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Reading: Matthew 21.12-17
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”?’
Picture: The Cleansing of the Temple by El
Greco
The artist and the painting
The artist is El Greco. As the name suggests, he was Greek (though it’s a name
he would not have recognised as it was never used in his lifetime and is an odd
conglomeration of Spanish and Italian: his real name was Domenikos
Theotokopoulos). Born in Crete in 1541, he trained as an icon painter, but being
drawn increasingly to the western tradition of painting, he moved as a young man
to Venice. After studying and painting in Italy for some time, he moved on again
to Spain, settling and living out his life in Toledo, where he died in 1614.
Although a fine painter of portraits, able to pin down a personality in a few
deft brushstrokes, El Greco really comes into his own as a painter of ecstasy,
of intense religious experience. Particularly in some of his later paintings, El
Greco, as few if any other artists ever have, captures on canvas what it is to
be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, to feel caught up into the life of
God, drawn out of the present moment into eternity, out of a particular place
and into the infinity of divine being, out of matter of fact and common sense
reality and into an unintelligible glory we can grasp only as being far beyond
our comprehension.
To convey all this in two dimensions, El Greco abandons any attempt to set a
scene in real space and proper perspective. The context falls away. The human
figures lose their physicality. People become more like flames; they gain a
restless upward movement, a flickering energy, a relentless verticality. Bodies
are stretched thin and long… long necks, long limbs, long hands, long fingers.
Faces show passionate excitement, heads are thrown back, eyes…deep, expressive,
eyes… are focused on something which we cannot quite see as they see, but which
is dazzlingly bright and full of dynamic energy. All is movement.
Colour is bold and definite; yet not the colours of reality. The palette is
bright, but shifted into a different range: we have yellows and blues and reds
and greens and earth tones, but translucent and sharp, acidic, and heavily
marked by deep contrast between light and shade. Some have described El Greco’s
palette as restrained, but it’s better thought of as deliberately shifted across
from a natural range to an other-worldly range, to the colours of a different
dimension of reality.
There is nothing in his paintings of subjects such as Pentecost, the
Annunciation or the Nativity, which is truly physical or concrete or substantial
or tangible. These are paintings of the personal, the deep inner encounter with
God. El Greco shows us people hearing mysteries in the Spirit, experiencing God
in a way which we cannot fully appreciate until we have felt this way ourselves,
or at least until we have heard just a hint of what they are hearing.
So El Greco paints holiness as tall and thin and insubstantial. Bodies become
like flame, all energy and rising movement, reaching up and out and away, as God
the Spirit is drawing them out, extruding them into a new mode of being.
There are some subjects which clearly fascinated El Greco, and he painted them
again and again. Among these is the cleansing or purification of the Temple.
From around 1570 to 1610 he painted at least four versions of this scene. The
painting we are looking at this evening is the last of the four, and one of the
last paintings of any subject which El Greco painted before his death. This
particular version hangs in a parish church in Madrid, but in the National
Gallery in London there is a very similar treatment of the same subject.
The most striking difference between the version in London and our version is
that the painting in the National Gallery is effectively the bottom half of our
painting: the artist has zoomed in on the crowd of figures around Jesus for the
earlier work; but in our later version he has drawn back to reveal a wider scene
and an altogether calmer upper level which sets the cleansing in a different
context altogether.
The London painting, and indeed all the earlier versions El Greco painted, are
set where, historically speaking, they probably ought to be set, in an outer
portico of the Temple. We can see out to the wider city of Jerusalem through
windows and arches. But in our version we have moved inside the Temple, and
perhaps inside as far as the Holy of Holies itself. Immediately above the figure
of Jesus is a rather strange-looking object in gold. No one is absolutely sure
what this is, but the artist clearly means us to see it and associate it with
Jesus. The elderly master could easily have adapted his composition more
successfully if it had been simply a matter of having to cover a canvas of a
certain size or shape. So this object is important; and the only important
object that might remotely look like this is the Ark, the gold covered casket
made to contain the tablets of the Law. The Ark was placed in the Holy of
Holies, the innermost room of the Temple which the High Priest alone was allowed
to enter. The traders could not have been in the Holy of Holies; but for El
Greco it is important that what Jesus does is set in that context, and we will
see why later.
