Look Out, Pilgrim III

...(N)othing could hide the essential business of the Temple, which was the ritual slaughter, consumption and combustion of sacrificial cattle on a gigantic scale....To the unprepared visitor, the dignity and charity of Jewish diaspora life, the thoughtful comments and homilies of the Alexandrian synagogue, was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the abattoir stench....

-Paul Johnson

A couple of weeks ago I read Ezekiel's vision of the eschatological Temple, and this quote from Paul Johnson's A History of Christianity came to mind. The fact is, that by the time of Jesus, Herod's Temple (and all it represented) had become Big Business, with a self-aggrandizing hierarchy that had completely lost touch with both the God and the people of Israel. I once heard a local Bible teacher ask, "What do you think the priests and elders did when the veil of the Temple split open on the first Good Friday?" Answer: "They stitched it up and went on business as usual." The institution had hardened to the point that any new voice other than its own could not be heard, even the voice of God in pain and thunder.

The irony is that as the Temple was hardening into judgment, God was raising up a new Temple outside its walls. A small group of disciples sat in the garden across the Kidron Valley, or walked the hills of Galilee, and the Holy Spirit brooded over them as he had once done over the temple of the Restoration. Something new was being nurtured. In time, Rome destroyed Jerusalem, and the church emerged as the Temple of God.

This is, of course, a pattern throughout history. Movements that begin in spontaneity and power harden over time and assume the posture of the True Church, and the Holy Spirit becomes attached to forms and doctrines which he resists because he will always be free. Movements begin their downward spiral as soon as they become self-conscious of the Spirit's presence, or see themselves as the last great move of God.

The question is, where is the Spirit moving today? What is going on outside the walls of our own comfortable traditions? Where are the genuine Sprit-filled leaders that God raises up through history? And how do the people of God stop the process of calcification that has made previous movements as hard as the stones of the Temple?

Pilgrim, the way through the Temple is a dangerous business.