Temples, bodies, sacrifice & encounter: A Lent sermon

 Preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster. Gospel text John 2.13-22.

 

‘[Jesus] was speaking of the temple of his body’ John 2.21

 

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For centuries the temple in Jerusalem sat at the heart of Israelite religion.

 

The temple was the place of sacrifice and of encounter with the presence of God in all his holiness.

 

Housing the Ark of the Covenant, the very presence of God, the temple’s roots are deep in the story of God’s people.

 

Early on, in the account of the Exodus it is as a roving sanctuary, resting on the journey as the people of Israel moved through the wilderness before entering the Promised Land.

 

Eventually, brought by King David, God’s presence in the Ark came to rest on Mount Zion and his son, Solomon, began the work of building the temple to house God’s presence.

 

Solomon’s temple fell into disrepair when Israel was captive in exile in Babylon. Yet under the priests Ezra and Nehemiah it was restored, and by Jesus’ day it had recently been rebuilt by Herod the Great, taking some 46 years.

 

That brings us to this visit of Jesus to the Temple, as recorded in all four gospels (Matthew 21.12-17; Mark 11.15-19; Luke 19.45-48).

 

Indignant at what he finds Jesus sweeps away the buying and selling which is a spin off from the necessity to have animals to sacrifice in the temple.

 

Some see this as an example of Jesus’ anger, an example of his humanity. On one level that is right - Jesus has assumed our humanity - but it’s not that Jesus is ‘losing his rag’. As the disciples later remembered, it is ‘zeal for God’s house’ that has consumed him: it’s zeal; it’s passion.

 

Re-read today’s gospel and we see that what Jesus is doing, in the tradition of the prophets, is a purposeful, intentional act of resetting the Temple to its original purpose: sacrifice to God is not about trading animals; encountering God is not a commercial transaction.

 

The temple is to be a house of prayer, a place of encounter with the Living God.

 

What is new, and different from the prophets, is that this is a divine visitation on an institution that had become all too human: as the prophet Malachi had said, ‘the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple’ (Malachi 3.1).

 

The stone-built temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD, some forty years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. So where is the temple now? So where is the place of sacrifice now? Where is the place of encounter now?

 

The clear statement of our gospel today is that the temple is a temple of flesh: the temple of Jesus’ body. So, that’s the place of sacrifice; that’s the place of encounter with the living God. The Body of Christ is of course profoundly what the church is: you and me together, who feed on the Body of Christ in the sacrament.

 

This is the place of sacrifice, Jesus Christ gives his life that we might live. Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrificial victim: ‘worthy is the Lamb once slain’ (Revelation 5.12), not a lamb traded in the temple precinct, but the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

 

The temple is not abolished by Jesus but transformed and relocated in his flesh.

 

Read the letter to the Hebrews and the Revelation to John and you see that the temple, recast by Christ, feeds the Christian life and imagination.

 

In its cleansing, the liturgical life of the temple - its rituals, customs, sacrifices and services - are transformed by Jesus and embraced by the church, not to exploit God’s people but to feed them.

 

So, then, where sacrifice and encounter with God take place there is the temple. In Christ this is a temple cleansed and fit for worship.

 

So as Christians when we speak of the temple we speak of Jesus Christ, we speak of our church building and we speak of ourselves.

 

Our church is a temple, a place of sacrifice – where lives are offered and life is received – and this holy place is a place of encounter.

 

And you are too.

 

As St Paul says, ‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?... God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple’. (1 Corinthians 3.16,17).

 

Christ’s Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is the pioneer of this reality. The power of the Most High dwelt in her body, she gave her body – her human body, her woman’s body - as the Lord’s temple; her life was opened to receive his life.

 

This all points to the reverence and honour we have for the body as Christians: we believe in the resurrection of the body, the ultimate statement of optimism about human bodies.

 

So we reject the separation of body and soul, the ancient heresy of Manicheism, which sees the soul as too good or pure for one’s body; the body is seen as a terrible encumbrance on a free spirit, and it means life is only lived through the body and physical gratification. That is the path to self-loathing. It afflicts many in our culture today.

