people saying that we don’t need the Old Testament today – we’re Christians – we follow Christ. Some people go so far as to talk of the God of the New Testament as distinct from the God of the Old Testament, the latter being hopelessly autocratic and arbitrary, the former being reliable, and, of course, loving.

Now there are a lot of heresies that I rather enjoy myself; but not this one. As broad as we Anglicans like to be, this one is a heresy too far. It should be stamped out and those who believe it should be deported to Auckland or some other place of eternal punishment. At this stage in the Church year particularly, we are reminded that the Christian teaching does not make any sense at all if it is removed from the Old Testament context.

Two weeks ago we had the story of the wedding at Cana, where, we were told, Jesus turned water into wine. If that was all that happened on that occasion – if that was what St John’s story was all about – then I would agree with Lloyd Geering that it was pre-scientific nonsense. What we would have is not Jesus the Son of God but Jesus the magician, with a party trick to astonish the gathered throng.

But when we put that story in its proper context – its Old Testament context – we see something very different from magic tricks. St John is very clear about those stone jars. They weren’t there for those who had taken the pledge and wanted something non-alcoholic to drink – they were there for the ritualistic hand-washing required of all faithful religious Jews before eating.

Water is essential to human life, and it played a very important part in Jewish ritual. It plays a very important part in Christian ritual, too, of course; we come into the faith through baptism with water. But there is more to life than just water – just existence. When Jesus turns the water into wine he signals that God is doing something new – something more – than he had done before, not instead of, but in addition to what had been done before.

Jesus did not say, from now on water is abolished and replaced by wine. He said in addition to the water that is essential for human existence, God is offering wine as a symbol of fullness and joy. Jesus and the new covenant does not replace Abraham and the old one, but builds on it, takes God’s relationship with us to a new level, as we might say.

Today’s story is another illustration of that same idea. It’s a first instalment of the whole story of the relationship of Jesus and the Temple, which takes about 100 years to work through. Nobody works it through better than the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, to whom we will come shortly. But first let’s look at the story as St Luke records it, and then look at its context in the Old Testament.

St Luke is the only one of the gospel writers who includes this account; and he does it with the same care for detail as he shows in his birth narrative. He is at pains to show that Mary and Joseph scrupulously followed the requirements of the law in respect of their firstborn child. Just before today’s passage begins, St Luke has told us that Jesus was circumcised on the 8^th day, as the Law required.

Then Mary observed the period of purification required by the Law. Childbirth had rendered her ‘unclean’ – that is, she could not participate in religious ritual. Some of you will remember a ceremony in the Book of Common Prayer called The Churching of Women, which was a Christian development of that same idea in which we gave “humble thanks for that thou hast vouchsafed to deliver this woman thy servant from the great pain and peril of child-birth”. In Mary’s day there was a stand-down period of 40 days, and then a rite of purification at the Temple.

So she has come to the Temple for that purpose, and to do two other things. First, to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving for the child; and secondly, and even more importantly, to consecrate Jesus to God as the Law required in respect of the firstborn male child. So, says St Luke, at this first meeting, so to speak, of the Temple and Jesus, the past is accepted and honoured, and the new present with the transformed future is begun.

That is what is being proclaimed by the prophet, Simeon, and the prophetess Anna. Humanity’s representatives, male and female, speak through the Spirit to welcome the child, but also to acknowledge that this infant’s coming to the Temple is in fulfilment of the ancient promise that the Lord himself would come, bringing salvation.

Thus, to fully understand the significance of this gospel story we need to know the Old Testament background to it. Today’s passage is a case in point. The prophet, Malachi, whose book has the distinction of being the final one in the Old Testament, includes this promise: See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come, says the Lord Almighty. And as soon as we think about that for a moment, another story involving Jesus and the Temple springs to mind. This story is one that St Luke shares with all the other gospel writers. We know it as the Cleansing of the Temple; and this time, of course, we can see much more clearly, the idea of judgment, of cleaning up the household of God in readiness for the in-gathering of the Gentiles.

As I’ve said, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews has much to say about the way in which Jesus replaces the Temple with his own body. Instead of the special holy place in which God is to be found, we have a special holy person in whom God is to be found. But before he gets around to spelling out this great insight, he reminds us that Jesus was and is a human being like all human beings. He came, not to help angels, but “Abraham’s descendants’ – and there is the link back to the Old Testament, the proper context for understanding this and all other New Testament writings.

Perhaps the real difference between the Christian viewpoint and the post-modern one is toPublish be found here. We believe in the continuing, coherent story of God’s relationship with humanity, beginning with Abraham and going on to the end of time. The Geerings of the world do not. They believe that we create a story of our own, and whatever story we choose to create is just as valid and worthy of respect as any other story. There are just as many truths as there are people, as somebody has put it

And that is another heresy for which the only suitable penalty is exile to Auckland.