Cleansing the temple
Once we possessed delight before the Lord,
singing in the skies, in better seasons
- “Christ and Satan”, Old English poem
My dreams are getting more weird and disturbing as we journey through Holy Week proper. In the latest, I’m watching a TV programme that focusses on a mysterious, sucking void. Just watching it makes me feel sick.
The void is sucking out an important person's soul. I’m not sure who - maybe Pope Francis. It’s unstoppable. It fills me with great dread and nausea. I’ve seen this before, I know where it’s going! Even so, the next images are a surprise. The (invisible) soul, sucked out of the significant person’s body, is then placed inside a small metal box. A winged robot flies off with the box in its hands. It takes it into deep black space - and to an awaiting Imperial-Class Star Destroyer (for non-Star Wars fans, think huge black spaceship)!
Somehow, in a way I hope to explain here, this made me think of Jesus’s most transgressive, earthly act, as well as his later, most transgressive ‘heavenly’ one:
Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, ‘It is written,
“My house shall be called a house of prayer”; but you are making it a den of robbers.’
The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’, they became angry and said to him, ‘Do you hear what these are saying?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Yes; have you never read,
“Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself”?’
He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there. (Matthew 21:12-27).
The great Jerusalem temple, rebuilt under Persian patronage from 538 to 515 BCE, was a central focus for all Jewish national life. Jesus has come into the very heart of the Holy City, at the time of the Passover, into the heart of ‘Second Temple Judaism’ no less, and delivered his greatest, ‘insider’ rebuke - not to the Jewish people, nor to the true fire of his tradition, but to what Paul called ‘the powers and principalities’ of his world. In Mark’s Gospel, “when the chief priests and the scribes heard [about] it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching” (Mark 11: 28).
According to Geza Vermes, the pioneering Jewish New Testament scholar, it was ‘the cleansing of the temple’ that specifically led to Jesus's arrest and execution. Jesus was not killed for blasphemy, Vermes argues, as “no Jewish law would qualify someone a blasphemer simply for calling himself the Messiah or the like.”* Jesus was killed for rebellion, or for his potential to inspire further disorder:
It was the duty of the Jewish leadership, Caiaphas and his council, to maintain order in Judea. Caiaphas imagined that Jesus was a potential threat to peace. Jerusalem, filled with pilgrims at Passover, was a powderkeg. A few days earlier, Jesus had created a commotion in the merchants' quarter in the Temple, when he overturned the stalls of the moneychangers. He could do it again. Jesus had to be dealt with in the interest of the whole nation in order to forestall massive Roman retaliation.**
There is something in the machinery of religious institutions and ‘ordering’ that vacuums up souls, encases them in heavy iron, and sends them to the angel of death. Think survivors of Church abuse. Think rainbow Christians, and non-Christians, being told that they are distorted, perverted and, literally, hell-bound. Think God as the architect of infinite torture (the doctrine of hell as “eternal torment”). More pervasively, across the board, think of how conformity, institutional life, and what often passes for polite, respectable order, deadens our lively bodies. In Phillip Pullman’s imagination, think of the terrible moment when dark powers catch up with you, hold you down, and sever your young self from its animal spirit. Of course, this may happen slowly, over a lifetime. We may also learn to do it to ourselves - and to others around us - quite apart from external chief priests and scribes.
Religion is more threatened by sacred fire than it is by cool indifference. At least, it treats the former more brutally.
Somewhere, between the New Testament (where there are hints***), and the great ecumenical creeds some hundreds of years later, Christianity began to believe that, after his death, and before his triumphant resurrection, Jesus “descended to the dead”.**** There, undiminished, he “harrowed hell” - broke down the gates of the underworld, and liberated those inside. He had, after all, been sent to hell too.
Christian theology approaches the mystery of Easter in what is known as the doctrine of the atonement. The most infamous (and sadistic) versions - Christ's death as satisfying a wrathful God (“satisfaction theory”), Jesus as punished and put to death in the place of sinners (“penal substitutionary theory”) - were developed much later in the piece (evolving in medieval and reformation times, respectively). One of the earliest versions, and widely considered dominant for most of the Church, is what Gustaf Aulen summarized as “Christus Victor”; "the work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the powers which hold humankind in bondage...".***** The rebel Jesus cleanses the temple, kicking over tables and healing the sick.
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References:
* Geza Vermes, "Celluloid brutality", in The Guardian (27/2/2004); retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/feb/27/religion.film).
** Vermes, “Celluloid brutality”.
*** See Matthew 12:40; Acts 2:24, 31; Romans 10:7; Ephesians 4:9; Colossians 1:18; 1 Peter 4:1.
**** Apostles’ Creed, contemporary wording.
***** Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor (1931). My inclusive language update.
Image at top of page: Harrowing of Hades (Chora), fresco in the apse of the Church of the Holy Saviour in the Country (usually known simply as “Chora”) outside the walls of Constantinople.