 

We are body and soul together.

 

Christ visits the temple of our bodies and as we pray in Lent, ‘wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin’ (Psalm 51.2). That is a prayer that Christ might purge us, turn over some tables and upset some of our cosy bargains with God, so that we can become more truly people of sacrifice, offering our lives to Christ, the Lamb of God, that he might give us life in this bloodless sacrifice of the Eucharist.

 

Let us pray that we might be worthy temples of the Holy Spirit, a worthiness which is not earned but is Christ’s gift, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer:

 

We offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee, that all we, who are partakers of this holy Communion, may be fulfilled with thy grace and heavenly benediction. (Book of Common Prayer, Order for Holy Communion)

John the Baptist: righteousness is not hereditary

First preached as a sermon at Guildford Cathedral, second Sunday of Advent 2016

Isaiah 11.1-10; Romans 15.4-13; Matthew 3.1-12

+In nomine Patris…

Over the last few years the interest in family trees has grown and grown. Family trees tell us something about who we are by naming the connections and relationships that have brought us to being: they tell us about the roots and branches of families, groups of people and ultimately nations.

They can be dangerous though. They can lead us to over identify with close biological connections - tight or exclusive and the bonds of family, kinship and nation can lead to an unhealthy tribalism or veneration of social groupings. This fragments the oneness of being human in a common ancestor made in the image of the One God.

It is precisely that issue that John the Baptist identifies in the Pharisees and Sadducees who came to hear him. ‘Do not presume to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”; for I tell you, God is able from these stones [the stones of the wilderness] to raise up children to Abraham’ (Matthew 3.9). In other words, don’t rely on your supposed ancestral connections, on your family tree, to think you’re right with God. Righteousness is not hereditary, it is something each one of has to work at here and now.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, as was well publicised at the time, discovered that the man he thought to be his father was not. His response was to situate his identity not in a family tree, but in Christ.

The axe ‘lying at the root of the trees’ (v. 10) will bring down the idea that righteousness is hereditary, that biology always gives the most sustaining relationships.

It is ironic perhaps that John the Baptist shared a family tree with Jesus. John was Jesus’ cousin, although like in many Asian families the word ‘cousin’ could be a loose description. It is clear though that Mary, the God-bearer from whom Jesus received his humanity, was related to John’s mother Elizabeth. So Jesus’ and John’s DNA must have been pretty similar.

But similar DNA does not cut the mustard. What connects John - and us - to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is in the fruits of repentance and baptism, for the forgiveness of sins, which is a demanding, radical association of ourselves with Christ above all things, even bonds of kinship and tribe. It makes us ask: what do true, sustaining relationships look like? Where do I find them in my life?

The axe, then, is not destructive. John proclaims a message of both threat and promise. Threat: an axe lying at the root of the trees. Promise: a shoot shall spring forth from the tree stump of the family tree of the man called Jesse. Both in his own day and here and now John brings threat to many and promise to all.

We just have to glance around us at this time of year, late autumn giving way to early winter, to see threat and promise in the trees. The trees have all but shed their leaves. They look at their most dead. And yet deep inside the tree sap is brewing ready to rise and generate new leaves and new growth.

So it is that our final arboricultural image is in the promise that springs from the stump of a tree, the stock of Jesse.

Isaiah names this promise; St Paul, in our second reading, in the letter to the Romans also references it. This is an inclusive promise that the heirs of the patriarchs and prophets are not solely the people of Israel but those who have been adopted into the people of God in Christ. They are known as the Gentiles, that is you and me. We have no ancestral entitlement yet, Paul says, there will come from the root of Jesse ‘the one who rises to rule the Gentiles, [the nations, the peoples, the tribes]; and in him shall they/we hope’ (Romans 15.12). The God of Israel is the God of all Nations, ‘from whom’ as Paul writes elsewhere, ‘every family in heaven and on earth is named’.

