The Light of the Temple

Malachi 3.1-4 ‘The Lord whom you seek will come to his Temple

Hebrews 2.14-18 ‘He had to be made like his brother so that he might become merciful

Luke 2.22-40 ‘The child grew, filled with wisdom’

 

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Today’s gospel reading is such a rich and beautiful story.

 

The key features were set out in the introduction to the entrance procession with our candles:

 

Mary and Joseph, as obedient Jewish young parents, did what they were meant to do under the Jewish Law.

 

The figures of Simeon and Anna, obedient and expectant older people, filled with the Holy Spirit, who saw in Jesus the fulfilment of their long-held desire to see the Lord’s Messiah.

 

Jesus declared to be ‘the light to enlighten the nations’ and the hope of Israel, with whose light we are illumined at baptism: that’s the Christian Enlightenment!

 

All this takes place in the Temple in Jerusalem, the epicentre of Jewish religious practice, the very dwelling place and visible focus of the invisible God.

 

The Temple is at its heart a place of presentation.

 

In the Temple sacrifices are presented to God.

 

To sacrifice is to give up something precious of our own, in order to receive blessing in return.

 

In pagan religion even children were sacrificed, the Bible condemns this in no uncertain terms.

 

The cult of the god Molech demanded child sacrifice, but in Leviticus we read, ‘You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 18.21).

 

The great patriarch Abraham has to be taken right to the brink of sacrificing his son, Isaac, to understand that the God of Israel is not like that, does not demand that. (Genesis 22.1-19)

 

So, in ancient Israel sacrifices were not of children but were typically of animals – which is why God provided a ram for Abraham to sacrifice, instead of Isaac.

 

‘The LORD will provide’ (Genesis 22.14)

 

And in Jesus Christ the Lord provide himself as the sacrificial offering for sin: he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

 

So in anticipation of his offering of himself, Jesus is presented in the Temple

 

The prophet Malachi sees deep into the Lord’s intentions so that our eyes are open to the work of John the Baptist, whose birth was announced to Zechariah in the Temple, and who prepares the way for Jesus Christ, the one who offers and the one who is offered:

 

Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. (Malachi 3.1,2)

 

That cuts straight to the scene we heard today: of presentation and reception in the Temple.

 

Mary and Joseph present; Simeon and Anna receive.

 

Mary and Joseph the young parents present the Christchild in the Temple.

 

Anna and Simeon, two elderly people yet refreshed, vigilant, eager, receive him.

 

This is the Church in embryo: young and old, men and women, presenting themselves to the Lord, receiving the Lord.

 

Just pause on that elderly man and woman: how inspiring!

 

In a tired world, with so many people feeling just tired, it is a great gift to be infused, inflated, inspired by the Holy Spirit.

 

This is call to allow ourselves to be inflated by the Holy Spirit!

 

The Spirit is the presence of God allowing and enabling us to recognise the Lord and the things of God in the world and in the heavens.

 

Here in the Temple, just as at Christ’s baptism, which we have already celebrated, but that comes later in his life, we see the Blessed Trinity in action: the Son is presented in the power of the Holy Spirit, in his Father’s house, the Temple.

 

At his baptism he hallows the waters of new life and new birth, waters that, in the prophecy of Ezekiel, flow from the Temple, just as the rivers flowed from the Garden of Eden to water the whole world. (cf Ezekiel 47; Genesis 2.10-14)

 

And when the soldier pierced the Crucified Lord, as he hung on the Cross, there flowed water and blood.

 

That was the sword, of which Simeon spoke, that pierced the heart of Blessed Mary too: as the 13^th century hymn, Stabat Mater, puts it:

 

Through her heart, his sorrow sharing,

All his bitter anguish bearing,

now at length the sword has pass'd.

 

The water and blood, flowing from the Sacred Heart of Jesus, signifies life and sacrifice.

 

When a child is born there is water and there is blood.

 

In baptism – itself a birth - there is water; in the Eucharist there is blood: both of which graft us into the Body of Christ, so that we share in his offering to the Father.

 

Just as Jesus Christ is human and divine so we are to shape our lives as human beings in the way of the divine, of God.

 

This is what is meant by those words in the Collect today, that Christ came and was presented ‘in substance of our flesh’: the fullness of divinity and fullness of humanity meet in his body; he is the New Temple, the Temple to be destroyed and raised on the third day as told in St John’s gospel:

 

Jesus, looking at the temple in Jerusalem, said: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. (John 2.19-21)

 

St Paul teaches that your body is a Temple.

 

Your body is the meeting place of divinity and humanity.

