The Speaking Absence

We live in a noisy world. So noisy, that there are times we don’t even recognize it. When I lived in Washington D.C. , my bedroom windows were over an alley on one side, and a major street to the hospital on the other. When I moved to Claremont , California , my apartment was so quite at night, that I would have to turn on the radio, or television, just to fall asleep. Noise was such a part of my life. When I moved to my first appointment, I was a single woman. I would have the television on almost constantly. The background noise served as company for me.

We live in a noisy world. Many of us wake up to noise, ringing, buzzing, radio-blaring alarms jolt us out of our sleep. For some of us it is the noise of a small child crying or wandering the house. We walk out of doors to noise, the din of cell phones and cars, the chattering of kids and colleagues. For us city dwellers, we hear the roar of crowds and traffic, all day long. Many of us work to noise, the "furniture music" of squeaky chairs and ringing phones, or the noise of machinery hard at work. We even play to noise the endless white noise of the TV or stereo, or even the computer. I’ve even camped in the middle of the wilderness, beside tent campers blaring a stereo or portable television while camping. Are we afraid there won't be enough to listen to in the stillness of a night spent far away from the sounds of civilization.

The people of ancient civilizations were also fearful of being alone in an unpredictable world. These men and women had a host of gods and goddesses who could be safely located in available shrines and temples. These various gods had very distinct images and faces. The temples were decorated with images of the gods they housed, and oracles would speak their message, for a certain price of course. The oracle’s message was important, but like our noise, their images were so very critical to daily living. In fact, Israel ’s call to worship one God was really radical and quite scandalous. One God hardly seemed powerful enough to handle everything.

Every year, people of the Hebrew temple would come and gather in ritual as well. During the Passover celebration, it’s estimated that the population of Jerusalem would swell from 50,000 to 180,000 people. Pilgrim worshipers would come from as far away as Persia , Syria , Egypt , Greece and Rome to worship and make a sacrifice in the big Jerusalem temple. People were everywhere. You can imagine a couple of football stadiums full of people crammed together elbow to elbow, merged into an immense organism that inched along the narrow cobblestone streets toward the temple. Can you imagine the noise? Passover had for centuries brought worshipers to Jerusalem to celebrate their national story-their liberation from slavery in Egypt .

The Israelite celebration differed from some of the others in town. People came to a temple to celebrate a God who had no accessible images and spoke no direct words to the mass of people. In the heart of old Jerusalem was the temple. In the heart of the temple, within its innermost sanctuary, was the "Holy of Holies," where only the high priest was allowed to visit. In the heart of the "Holy of Holies," separated by partitions and curtains, sat the Ark of the Covenant. This was the same ark that the Israelite priest carried with them as they wandered the desert for 40 years. In the heart of the ark was the throne, or mercy seat. The "mercy seat" was a flat slab of gold resting on top of the ark. Guarding either end of this slab, were the golden angelic figures, or cherubim, their faces inward turned toward each other and their wings arching over the mercy seat. Here between the cherubim and over the mercy seat was the throne, thought to be the dwelling place of the God of Israel (Exodus 25:22; 30:6; Numbers 7:89).

On the Day of Atonement it was on this "mercy seat" that the high priest sprinkled the sacrificial blood, of the animals sacrificed at the temple. Here is the curious thing, the cherubim did not reside on the mercy seat. God's presence was nowhere portrayed within this "Holy of Holies", or anywhere else within the temple. All that greeted the high priest was a blank slab of open space, a void, an absence. In other words, the most sacred space where God was in the midst of the Hebrew people was empty. What the Israelites carried with them through the wilderness and protected with their lives was a seat with nothing on it but everything in it. To go to Jerusalem to visit God, to make a pilgrimage to find mercy and comfort, was to visit empty space, the holy absence and holy silence of the holy space between the cherubim. Silence and absence were key parts of the worshipping experience. The absence of image and/or talking idol is how the Israelites were able to experience the living presence of God's holiness in their midst.