In the Lady Chapel of this Cathedral there is an icon, of the Orthodox tradition, which is of the Jesse tree. At the bottom Jesse lies prone, asleep or possibly dead, yet growing out of him is the trunk of a tree. In the branches are our ancestors in the faith, patriarchs, matriarchs and prophets. And at the heart of the Jesse Tree is the Mother of God with her Son, our Saviour, enthroned on her lap. As the Elizabethan poet, Francis Kindlemarsh, put it, ‘an earthly tree a heavenly fruit it bore’: that heavenly fruit, Jesus Christ, the earthly, Mary.

The invitation of that icon is to be grafted into the living vine, to the Tree of Life in Jesus Christ.

John the Baptist prepares the way for the coming Lord, and demands of us lives that reflect the purity and holiness of the One Who Is to come. Something that we achieve, not by our ancestry, not by our own strenuous efforts but by confessing our sins, resting in Christ and receiving his life in baptism and eucharist.

Sharing in that life may we pray that the God of hope will fill us and all the world with all joy and peace in believing, so that all may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Blessed Virgin: Sleeping and Waking

Jesse Tree icon at Guildford Cathedral

The Lady Chapel of Guildford Cathedral contains within it an icon of the Jesse Tree. At the heart of its branches is the Mother of God with her Son, the focal point of the icon, enthroned upon her lap. Jesse sleeps at the foot of the tree. He sleeps not inattentively but in a generative repose of deep sleep as Adam did. Out of Adam’s side a rib was taken to create the mother of all the living, Eve, and out of Jesse’s side comes the tree from which the New Adam is descended and the mother from whom he is born.

St John of Damascus calls Mary New Eve. This title, which predates John, alludes to sleep since this is used to ‘correct’ the action of the first Eve. So, as Kallistos Ware says, ‘where Eve is disobedient, Mary is obedient. Where Eve is unguarded and inconsiderate, listening all too readily to the deceitful words of the serpent, Mary is watchful and prudent, only accepting the Archangels’ message after she has carefully questioned him’.[1] So for John, Eve brings the ‘sleep of death’ upon humankind, but Mary is, ‘initiator of life for the whole race’.[2] Mary’s is the ‘unwedded bride’ or ‘Bride without bridegroom’ she is the Wise Virgin who watches for, and points out, the bringer of the New Wine (John 2.5)and resists the Eve-like sleepy behaviour of the foolish bridesmaids in the gospels who fall asleep.

Icon of the Dormition of Mary

The Eastern Church proclaims that, ‘Neither tomb nor death overpowered the Mother of God, unsleeping in her prayers, unfailing hope in intercession’.[3] This proclamation is for the feast of the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God, the Dormition. It recalls the declaration of the Saviour at the bed of Jairus’ daughter, ‘she is not dead, but sleeping’ (Luke 8.52). This is the proclamation made to all who hear the voice of Mary’s Son, ‘Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live’ (John 5.25). She who is declared by the angel to be ‘the favoured one’ (Luke 1.28) falls asleep and the human body of one of God’s creatures is ‘crowned with mercy and loving kindness’ (Psalm 103.4).

It can now be said:

The virgin of the Magnificat, on whose lips is placed the message that God is exalting the humble and casting down the powerful, finds her life confirmed and glorified by the Father of Jesus. Mary’s assumption – seen in the light of Jesus’ resurrection – is hope and promise for the poor of all times and for those who stand in solidarity with them; it is hope and promise that they will share in the final victory of the incarnate God.[4]

For John of Damascus Mary is ‘Ladder of Jacob’. She is the ladder whose two extremities touch earth and heaven whilst Jacob, and humanity, sleeps. She was awake and alert, though fearful at first, of an angel who stepped off the ladder to call her to be mother of the Saviour.

Mary is not a goddess, not immortal, but as John of Damascus teaches emphatically, she who fell asleep was raised as expression of love.[5] It is out of this love, and echoing Song of Songs that, John places on the lips of Mother and Son these words, ‘Into your hands my child, I commend my spirit, says the Mother to her Son as she dies; and her Son replies, ‘Come, my blessed Mother, into my rest…Arise, come, my beloved, beautiful among women’.[6]

At the coming of sleep we entrust ourselves into the hands of God and pray that we will sleep in peace ready to be raised to the life of the new day, as Mary in her Dormition was swept up, like Elijah (2 Kings 2.1-12), to the very presence of God. Hence why the Church for centuries has associated sleep with the maternal care of Mary.