 

Your body is a temple; it is also a sacrifice.

 

That doesn’t mean you’re going to be slaughtered; it means you’re going to offer yourself in service of God in his world and in the lifting up of your heart in worship.

 

Lift up your hearts. We lift them to the Lord.

 

Our collect today prays that ‘we may be presented to [God] with pure and clean hearts’.

 

This is how St Paul puts it, connecting the offering of ourselves to God and away from the corruptions and machinations of the world:

 

I appeal to you therefore, brothers [and sisters], by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12.1,2)

 

The human body, in Christian tradition, is precious, honoured, not to be sullied or abused.

 

It’s why we carefully treat a dead body and recognise crimes against the body: it’s why every body matters.

 

We come as members of the Body of Christ, drawn by the Holy Spirit, presenting ourselves at the altar so that in turn we receive the Body of Christ.

 

So let us also, gathered together by the Holy Spirit,

proceed to the altar of God to encounter Christ.

There we shall find him

and recognise him in the breaking of the bread,

until he comes again, revealed in glory.

 

 

 

Word of God: Scripture fulfilled

Nehemiah 8.2-4a, 5-6, 8-10 ‘They read from the book of the Law, and gave the meaning.’

1 Corinthians 12.12-14,27 ‘You are the body of Christ and individually members of it.’

Luke 1.1-4; 4.14-21 ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled’

 

‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

 

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Scripture is fulfilled; fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.

 

Scripture, in the words of the letter to the Hebrews, is ‘living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword’. (Hebrews 4.12)

 

The fundamental conviction of the Church is that the Bible, our Holy Scripture, the Word of God, is central to the Christian life and to Christian worship: it is alive and active; feeding us, challenging us, inspiring us, guiding us on the way of holiness.

 

The Bible is the guarantee and witness that the living God binds your life and my life into the unfolding story of creation and covenant and redemption.

 

And Jesus says, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.

 

This tells us something really important about the logic of Biblical Christianity worth considering today.

 

In the synagogue in Nazareth, we are given a key, the key to unlocking the scriptures.

 

The key is Jesus Christ, the Anointed One of God, the one who declares, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ (Luke 4.21)

 

He is the key and the fulfilment of scripture, he is the Living Word.

 

The Church reads scripture always in the light of the Crucified and Risen Lord.

 

We see that at Easter, when a great series of reading from the Old Testament is read: promises and pledges, good in themselves, yet waiting to be fulfilled for all humanity in Christ.

 

We see it in the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch in the Acts of the Apostles, St Luke’s second volume (Acts 8.26-40).

 

This is when an important official of the Queen of Ethiopia is on a journey reading a passage where Isaiah is talking about a servant who will suffer for the life of others (Acts 8.32-33).

 

The Ethiopian asks the Apostle St Philip, ‘who is the prophet talking about? Is it about him or about someone else?’ (Acts 8.34).

 

In response, ‘Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told [the Ethiopian man] the good news about Jesus’. (Acts 8.35 quoting Isaiah 53.7,8)

 

Philip has used the key!

 

Scripture opens up in relation to who Jesus Christ is.

 

Sadly, the Bible is seen by many today as either irrelevant to life, a remote document of the past or perhaps as a text to be dissected and analysed.

 

That is fine as far as it goes - great for a literature student and it can give some insights - but it does not treat the Bible as the fulfilled Holy Scripture that it is, a living and active, converting, inspiring word, burning with God’s love and presence and holiness.

 

Analysing the Bible as literature is just dull, and doesn’t do justice to the power of scripture.

 

Can you imagine if Jesus stood up in the synagogue that Sabbath day and read that stunning piece of Isaiah and declared:

 

Today you have heard a text that is from Trito-Isaiah, which is chapters 56-66 of so-called Isaiah, composed after the exile in Babylon, not to be confused with Proto-Isaiah (chapters 1–39) written in the 8^th century BC; or Deutero-Isaiah, which is chapters 40–55, and is the work of an anonymous 6th-century BC author writing during the Exile. It deals with the power dynamics of what politics should look like when exiles return home.

 

Now that may be academically accurate: but it’s word not made flesh.

 

It attempts to rob the text of its power: no action of the anointing Spirit, no good news to the poor, no liberty for captives or oppressed people, no recovery of sight for the blind, no jubilee.

 

That takes us back to the key.

 

For Jesus picks up the scroll, unrolls it, reads the text, sits down and declares, ‘today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.

 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon him,

    because God has anointed him

    to proclaim good news to the poor.

God has sent Jesus to proclaim liberty to the captives

    and recovering of sight to the blind,

    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour, the jubilee.

