St Nicholas' Church Dedication Festival (1939)

 Lectionary readings: 1 Kings 8.22-30 and Matthew 21.12-16

There’s a story in the Gospels of Jesus going to the Temple at Jerusalem, and, finding it filled with money changers, drives them out so forcibly that it is presented as an exorcism.

It helps to know some things about the Temple.

Firstly, the Temple was a deeply symbolic architecture, a representation on earth of the ordering of the cosmos. The Temple was a series of concentric spaces around the Holy of Holies, God’s house on earth, not because God needed or could be contained within a house, but for people’s sake, a visual representation. Around this was, first, space for the priests, mediators between God and humanity. Then space for Jewish men, representatives of their families. Then space for Jewish women. It should be noted that distance from the centre does not imply that most men are less holy or important or valued than priests, or that women are any less holy or important or valued than men, and more than Earth is less holy or important or valued than Mercury or Venus for being further from the sun at the centre of our solar system. While misogyny twists what is good, in our rightful calling out of misogyny we should not fall into the error of antisemitism. The Jewish women surround the Jewish men because they are the mothers who birth the community into existence, and the warriors given by God to deliver the people from their enemies. Beyond the space for the women was space for the Gentiles, non-Jews who chose to worship the Jewish God, and whose presence at the outer edge of the Temple was prophetically symbolic of a time when all the surrounding nations would come to worship.

Just as many people come to church today, people came to the Temple to mark significant moments in their personal or communal lives. And when they came, they brought an offering, usually an animal or a crop. This was blessed by the priest, killed (if an animal), prepared, and eaten, sometimes as a family, sometimes as a wider community, sometimes including the priests, in much the same way that those who come to church for a funeral, christening or wedding go on to a wake or reception, to which the vicar is often invited. What people brought was weighted according to means, but at the heart of coming to the Temple was coming to celebrate God’s goodness, and the principle was that all who participated, contributed.

Over the centuries, Jewish communities spread out beyond the boundaries of Israel. This resulted in a logistical problem for pilgrims. If you are travelling to Jerusalem from, say, Alexandria, it isn’t easy to bring a sheep along. And so, at some point, animals were made available on arrival. At some point, someone also decided that pilgrims couldn’t buy these animals with common currency but would have to exchange their money for Temple currency. This is understandable when you recall that the Greeks had desecrated the Temple. Those who operated the bureau de change may well have added a small commission, but there is no evidence that they were exploiting pilgrims. They had, however, spilled into the court of the Gentiles. When Jesus declares to the money changers and sellers of doves—the poor person’s offering—that, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer [for all nations]”; but you are making it a den of robbers’ it is likely his objection was that they had stolen the house of prayer from the nations.

Jesus says that they are making the house of prayer into a den of robbers, or cave of bandits. This is an interesting choice of words. It was king David who had first wanted to build a Temple at Jerusalem for God. But before he was king in Jerusalem, David had been king of outlaws or bandits hiding in a cave; and God told him that he had too much blood on his hands; instead, his son Solomon would be the one to build the first Temple. That had been destroyed, a second Temple built, and later significantly extended; even so, space was at a premium, and it was the nations who were missing out. Perhaps the import of Jesus’ words was that, like David, their heart was in the right place, but they weren’t going about it in God’s way.

The immediate effect of the exorcism is that the blind and the lame receive healing, and children shout for joy.

When we come to God’s house to thank God for his goodness, the grace and mercy we have received, the blessings we enjoy, everyone is meant to bring their contribution. God’s house, wherever it may be, is a house of prayer, for all nations. We come bringing not sheep or doves or grain but—first and foremost—prayer. And the space in which we do that can be stolen, encroached upon. What might Jesus want to exorcise from his Church today?

One of the things that often needs to be exorcised is our perfectionism, which has little to do with doing all things well and much to do with our own narrow view of how things should be done. Too often people have had the confidence to pray in public stolen from them by church leaders or fellow members who have passed judgement on their offering, as not being acceptable: ‘Those prayers were lame!’ Too often people have been disabled, rather than enabled. Too often those who are inexperienced—those who are children in what they bring, who have not yet learnt the sober and at times sombre ways of Getting It Right—are overly-corrected, told what to say, made to read out prayers written by someone else. This, too, is a disabling and not an enabling.

But when Jesus comes into the Temple, he turns over tables. He disrupts business as usual. He sees with fresh eyes and acts with strong limbs, in such a way that others are empowered to praise, to bring their previously silenced contribution to the party.

Exorcisms are concerned with restoring things to their rightful place in order that no one is trespassed upon by anyone else. In Jesus, there is room for all. Sometimes we just need things to be shaken up to rediscover it. Sometimes, we resent it, as if leaving room for others will mean less room for ourselves. But it doesn’t work like that. And Jesus will exorcise us until we discover him to be true.