Dom David Steindl-Rast describes the monastic practice of Compline at his community:

At the very end of Compline, it has become a custom for the Abbot to bless the whole community by sprinkling them with holy water, a sort of evening dew. The monks then file into the Lady Chapel for a final hymn to Mary. This hymn changes with the seasons. For most of the year it is Salve Regina; at other times, there are Marian antiphons like the Regina Coeli or the Alma Redemptoris Mater, jewels of chant.

            This custom has always reminded me of children being tucked up in bed at the end of the day by their mother. It brings a smile to my face to think of all those monks sweetly singing at day’s end to their Mother, opening themselves to the anima realm of their psyche, and entrusting themselves to the infinite darkness as maternal. Thus the part of the monastery indelibly linked for me with Compline is the Lady Chapel, where we return to our spiritual womb to be reborn again next morning.[7]

Jean-Luc Nancy’s words could almost have been written as a meditation to be placed on Mary lips as she gazed upon the Christ-Child:

Tomorrow morning, God willing, you will awake again: sleep my child, sleep my soul, sleep my world, sleep my love, sleep my little one, the child will sleep soon, already he’s sleeping, look he goes to sleep with the first night of the world, the divine child who plays with the dice of the universe and of all its centuries, he sleeps with every night that rocks anew, tirelessly the repetition of the first, of the initial nocturnal lullaby where the first day fell asleep with the first sleep.[8]

The new day will come, before which we sing, ‘Ave Regina caelorum’:

 

Hail, Queen of Heaven, beyond compare,

To whom the angels homage pay;

Hail, Root of Jesse, Gate of Light,

That opened for the world’s new Day

Rejoice, O Virgin unsurpassed,

In whim our ransom was begun,

For all your loving children pray

To Christ, our Saviour, and your Son.

As we prepare to lay ourselves down to sleep let us close in prayer before sleep with the words of St Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) entrusting us to the care of Jesus Christ, Blessed Mary and the angels.

Jesus Christ my God, I adore you and thank you for all the graces you have given me this day. I offer you my sleep and all the moments of this night, and I ask you to keep me from sin. I put myself within your sacred side and under the mantle of our Lady. Let your holy angels stand about me and keep me in peace. And let your blessing be upon me. Amen.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

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[1] “‘The Earthly Heaven’ – The Mother of God in the Teaching of St John of Damascus” in McLoughlin, W, & Pinnock, J,. 2002. Mary for Earth and Heaven: Essays on Mary and Ecumenism. Leominster: Gracewing. p. 358.

[2]

[3] Kontakion Tone 2 www.monachos.net/idomel accessed 19th March 2014

[4] Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, trans. Phillip Berryman, (Maryknoll N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989),119.

[5] Ware, ‘The Earthly Heaven’, 364.

[6] Dormition Sermon 2.10.

[7] David Steindl-Rast and Sharon Lebell, Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day. (Berkeley CA: Ulysees Press, 1998, 2002), 109.

[8] Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, 32-33.

God remembers his mercy: Mary sings about it

Preached at the Guildford Cathedral Eucharist, 
Sunday 20^th December 2015, Fourth Sunday of Advent. (Micah 5.2-5a; Luke 1.39-55)

“God’s mercy is on those who fear him through all generations”

+ In nomine Patris…

A mother, whose son is condemned to die for being a thief, kneels on the ground pleading with the Emperor, ‘Show my son mercy’. Coldly, he replies, ‘This boy is a habitual thief, and for what he has done, he deserves justice, and that justice is death’. The mother begs, ‘But I don’t ask for justice, your highness, I seek mercy’. ‘He deserves no mercy’ replies the Emperor. To which the mother says, ‘It would not be mercy if he deserved it’.

