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He is the Temple and We are His Body

John 2: 13-25 : Lent 3, Year B : 11 March 2012

Colin Stephenson was a flamboyant Anglo-Catholic priest who reached the apogee of his career as the Guardian of the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham. In his autobiography Merrily on High he recalls an incident from his time as Vicar of St Mary Mags in which he was being shown over St Aldate’s, the centre of Anglican evangelicalism in Oxford. As they walked around its austere interior the Vicar remarked, "Dull isn’t it," an observation with which Colin Stephenson heartily agreed. Later, he writes, I realised he was talking about the weather.

Anglo-Catholics are renowned for their aesthetic sense, their conviction that beauty matters in the house of God, and that churches themselves should be beautiful since they are a primary focus of the presence of God. That sometimes puts them at odds with a surrounding culture of reformed Protestantism with its background belief that the beautiful and the true are often opposed realities. The Reformation was accompanied by an outbreak of iconoclasm in which statues; stained glass windows, banners and attractive church furnishings were destroyed. So I can’t help smiling every time I enter First Church and Knox Church to see that some of these features have crept back in - John Knox and Calvin must be turning in their graves.

But the counter-argument most often heard against the Anglo-Catholic love of beautiful churches is that the Church is people and not buildings, a sentiment often trotted out by preachers at Patronal Festivals, but to say that is to raise as many issues and to beg as many questions as it answers. What is more Anglo-Catholics have a distinctive take on that point of view which leaves many protestants feeling distinctly uneasy. In today’s gospel incident Jesus turns up at the Temple to find that the local entrepreneurs have little to learn from some contemporary Cathedral visitor centres. I recall visiting Ely Cathedral last year and heard the German tourists ahead of me being charged a challenging sum - slapping down my business card I asked, "I am an Anglican priest and I want to enter the building to pray, how much will that cost me?" By contrast a few weeks later at Norwich Cathedral I was told on entry, "We don’t charge an entry fee, at various points in your tour a guide may approach you to explain various features of the building, if you want to you can give a donation as you leave." As I did so I gave generously and gladly.

Having cleansed the Temple, Jesus utters those enigmatic words, "Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up." No wonder his hearers were puzzled. The Temple that had been built after the return from exile was a sorry thing compared to the original, a kind of cardboard Cathedral of its day. Later, King Herod, a cruel and unpopular puppet King, decided to turn his reputation around with a spectacular rebuild. It turned into a massive project lasting from 20 BC until 67 AD, far beyond the lifetime of Herod, with Jesus only seeing a partially realised building. But it became one of the wonders of the world, though you had to be in quick to enjoy it as the Romans destroyed it 7 years after its completion.

At one level Jesus is talking about his death and resurrection. At another level he is making the bold claim that in his person he has superseded the Temple to become the focus of the devotion and spiritual aspirations of his people. Since the splendid Temple has proved itself to be unfit for purpose he has taken over the role himself, to become as it were the engine room of Jewish religion.

Beyond the earthly lifetime of Jesus, and the destruction of the Temple, Paul will begin to use some startling images to describe the new community that has just come into existence, the Church. In calling it the Body of Christ, and the Bride of Christ, he appears to assume a close connection between the continuing presence of Jesus Christ in the world, and this small collection of struggling congregations scattered around the Mediterranean world. Maybe the Church at Corinth is just 30 people or so, meeting in somebody’s large living room, and maybe they have issues and problems such as to make a contemporary Archdeacon rather worried, but they are the locus and the focus of the activity of the Son and the Spirit in the world. Jesus as the embodiment of the Second Temple has now become a community called the Church - this is where he is to be found in the world more than anywhere else.

And here we come to the nub of contemporary disagreements about the nature of the Church. Anglo-Catholics are happy to accept this close identification between the people of God and the presence of Christ in its midst.

They assume first of all that the Eucharist makes the Church happen - that as we celebrate this sacred meal we become for that time of worship him in this particular place. That is why the kiss of peace was introduced, or should I say restored, in contemporary liturgical revisions. As we greet one another we acknowledge that despite our individual differences we have become part of this collective entity called the Body of Christ. For the first one thousand years of the Church’s life this was seen as the primary function of the Eucharist. It generated the unity of the Church. It was only later that its secondary function got all the primary attention, when it came to be seen as a kind of bowser that the individual worshipper pulled into to get topped up with Divine grace.

Anglo- Catholics also assume that the Church’s main business is to glorify God - that its regular round of worship, which we could define as a movement towards God in love, and praise and thanksgiving, really matters in God’s eyes. He delights in this part of the creation called the Church more than any other, and he loves to receive its offerings of love. Which is why the worship of God should be done with reverence, and devotion, and care, and imagination, and yes, beautifully. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "Give beauty back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver." We are not just here to hear the message, to get hyped up on the music, and to receive individual encouragement from other believers. In worship we are carrying out the business of heaven.

Anglo-Catholics are also prepared to wear the consequences of God in Christ investing his character and reputation in the Church. That is why the disciplined search for holiness matters, which is a hallmark of the movement. We are to be holy as God is holy. We are to become like him in as much it is possible to for us do this given who we are.

Here we come to a real neuralgia point in thinking about what the Church is. There are many protestant Christians who are keenly aware of how easily and how often Christians let God down by their scandals, they’re slackness and their folly. They are therefore reluctant to betray God’s reputation by aligning it with the Church. Karl Barth summed it all up with his occasionalist view of the Church’s nature. Sometimes, not very often, the Church is congruent with God’s purposes in the world, at which times it is truly his body, but often it just spirals down to being a religious organisation that aspires to be the Jesus community but does it in a rather mediocre way.

Anglo-Catholics can’t accept this fade in and fade out view of the Church’s identity. They find this to be too thin a description of what the Church is. And they certainly don’t think it is just a pragmatic platform for carrying out mission in the world, and a service point for meeting individual Christian needs. Of course we need to pull our socks up about being braver about sharing the good news with the unconverted, and why not since we have such a wonderful version of the Christian faith! But on the whole Anglo-Catholics are prepared to accept that God can often, through the operation of Divine providence, and a considerable sense of humour, work through the folly and foolishness and sinfulness of his followers to produce outcomes that are, often surprisingly, in accordance with his will.

But there is a note of warning that needs to be sounded with this high view of the Church. If enough members of a Church take God’s forgiving nature too often for granted, if a Church as a collective whole makes disastrously wrong choices in doctrine and morals, if it apostatises from its true nature, then God is perfectly capable of pulling the plug on it, withdrawing his Holy Spirit, and leaving it to its own disastrous devices. That is what the opening section of Ezekiel is all about with those amazing creatures with those amazing wheels taking off from Jerusalem, the Shekinah presence of God’s Spirit is leaving the first Temple because God’s exasperation with what went on there reached the point of no return. This is why the current struggles that are going on within the Anglican Communion really matter - we are playing for very high stakes indeed.

However, I want to finish on a note of encouragement and anticipation that follows on from this high view of the Church. Augustine of Hippo, thinking about how things will be in the life of heaven, wrote about what he called the totus Christus, the total or whole Christ. Since human beings are made by God to belong to and operate within collective patterns of relating, and since in the Church Christ is knitting us together into a pattern of relating that makes us like him, our destiny at the end is to become him in a sense. Jesus Christ has three different ways of being himself. He was an individual human being in Palestine two thousand years ago. Now he lives in the Church in our midst. At the end he will become a collective personality made up of us his community, the saints, in which each of us becomes a small part of who he will be as part of his extended family, while at the same time becoming more intensely ourselves than we have ever been. Life in the Church and as a Christian is such a community orientated business, because we are headed for a very communitarian destiny.