Tom Wadsworth, whom I referenced recently, is particularly strong on the idea that teaching and exhortation in church is not simply the job of a credentialed Pastor, but of multiple people in a fellowship. I expressed some caveats to this in my linked piece, but it is a particularly strong idea when linked to the role of the Holy Spirit in co-ordinating Christian assemblies so that they are, indeed, edifying to all because all participate.
Here’s a small example from my own, moderately conventional, church setting. We are working through Mark’s gospel, mainly under the ministry of our pastor Mike, and this week he was covering the end of Mark 12, dealing with Jesus’s warning against the scribes, and the episode of the widow giving her last two lepta to the temple treasury.
As the passage was read, for the first time in my sixty years studying the Bible, I noticed that in the first pericope Jesus speaks of scribes devouring poor widows’ houses, and in the second a poor widow gives her “whole living,” which is as much as to say that the temple treasury devours her “house.” I scrabbled mentally to work through the obvious thematic connection, before storing it away for later thought.
So, as Mike got to that bit, he gave the usual, and completely correct, interpretation about the wholeheartedness of the widow’s genuine faith, compared to the easy and ostentatious generosity of the rich. And then he said that, although every commentary he’d read confirmed that understanding, he wondered if Jesus meant something more, because he’d noticed the parallel mention of poor widows in the two pericopes.
He offered the suggestion that part of what Jesus was saying about the widow and her “mites” was to reinforce his condemnation of the temple, though Mike had not been able to find that interpretation in his sources. Consequently, he invited people to refute the idea if they thought he was barking up the wrong tree. Yet his was exactly the insight that had come to me, for the first time, that very morning as the passage was read – so I told him so, and regard it as an example of the kind of delightful, and undramatic, revelatory work of the Holy Spirit within the context of Christian assembly, as in 1 Corinthians 14:26.
To expand on the theme, this whole section of Mark, from 11:1-13:27, is largely about Jesus’s critique of the temple and the religious authorities, culminating in the “little apocalypse.” This, to the early Church, must have been a crucial fulcrum of Jesus’s teaching, because it was a major prophecy of an unthinkable event that changed the course of Jewish history; that is to say the final destruction of the temple in 70AD. As N. T. Wright shows at length, the fall of Jerusalem was the public vindication of the crucified Jesus as the prophetic messiah, which demonstrated to Israel and the world his coming to share the throne of God foretold in Daniel 7.
We begin the section with Jesus’s cleansing of the temple, sandwiched between his cursing of the unfruitful fig tree and its withering. Wright (and pastor Mike) rightly see this act not as an angry outburst, nor even a measured protest against commercialism, but as an acted prophecy of condemnation for what Herod’s temple stood for.
There follows a section on the futile questioning of Jesus’s authority by the temple and religious leaders, together with the parable of the vineyard in which their doom is prophesied with a temple-linked quotation from Psalm 118, which actually proclaims Jesus as the true temple foundation, rendering the Jerusalem edifice obsolete:
“‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone;
Yahweh has done this, and it is marvellous in our eyes.'”
Then come our “poor widow” passages, whose thoughts are reminiscent of Jeremiah 7’s prophetic condemnation of the first temple for reasons including oppressing widows, and whose verse 11 Jesus has already quoted in his “den of robbers” saying (Mark 11:17).
I doubt it is coincidental that when, immediately after remarking on the widow and leaving the temple, the disciple who enthuses, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” is pretty close to Jeremiah’s mocking, “This is the temple of Yahweh, the temple of Yahweh, the temple of Yahweh!” Just as Jeremiah is told by God to stop praying for the people and their temple, because their condemnation is now certain, so Jesus seals the fate of the second temple through Mark 13.
And so we see that the “widow’s mite,” whilst indeed a vindication of her simple faith, is within the broader context of Jesus’s judgement upon Herod’s temple forty years later. This coincides with the establishment of the eternal temple of his body, not made with human hands – which is, astonishingly, the exact fulfillment of Nathan’s original covenant-making prophecy to King David a millennium before:
“[Your offspring] is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish his kingdom for ever.” (2 Samuel 7:13).