 

What we seek and find in the scriptures is a living encounter with Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, that is a way that avoids fundamentalism and liberal scepticism.

 

We know the dangers of fundamentalism when it comes to the Bible and we should also know the perils of how the Bible is treated by many even in churches today.

 

The trouble is that both the fundamentalist and the liberal takes the Bible literally but not seriously: it suits both to do that; one so as to overclaim what the text says and the other so as to underplay it.

 

The absence of dinosaurs in the Bible makes the fundamentalist say that dinosaurs are made up: that’s taking scripture literally but not seriously.

 

The absence of dinosaurs in the Bible makes the liberal say that the Bible is limited and not applicable today: that’s taking scripture literally but not seriously.

 

The Bible is sacred word not scientific text book; it is of human authorship but divinely inspired.

 

The tradition of the Church is to take the Bible totally seriously, but not literally, in every aspect of what we read; it feeds and inspires the living faith of the Christian.

 

Read the Bible, mark it, learn it, inwardly digest it!

 

We do this in personal reading of the Bible: at the very least check out the readings for the coming Sunday each week, or get Bible reading notes.

 

We do this too as we come together to worship and hear ‘the word of the Lord’ because we come to meet Jesus.

 

Our text today was from the beginning of St Luke’s Gospel, and at the end his gospel the power of the Bible proclaimed in the Eucharist is affirmed

 

Two disciples walk along the road to Emmaus, they are joined by the Crucified and Risen Jesus, yet they fail to recognise him.

 

They start talking about Jesus, to Jesus, and, as they walk along, we read that, ‘beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, Jesus interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself’. (Luke 24.27)

 

At journey’s end they break bread together and they recognise Jesus.

 

As he went from their sight they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’ (Luke 24.32).

 

May our hearts be set on fire through the scriptures, may our ears tingle with eagerness to hear them, may we be set free by the one they proclaim and may we say with the psalmist:

 

How sweet are your words to my taste,

sweeter than honey to my mouth!

(Psalm 119.103)

Nicaea 1700th Guest Post - Would it Matter if Jesus was not fully God and fully Human?

This is a guest post from Fr David Adamson-Hill, priest with responsibility for St George's, Waddon in the Parish of Croydon. It is written to mark the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 2025.

Would it Matter if Jesus was not fully God and fully Human?

 

Docetism is an easy heresy to fall in to; the belief that somehow Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ, was in some way less human than we are; as if God was disguised in the body of a man. The truth of the incarnation is that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, and the Christian 'faith is grounded in the divine human relation'[1] which only becomes possible because of the absolute and irreducible humanity of Jesus. Ignatius of Antioch, the second century bishop and martyr, neatly sums up the problem:

 

'Every denial of the reality of the humanity of Jesus means a denial of the reality of our redemption, for if Jesus only seemed to have a body, then he only seemed to redeem us...The whole of Christianity then evaporates into a mere semblance of reality.'[2]

 

            A modern day problem for Christians in trying to grasp the full humanity of Jesus is the temptation to try and escape the finitude of our human condition. In a broad sense this can mean escaping the terminality of death, though most people realise this is impossible and undesirable. More subtly and more realistically, it means the desire to escape the normality of life – the everyday situations and context that bind us to the world. Like all human beings, Jesus had his time and he participated in our history under specific conditions. This specificness, which is key to human identity, places Jesus in a context that is very human. Being “bound” by anything less than the same conditions which “bind” us would take away from this humanity.

 

            Why does this finitude matter? It matters because 'through the incarnation, the Son of God experiences at first hand what it is to be human – with all our limits'[3] By Christ living within human limits, we, as humans, begin to be liberated 'from our inclination to regard our limitedness as an affliction.'[4] In fact, what it is to be human is turned on its head. No longer should we try and fit the knowledge of Jesus into our human experiences, but rather how we think about what it means for us to be human is changed by our sharing in the life and time of Jesus. I’m a big fan of the Scottish Dominican theologian, who says 'we human beings have to learn to understand ourselves as being allowed to partake in [Jesus’s] humanity.'[5]

 

            This recognition that humanity in general is able to partake in the specific humanity of Christ in fact opens up a new way of being human – in God's self revelation of Christ, God has made possible the 'humanization of humanity.'[6] This full humanization is seen in the way Christ responds in complete faithfulness to the Father's call. Arguably, it is Christ's faithfulness in the face of pain, fear, and death that best express this freedom found in faithfulness. In order to understand the freedom and faithfulness of Christ, we must recall that 'God is most emphatically not an escape from human ills enabling us to evade the horrors and suffering of human life.'[7]

 

Christ's faithfulness only means anything to us as humans because Christ had the human freedom to choose whether or not to to run away from his impending death, and Jesus of Nazareth had no foreknowledge to help make that decision. Without this human power of choice and self-determination in the face of uncertainty, our salvation would be completely undermined. In this faithfulness, there is no escape or easy way out, but there is victory.