This, of course, is partly why Jesus became so angry with what he saw in the temple. The temple over time had become a noisy, marketplace, not unlike the rest of Jerusalem . The temple experience required vendors and moneychangers. Once a person arrived at the temple they needed to purchase an unblemished animal for sacrifice. As you may imagine, traveling a long distance, it was a lot easier to buy your lamb when you got to the temple. Luckily, as we learn here, there were merchants right in the temple, ready to help you out with all your sacrificial animals needs.

Even the half-shekel temple tax that every adult man must pay required assistance from the moneychangers. If you have ever crossed the border from one country to another, you have been to a moneychanger. Canadian stores expect you to pay for merchandise with Canadian dollars. Irish stores want Euros. In England you’ll need pounds. At the temple, you needed shekels.

You might think that the priests could have taken the other coins and changed them later. The complicated part was that the Greek and Roman coins had pictures of gods on them. Even Caesar was believed to be a god. You couldn’t take a coin with the image of an idol into the temple. You had to exchange it for a more appropriate coin and, of course, you paid a fee for that privilege. That’s what moneychangers did. As far as we know, this was an ordinary day at the temple.

It’s true that the selling of animals and exchange of coins exploited the people. But this was nothing new. So why did Jesus get so angry? Jesus himself experienced the same old scene, every year as he traveled to Jerusalem at Passover. The merchants and moneychangers had been doing business at the temple for some years. Everyone knew how the system worked. There is no indication that anyone was complaining. People knew that was just how things were.

It’s always annoying when you know you are being taken advantage of, but we’ve all learned to tolerate a certain amount of exploitation. We buy Christmas presents and Easter eggs and scary costumes. Our purchases line the pockets of the storeowners and manufacturers. Nowadays, the stores prefer that we pay them with a plastic credit card, and we pay for the privilege of spending our money. We’re used to that stuff. So, what’s the big deal? Why did Jesus get so angry?

Jesus saw the temple being abused, and he didn’t mean merely the physical place were people were worshipping. A sacred space was being violated, focus on the miraculous works of God distorted and molded around convenience and profit. Jesus' rampage in the temple was partly a reaction against the intrusions of unholy noise and unholy images into this sanctuary of holy silence. Jesus saw that the temple site was gradually being transformed from a center of spirituality that lead one to greater silence and greater space for holiness into a place simply of greater hustle and bustle. The crush of crowds and commerce threatened to fill in the cracks of holy absences. The whole promise and experience of God was overshadowed by doing church business as usual. Yikes, it is so easy to fall into that trap…church business overshadowing holy silence and experience.

“By cleansing the temple of all this noise pollution, Jesus sought to restore the purity of the temple. Only by regaining the sanctity of silence and the silence of the sanctuary could the Jews hope to hear the speaking absence in their midst. Are we afraid to listen for God's "speaking absence" in our own lives? What kind of noise have we let into our "temples" in order to avoid listening to that "speaking absence"? What imaginings of God are preventing us from finding the mercy seat of help and healing? In our church do we let committee meetings, budget crunches and church school attendance drown out the "speaking absences"? In our families, do we let busy schedules, old feuds and bad habits drown out the "speaking absences"? In our work, do we let concerns about getting ahead, being left behind and making the cut drown out the "speaking absences"? In our schools, do we let peer pressure, insecurity and cowardice drown out the "speaking absences"? In our communities, do we let fear, prejudice and despair drown out the "speaking absences"?”[1]

When Jesus himself became the new temple, the new mercy seat for God's presence, he made it possible for each one of us to become temples. If the temple is truly the dwelling place of God, then the temple of God is no longer to be thought of as that physical structure in Jerusalem, or any other structure, for that matter, but the person of Jesus Christ. This means that the temple of God today can found in the hearts and minds of all those who honor Jesus Christ, wherever they may happen to be. This is wh at Paul told the Corinthians when he said, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you …? (1 Cor. 6:19)

[1] Rev. Bob Taylor, The Speaking Absence, Homiletics, March-April, 2009.