Thankfully the experience of ‘Lockdown’ is now a memory, but it has left scars on the lives and landscape of us all. Many town centres have lost their big stores as we have turned into internet shoppers. Many meetings are now online, many city centre bars and restaurants have lost their customers who are now working from home and many churches now have virtual worship services.

All of these changes pose a question about the ways in which we relate to each other. The human creature has evolved as a social animal, we need each other to be ourselves, but new technologies have constantly changed the way in which we do that. How does the Church respond to these challenges?

What does it mean to be the Church of Jesus Christ?

This is not a new question, in fact in every generation new challenges, technologies, and sadly abuses have raised the issue of the role of the Church in mediating our relationship with God.

The Reformation in Northern Europe was such a response. In part it was a response to the challenge of scientific discoveries, in part to the development of new print technologies, and in part to the perceived abuses within the Catholic church.

The Counter Reformation in the Catholic world was not just an attempt to counter the Protestant critics but to renew from within the medieval practices of the Catholic church.

Emerging out of this movement there was, in Spain, an emphasis on the mystical and spiritual relationship that each worshipper should seek to develop with Christ.

Traditionally the Church had acted as ‘Door Keeper’ to God, granting access through the ‘Means of Grace’ and the ‘Acts of Penance’ but the new ‘Mystics’ talked about a ‘Conversion’ experience through which the faithful could come to God in their own right.

Instead of the ‘Sacrament of Penance’ as a public act of ‘Reconciliation’ with the Church, there was a change of emphasis to private confession and personal experience. The image of the Church as an Ark carrying all to God was replaced by the image of the soul as a pilgrim on his path to heaven.

The Mystic writers and poets of the Spanish Catholic Church were at the forefront of this renewal of faith and practice and the painter ‘El Greco’, in the words of one commentator, ‘became the vital visual representation of Spanish mysticism, reflecting its religious spirit in his paintings’.

The Purification of the Temple 1605

El Greco was himself a ‘Mystic’ sitting in a darkened room as he conceived his works of art, so that the ‘Inner light’ might illuminate him.

His depiction of the ‘Purification of the Temple’ should be understood in the light of this new ‘Mystical’ understanding of the Church.

Here each figure seems to carry its own light within, or reflect the light that emanates from Jesus. Anatomically each figure has become ‘Otherworldy’ as if somehow ‘On fire’! It is a work not of reality but of imagination and intuition, described by contemporaries as ‘Mad’, ‘Strange’, ‘Odd’ but by others as ‘Original’. Along with El Greco’s otherworldly paintings it was an image that was to influence, hundreds of years later, the Romantic and Impressionist painters.

‘Destroy this Temple, and In three days I will raise it up’ John 2:19

The Temple was for the Jews the place where heaven and earth met. It was where God spoke to his people and one day would come to meet with His people. Jesus was about to redefine ‘The Temple’

Jesus had come to the Temple courtyards where the sacrificial animals were sold to the worshippers, but the coin they needed was not that which they normally bought and sold their goods. The Temple coin did not bear the idolatrous image of Caesar and had to be used in the Temple precincts.

The exchange of Roman for Temple coins provided the Temple authorities with a considerable income and financed the many priests and Temple officials necessary to run the business of thousands of daily sacrifices.

Jesus now brought this business to a halt, threatening the functioning of the Temple itself, no wonder then that he caused outrage! His offence was not so much that he turned over the tables of the traders but that he struck at the heart of the Temple’s business model! A Business model that we might call

‘Marketplace’ economics.

The buying and selling of access to God or the exclusion of the poor from worship because they cannot afford to pay, is an abuse of the free gift of God’ grace, his forgiveness, his love.

The prophetic words of Jesus to destroy the Temple will indeed bring the whole business of access to God through the sacrifice of an animal to an end. In El Greco’s painting we see two carved images, one of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden and the other of Abraham offering his son as a sacrifice. They help to explain for us the significance of Christ’s words.

He will now provide the sacrifice for all, and through his death and resurrection grant access to God to all, without cost.

The Temple of his Body.

Does Jesus then make the Church necessary? A few days after the events in the Temple he meets with a Samaritan woman who asks him whether it is the Jewish temple or the Samaritan Temple where God meets with his people. The response suggests that it is not the place where we meet with God that matters, but how we meet with God.

‘The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth’

John 4:23

The new Temple, (the Church), is the ‘Body of Christ’, and as the ‘Mystics’ taught us we all have access to it through the Holy Spirit who leads us into all truth. As such the reality of the Church is not the bureaucracy that organises it, or the money that finances it, nor as many demanded the signs and miracles that claim to authenticate it, but the love that brought it into being in the first place.

Through service and sacrifice the Church is to make known the love of God and the wisdom of God. As Paul says, in his letter to the Corintians, this seems like foolishness. The wisdom of God is indeed foolishness to the world.

As we leave this building this morning we do not cease to be the Church. We are the Church at home, at work and to all who we meet along the way. God has chosen us, called us, to make his love and wisdom known to the world. It might seem like a foolish plan, but then God’s wisdom is made known through foolishness and his love made known in weakness. We can have confidence that God can and does use us to be His presence, His power, and His love in the world. We are the place where heaven meets earth.

‘But to those who God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

For the foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength’.

1 Corinthians 1:25

Rev Simon Brignall

We continue to pray for Clare Claper and her family.

Next week's Mothering Day service will be a celebration of our Mums and Grandmas in St John the Baptist Church, Coln.