In the lower half of the painting Jesus is central and on our left, his right,
are the traders, the moneychangers and dealers in sacrificial animals. They are
reacting dramatically to the presence of Jesus who is raising a whip (a detail
provided by the Gospel of John). On the other side of Jesus, and just behind, is
a knot of standing figures, almost certainly to be taken as the Apostles. In the
foreground are two further figures who may also be Apostles. Certainly many
historians have identified the seated figure as St Peter, but it is not
absolutely clear. In all his earlier versions El Greco had painted two very
similar figures, but the seated figure has a basket in the two earliest
pictures, which makes it seem unlikely that he is Peter or any other apostle. If
not an apostle, I would like to think that he might represent the lame and the
blind, who in Matthew come to Jesus in the Temple. Is he in that awkward
position because he can’t stand? Is the man stooping down to him simply
discussing the action with him, or is he explaining what is happening to him
because he cannot see? It would be very convenient for me if that were so, but I
cannot claim that it really is, only that it might be: see what you think!
Equally puzzling in many ways are the outer figures on both sides. On our right
is a woman carrying a basket who looks down at something small in her right
hand. She is said by critics to be the widow who placed her mite in the
treasury: the mite being the object she is looking at, and is about to donate
even though it is all she has, the proceeds perhaps of selling what she had
brought in her now empty basket. If that is right, this figure represents a
simple piety, and a willingness to surrender everything to God’s will: a
childlike appreciation of her dependence on God.
On our left is a child, a little child, who may belong to one of the traders,
but certainly, and perhaps deliberately, reminds us of the children who,
according to Matthew, sing in the Temple ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’.
Above the child is a woman reacting to Jesus in a classic El Greco pose. The
best known example of a very similar pose in his work is the painting now known
as the Opening of the Fifth Seal or The Vision of Saint John, in which St John
is shown, kneeling but otherwise adopting the same position as this woman, as he
sees the great vision which is the Book of the Revelation to John. So in El
Greco’s visual vocabulary this woman is not a trader reacting with shock and
awe, but a visionary or a convert: one who sees the spiritual truth of what is
happening; one who knows that God is present.
Above the woman is a sculptural panel on the wall, and above that a niche with a
statue of a standing man. Neither is a historical detail. The Temple contained
no sculptures of the human form. These details are placed here by the artist as
a visual statement about the action he depicts. The purpose of the panel is
clear: it shows the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and it was common in El
Greco’s lifetime for the expulsion of the traders from the Temple by Jesus to be
set alongside the story of the loss of Eden. The male figure is more puzzling.
It could be Adam; but if it is, why duplicate him from the panel below? Could it
be David? If so, it would pick up the song of the children, ‘Hosanna to the Son
of David.’
What is clear is that the artist has surrounded the central action of Jesus
driving the traders from the Temple with a visual commentary, a series of clues
to point us towards a deeper reflection on the meaning of the gospel text to
which we will now turn.
Matthew’s account of the entry into Jerusalem
All four gospels record the cleansing of the Temple, but Matthew is unique in
the way he tells the story. John placed the event early in his gospel, quite
distinct from his account of Holy Week, and although Mark and Luke agree in
placing the story within Holy Week, Mark separates it from the entry into
Jerusalem and places it on another day of the week entirely, whilst Luke makes
very little of it at all. For Matthew Jesus enters the Temple as soon as he
reaches Jerusalem and is swept into the city by the crowd. The visit to the
Temple is the culmination of his journey to Jerusalem and highly significant.
We have to remember that in Matthew Jesus has never been to Jerusalem before:
even as a child he is never described in Matthew, unlike Luke, as having been
taken there by his parents. So for Matthew this is a supremely important moment.
Jerusalem is the holy city which contains the Temple, and the Temple contains
the Holy of Holies, the place which symbolised the presence of God among his
people. When Jesus enters the Temple, God is in the house of God, present among
his people as never before. And so in Matthew Jesus, God-with-us, acts
decisively as God in making the Temple what it should have been: a place not for
trade but for healing, for the healing which comes from a genuine and deep
relationship with God. We should read verse 14 as following close on verses 12
and 13: Jesus drives out the traders, but at once welcomes and cures in the
Temple the blind and the lame.