And so, the story goes, the Emperor was touched by the mother’s grief and compassion and released the boy.

This story draws on two particular themes that come from this morning’s gospel reading: that of the mother, and that of mercy.

Mary’s song, the Magnificat, touches many themes, of course. The fundamental one is her glorification of God and his works, in her life and in the world.

Mary magnifies for us the mercy of God: she says, ‘God’s mercy is on those who fear him throughout all generations”, “God, remembering his mercy, has come to the aid of his servant Israel”.

Mercy is at the heart of God’s relationship with Mary’s own people, Israel.

Narrating Israel’s history, Psalm 136 has this as a repeating refrain, ‘for his mercy endureth for ever’.

‘God, remembering his mercy, has come to the aid of his people Israel’, Mary sings.

Israel strays time and again from God. Justice would demand retribution and punishment for that: but God shows mercy and patiently calls Israel back to himself.

But how much mercy? What does mercy look like in the face of terror and violence, in bullying and ostracising? Bluntly, is there any possibility of mercy for Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Abu Bakr al-Bagdahi or Jihadi John?

Perhaps justice demands eternal death and damnation for them. Or is that just retribution?

Pope Francis, who is passionate about mercy, has said, ‘Mercy is not opposed to justice but rather expresses God’s way of reaching out to the sinner, offering him a new chance to look at himself, convert and believe.’ (Pope Francis, Misericordiae Vultus, §21).

This mercy is available to all people in our generation as well as in the past, otherwise it is not mercy.

This is what, in five nights, time we proclaim and celebrate afresh. Mary gives birth to divine mercy in human form. So now we see the divine mercy of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The ultimate act of mercy is the coming of the Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ. Christ emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness (Philippians 2.7). Christ born as one of us: that is mercy. ‘And being found in human form, he humbled himself, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross’ (Philippians 2.8). Christ dies for us and our salvation: that is mercy.

Jesus taught and lived mercy. ‘Go away and learn what this means’, he says, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ (Matthew 9.13). He became a sacrifice for sin to show us mercy. This is how we can sing, ‘O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us’.

Jesus illustrates mercy in the parables.

The parable of the Good Samaritan hinges on mercy. The priests who passed by were being fastidious about ritual cleanliness and bypassed the bloodied man so as not to defile themselves ready to offer the temple sacrifice; because of that they were devoid of mercy.

That’s not what is seen in the Samaritan. Jesus asks the lawyer at the end of the parable, ‘“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy”. Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10.36, 37).

Another ‘mercy parable’ is the one known as ‘The Prodigal Son’. But focus on the son detracts from the merciful character of the father, which is, without doubt, telling us of the nature of God. It is the parable of the merciful Father.

In that parable justice demanded that the father reject and punish his wayward, disrespectful and morally bankrupt son, yet mercy means that he says, ‘let us celebrate for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ (Luke 15.24).

When mercy is shown to us it is life giving and life affirming.

It is this life that Mary delights in in the Magnifcat.

She sings about God’s mercy which frees us - and his people throughout the ages - to awe, reverence, adoration, honour, worship, confidence, thankfulness and love.

Put that way, when we sing ‘Kyrie eleison’, ‘Lord, have mercy’ it is not an abject plea, but a joyful response to all that God does for us, just as Mary sings about in the Magnificat. When we pray, ‘Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer’ it’s not to persuade God to be merciful but it’s because God is merciful that we can pray it.

So mercy has two faces.

It is the gaze of God upon you and me, mediated in the face of Jesus Christ, the image of the Father. As St Benedict says in his Rule, ‘Finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy’ (RB4).

The challenge of the Magnificat for you and for me is to gaze mercifully upon other people and upon yourself; to be the face of mercy to the people with whom we share our lives, even our enemies and those we find most difficult or detest.

In response to the impending birth of her Son, the Saviour of the World, Mary sings of God’s mercy in her life and in God’s world. Inspired by her example, and the merciful face of her Son, may we hear afresh these words of his, as we prepare for Christmas and live every day of our lives:

‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you’ (Mark 5.19).