Pretty cool, huh, or at least that’s my feeling. But I think we need to work out just what it was that Jesus was condemning in judging the temple. It’s simple-minded to conclude that God never liked temples anyway, because it was God who commanded Moses to construct the tabernacle “according to the pattern shown you on the high mountain.” The same ordained pattern was followed when the tabernacle became a temple at Shiloh, of necessity given Israel’s settlement of the land, and when Solomon built the first temple, and when Ezra commissioned the less magnificent temple after the return from Babylonian exile, and when Herod turned it into one of the greatest structures in the Roman Empire.
Now, a tent is obviously less magnificent than a temple platform the size of 25 football pitches, but that portability was a question of functionality for a tiny nation wandering around the desert. By Herod’s time the number of Jews needing to be accommodated for the annual feasts commanded in the Torah might be around a million. Size was a logistical necessity.
Neither, I think, can we simply say that Yahweh hates opulence, though he is certainly indifferent to it, saying to David that he’d never been bothered by dwelling in a tent while David lived in a palace. God’s indifference to architectural heritage is also shown by his willingness to destroy Shiloh and the two Jerusalem temples for Israel’s unfaithfulness, without regard to antiquarian or aesthetic sensitivities. Yet God’s instructions on the building of the tabernacle, from Exodus 35 on, specify not only the finest craftsmanship, but the most valuable materials available to the Israelites.
Neither is there any hint of criticism in the account of the magnificence of the project Solomon inherited from David, whilst the relative meanness of the post-exile temple was a cause of weeping and shame to many of the godly. It does seem appropriate for the house where the Name of the true God dwells to be the best his people can afford, to reflect his cosmic glory. I’ve mused in a previous post how, although God’s temple is, in the Church Age, simply his people gathered in the Spirit anywhere, the world would seem to be a poorer place without the theologically dubious, but culturally enriching, temples that are called cathedrals and church-buildings in Christendom.
Ecclesiology apart, don’t you think that it is a good thing when a nation’s public buildings reflect its wealth and greatness? Great art is greater in the setting of a stately home (even if the National Trust acquired it from a family that built it from ill-gotten gains) than in a warehouse, and my mind was enriched by the architecture of a great university as much as by the lectures. And believe me – reading John Owen in an original edition in a mediaeval cathedral library beats downloading the same text as a pdf any day. A despot’s gold-bathroomed palaces, embodying his megalomania, are perhaps justly trashed come the revolution. But, at least before our late degeneracy, Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament reinforced the people’s values and virtues, not simply the luxury of their leaders.
So maybe the Jesus who was happy to be anointed with costly perfume rather than selling it for the poor has a more nuanced view of things than the stereotype of the dour Puritan insisting not only that the meeting-house is not a temple (quite rightly) but that by that token it must be whitewashed and bare of art or beauty. The widow’s house was destroyed, it seems, because the temple was rich, and had through the megalomaniac Herod come to treat magnificence not as an ornament to God’s house, but as its very purpose. Herod built it to glorify himself, not God, as we know since he tried to murder the promised messiah in infancy.
Like the National Trust’s preserved follies, an excessively opulent fabric requires constant fund-raising just to maintain it, and requires ever-increasing bureaucratic staff on large salaries to administer it, and ever-bigger treasure chests because there needs to be a reserve just in case… or finally, just because. Sure enough, the temple intended for God to dwell among his people and bless them becomes just another tower of Babel, to make a name for Herod, or the Sadducees, or the Jews, whilst the destroyed widow, who is also a daughter of Abraham, is forever nameless.
In Moses’s law it was not so. People were indeed encouraged to bring freewill offerings to the tabernacle (but not their last two lepta). Yet the whole purpose of the tithe was to feed not just the levites, but the widows, the orphans and the aliens in the land. The poor widow should (as my pastor pointed out) have been financially benefited by her devotion to the Lord and the temple. But the high priests and the elders, just as Jesus accused them, had become obsessed with their own wealth (and their entitled enjoyment of a luxurious environment), rather than being a blessing to the nation’s needy in their prayers.
When I took our kids to St Paul’s Cathedral in London, I was recovering from flu, and so sat in a pew and looked around me whilst the others ascended the 276 stairs to the whispering gallery. I was suddenly struck by a memorised Scripture from Isaiah 57:15:
For this is what the high and exalted One says – he who lives for ever, whose name is holy: ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.
So God dwells in the highest heaven, and with the poor widow, I thought. This place is neither the one thing nor the other.