 

            If Christ's humanity is reduced by a forcing of divine foreknowledge into his self-awareness, then there is a real risk of reducing the saving power of Calvary. 'The human consciousness of Jesus did not pre-exist in heaven. To claim that would be to threaten the genuineness of his humanity.'[8] This is the key point; that without genuine human fear in the face of death, without a knowledge of Resurrection, how are human people able to relate to the human Christ? The Resurrection itself would lose meaning as well; it would no longer be the result of an act of complete faith, the 'act of surrender to participation in the divine life according to our human nature.'[9] To enter fully into death means to understand and experience death as terminal. The difference with Christ is that 'At the very point where the history of any other human being would stop unconditionally, he has a further history.'[10]

 

            In the face of the total humanity required for our salvation through Christ, how then can Christ's full divinity, the relation to the eternal logos be explained? A lot of confusion comes from a lack of appreciation of what the term 'person' really means, when the word is used in a theological sense. To say that Christ is fully human, and to say that Christ was a human person, is to say two different things; there is a difference between nature and person, with person being a subset of nature. 'Nature is what makes one human or not. Christ has a completely human nature. Therefore Christ is completely human.'[11] Christ is completely human without being a human person, in fact person hood (what we have) is not the fulfilment of human nature – fulfilment is what Christ is, the incarnation of the divine logos.

 

            This fulfilment takes the shape of a new way of being human, which is to say a new way of being faithful to God. Before this new way of being, God's call was the same, but humanity never fully responded to the call, to the fulfilment of humanity’s own vocation. To introduce you to another Dominican theologian, Edward Schillebeekcx, who writes that in Christ we find 'a man in whom was concentrated the entirety of man's vocation to faithfulness.'[12] This faithfulness is being attuned to the self-communication of the divine, even to participate in this communication. Human persons are called to continue this participation as children of God.

 

            Human persons now have the possibility, and the example, of living in this ongoing self-communication of God, living with the freedom to accept it or otherwise. In Christ 'humanity becomes “fully human” - able to share in the divine life, the “theological act of encounter with God'[13] through Christ's full humanity. The existence of Christ's humanity 'is what establishes and thus reveals human nature in all its possibilities.'[14] This true human nature is something that, left to our own devices, humanity cannot achieve – but humanity is not alone, it is given grace – the possibility of participation in the divine, through the ability to speak of divine life 'incarnate in the personal freedom and will of Christ'[15]

            Kerr writes that 'The life of the man Jesus was a limited life in a restricted time. Yet that life, with all its limitations, was the life of the eternal Son and Word of God.'[16] To have the same 'personal freedom' as Christ, which is key to sharing in the Divine life, means realizing that it is good to have life limited by time; there is freedom in accepting that the way of transcending humanity as it appears to human persons is to accept an un-transcended, completely normal, version of humanity.

 

            'Because of his boundless love, Jesus became what we are that he might make us to be what he is' so goes the famous saying of St. Irenaeus.[17] In this is summed up what it means to become 'fully human' – it is the vocation to intimacy with God through Christ. This is the revelation of the ultimate destiny of all humankind, shown once and for all in an individual, and accessible to all through that same individual. The openness that is required for this is what is given to us in the human life of Jesus Christ. Without this human life, there could be no intimacy with God; human persons could not have seen what it really means to be a human being, and the human destiny and calling to community with God could not have been fulfilled.

 

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[1]Jennifer Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God: The Theological Anthropology of Edward Schillebeeckx (T&T Clark: London, 2009), p. 143

[2]Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (Continuum: London, 2012) pp. 178-9

[3]Gerald O'Collins, SJ, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995), p. 236

[4]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 23

[5]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 26

[6]Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 127

[7]Harry Williams, The True Wilderness (Continuum: London, 1965), p. 46

[8]O'Collins, Christology, p. 254

[9]Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 150

[10]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 31

[11]O'Collins, Christology, p. 25t6

[12]Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (Sheed & Ward: London, 1963), p. 13

[13]Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 150

[14]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 26

[15]Cooper, Humanity in the Mystery of God, p. 160

[16]Kerr, Immortal Longings, p. 35

[17]Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. V, Preface (Ex Fontibus Co: Dublin, 2010), p. 554