This healing is doubly significant: among the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke,
which are so close to each other in many ways, Matthew alone records Jesus
healing anyone in Jerusalem. It is enormously significant that Matthew stresses
that blind and lame people came to Jesus in the Temple as soon as he entered it,
as soon as he expelled the traders. In 2 Samuel 5 the story is told of how David
captured Jerusalem. The Jebusites, whose city it was originally, boasted that
Jerusalem was so difficult to take that it could be defended by the blind and
the lame. When David took it, this vain boast was said to explain a prohibition
on the blind and the lame entering the ‘house’, which is usually understood to
mean the later Temple. If David was believed to have imposed a ban which later
prevented the blind and the lame from entering the Temple, it becomes
significant that the ‘Son of David’ now welcomes them. Jesus in Matthew quotes
Psalm 8 to explain or justify what is happening: a psalm which in Hebrews
(2.6-9), Ephesians (1.22) and 1 Corinthians (15.27) is associated with the
healing ministry of Jesus. The psalmist writes:
When I look at your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for
them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honour.
Weak and broken humanity has a unique place in the heart of God. God the creator
raises up fallen humanity and places people on an almost equal footing with
himself: he is willing to welcome us into his presence, walk with us and talk
with us.
In Matthew the entry into Jerusalem, and Jesus’ immediate arrival in the Temple,
carries all the theological weight which in Luke is split across the story of
Candlemas, when the infant Christ is carried into the Temple by his parents, and
the story of Jesus as a young boy found arguing in the Temple with the doctors
of the Law. In Matthew all this symbolism is placed in Holy Week. Jesus having
arrived in the Temple, is now present in it daily, and each day he engages the
scribes and Pharisees in theological debate. The debate continues right through
chapters 21, 22 and 23. Then finally, at the beginning of chapter 24, Jesus
leaves the Temple never to return:
As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point
out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, ‘You see all these,
do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all
will be thrown down.’
The Lord had at last come and filled the Temple with his presence, but only the
children, the lame and the blind had recognised him. Now the Lord leaves his
Temple again, and it is empty, redundant. God had been present, but is now
absent again.
Further thoughts on the presence and absence of God
The presence and absence of God, the sense that God is with us, and the aching
sense that we are alone, cut off from God, are key themes for Matthew. Last week
we looked at what it really means to say that God is with us by looking at the
experience of the crowd being with Jesus, and then Jesus being left entirely
alone as everyone deserted him. This week we need to look at that same theme
from another angle. The right place to begin is with the people of Israel
wandering in the wilderness with Moses.
The people of Israel have left Egypt far behind and have come to Sinai. Moses
has left them at the foot of the mountain whilst he has gone up to receive the
law from God. But he’s gone for rather a long time, and, left alone, the people
become restless. They have no idea what has happened to Moses, he has simply
gone. They do not know if, or when, he might come back, and they feel the need
to fill the gap. But more than this, they sense a much bigger gap which they
become desperate to fill. They need gods, or at any rate a god, to ‘go before
them’, as they put it. So they make an image, a figure of a calf made of gold.
It’s not that they are turning away from God himself, or at least that’s not how
they see it, or how Aaron sees it: he still talks about celebrating a festival
to the Lord, and he and the people are happy to credit the golden calf with
delivering them from Egypt. The golden calf represents God, it give them a
focus, a confidence that divine power is with them. It fills the gap, meets the
need, when Moses has gone and they are left with nothing, just a void, nothing
to see or get hold of or relate to. They just can’t worship nothing, can’t offer
sacrifice to empty space. Then, of course, Moses comes back, and he finds them
behaving very badly indeed, drinking and revelling and running wild. What had
begun as a seemingly innocent and natural request for an image, a sign of God’s
presence, has led to some very ungodly behaviour. Something which was supposed
to help people focus on the presence of God had very quickly taken them further
away from God than ever.
And this is not an isolated event, it really marks the beginning of one of the
most telling differences between Judaism as it developed down the centuries and
the faiths of neighbouring peoples. Even when they built a permanent place of
worship, the Temple in Jerusalem, the Jews avoided any cultic image, any statue
of God. At the heart of the Temple was an empty space: there was a gap, a void,
in the very place built to mark the presence of God with his people. All that
stood in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary, was the Ark, a box
containing the words of the Law.
We saw last week how Jesus is left entirely alone in Matthew’s account of the
crucifixion. Throughout his ministry in Matthew he has been followed by a crowd,
but at the end they all melt away, not even his closest followers remain, and he
dies saying ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He feels abandoned even
by the Father. On the cross Jesus experiences the real absence of God; and the
people of Israel camped at the foot of Mount Sinai also experienced the real
absence of God. And, as we read through the Bible from Genesis to The
Revelation, we can’t help being struck by occasions when people experience the
real absence of God every bit as strongly as they experience the presence of
God. If you still need some convincing of that, let’s look ahead to some of the
resurrection narratives in the gospels.
In all the accounts of the resurrection there is a major tension between ideas
of presence and ideas of absence. And I’d argue that this tension is one of the
key elements in all the narratives. Jesus is risen, but things have changed. One
minute he is not with his disciples, he’s absent; the next he appears, he’s
present and can be touched and held, can eat and drink; and then a few moments
later, he has gone again. We focus very much in celebrating Easter on the
moments of presence, but we would do well to ‘mind the gap’, as they say on the
underground. Mind the gap, because those recorded moments of presence are the
exception, all too brief encounters, mere minutes set amidst hours of absence.
It’s in Luke’s account of the Ascension that the gap is most clear:
Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed
them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into
heaven.
Or again in Acts:
When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took
him out of their sight.
The disciples had set out from Jerusalem with Jesus; they return without him,
and there is now an empty chair once more in the upper room: a gap. Similarly in
Matthew’s gospel, and in a way perhaps even more striking, Jesus barely appears
at all after the resurrection. There is a fleeting moment when Jesus suddenly
meets the women and gives them a single sentence message to share with the
disciples. Then back in Galilee he meets them all, momentarily, on the mountain.
He tells them what they have to do, and then the gospel ends with the words ‘I
am with you always, to the end of the age.’ Yet the implication is that they
will never see him again. They share a moment and then he is gone.
For Jews and Christians alike the scriptural understanding of God is held in a
creative tension between the language of presence and the language of absence.
God is with us, and supremely so in the life of Jesus. But God is also not with
us. God is not with us crucially in this sense: we cannot make him fast, locate
him, or demand that he be present to us, be intelligible for us, or exist to
meet our needs or embody our aspirations. God is God, he is not confined in a
space or the special possession of a particular people; and for as long as we
live in this world, there will always be something missing in our relationship
with God. Even the greatest saint will experience moments of utter dereliction,
like Jesus on the cross; and the rest of us will find our faith hard to make
sense of, and at times unsatisfying and unconvincing. But Matthew’s message is
that we are supposed to live with the gap: in fact we are supposed to welcome
the gap as a kind of guarantee of the authenticity of our faith. A faith without
any sense of a gap, with no awareness of the otherness of God, would not be a
true faith, it would be neat and tidy, a mere human construct.
The problem is this: when we feel that God is not with us, we long to fill the
void. We look around for something to reassure us that God is with us, and does
love us. That was supposed to be the point of the golden calf. Moses made them
settle for a tent in which to keep the Ark. In the end the Jews replaced the
tent with a building in Jerusalem; but even then they deliberately put nothing
in it to represent God himself. You could draw close to God in worship in his
Temple, but you could not encounter God directly there, you could not speak with
God face to face as Moses had, as Adam and Eve had before they ate the fruit.
The gap mattered; the emptiness of the Temple was a crucial theological
statement; but Matthew shows how even this importantly empty space had been
filled with idolatry.
Idolatry is the sin of filling in the space where God should be: it’s the sin of
papering over the awkward cracks, and of trying to live without uncertainty.
Living with a gap is uncomfortable, but it is part of what it is to be human.
The Temple was meant to enshrine the gap, to make concrete that sense that we
feel close to God and yet distant from God. When to the delight of the children
the gap was closed when Jesus came into the Temple, no one in authority
recognised what had happened. They failed to see that the Temple had at last
been filled with God’s presence, because they had already filled in the gap with
something other than God. They had grown to be at ease in what should always
have been a very uneasy space.
We begin by wanting something that makes us feel that God is near. They went at
first for a golden calf, but we can put on the same kind of pedestal, a book, a
bloke, an institution, a projection of ourselves. They said they just wanted ‘a
god to go before them’, a tangible sign of the guiding presence of God; we say
we just want a firm guide, authority, leadership, a fixed point of reference so
we know what Jesus would do; but it’s all the same. We feel insecure when we
feel alone, and rather than sort out our relationship with God, we knock up a
golden calf out of something that we already value more than we should.
The gospels revive and preserve the gap which had been built into the Temple.
Jesus is with us always, yet we will not always feel that. A Christian church is
meant to be like the Temple, an empty space in which we can draw close to God
and yet recognise at the same time how far we are from God. A church is meant to
be an uneasy place, an uncomfortable space in which we are reminded that we have
not yet arrived, but must travel on.
Drawing the threads together
For me this tension between presence and absence is what El Greco is trying to
paint. The theme of the ‘purification of the temple’ was not uncommon in the
sixteenth century, and the subject was often used to convey the idea of reform.
Several popes in the later sixteenth century issued medals with images of the
‘purification’, intending to convey the idea that they were reformers, cleansers
and renewers of the church. But El Greco seems to have taken the idea much
deeper.
By setting the scene not in the temple courtyard but in the Holy of Holies, he
faces squarely the issue of the presence and absence of God. He shows the Ark,
the container of the word of God in close association with Jesus, the Word made
flesh. The frozen record of God’s will has now been superseded by the living
Word, the real presence.
By showing a statue of David, as it seems to me, he contrasts with Matthew the
one who excluded the blind and lame with the one who welcomed the blind and lame
and made them whole.
By showing the poor widow with her mite, and the child singing ‘hosanna’, and a
woman in the moment of her conversion, El Greco contrasts those who have become
complacent and comfortable in the Temple and made the Temple’s daily round of
worship an end in itself, with those who have never felt at ease there and so
have recognised its true significance.
By placing on the wall a sculptured relief of the expulsion from Eden, El Greco
places the driving out of the traders in the wider context of the human
condition, our being drawn into God’s presence or our feeling cut off from God.
We have to remember that in Genesis Adam and Eve are not driven out of paradise
as part of their punishment for eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil. They are driven out to prevent them taking any more things to themselves
that properly belong to God or to God’s gift. In effect they are excluded from
paradise to prevent idolatry, to prevent them putting themselves, or something
else other than God, in God’s place. The exclusion is about their failure to
recognise their dependence on God, and the real possibility that they will
regard themselves as dependent on something else, or else as entirely
self-dependent. In the same way the traders are driven out because they have
filled the empty space with mundane human activity in place of the reality, the
unsettling reality, of real prayer and worship.
The gaps in the gospel are our resource to resist such idolatry. The absence of
Jesus protects us from any who claim to own the truth. The empty tomb, the
vacant place, the veiling cloud, all these tell us that Jesus, only Jesus, is
eternally Lord, alive, active, beyond all human knowing, beyond our defining and
confining, our judge, our only authority, our way, our truth, our life… our God.
Mind the gap!
Questions for group discussion or personal reflection
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Do you find churches comfortable places to be? Is a church
building mainly functional: just a conveniently sheltered space in which to
worship: or is a church more a place set aside from everyday life, a numinous
place, a place where both the closeness of God and his otherness are brought
home to us?
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Does our worship inspire awe and wonder and reverence, or is there
a sense in which our worship makes God seem too small and too accessible, too
much like us?
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No one really knows who all the figures are in El Greco’s
painting: who do you think they are? If you were trying to paint the scene and
bring out Matthew’s meaning, how would you do it, who would you include?
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How comfortable are you with the idea of being in the presence of
God? Are there times when you have felt very close to God, or times when you
have felt strongly that God was remote?
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What kinds of idolatry, if any, are there in our lives, or the
corporate life of the church? Is there a danger that maintaining the building,
fundraising, organising activities and all the annual round of business can lead
us away from God rather than towards God?
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