Reading the Old Testament we cannot help but be struck by the prominent
place given to the Temple building. The Israelites were by no means master
builders. They did not normally care very much about grand palaces or mansions.
If anyone did, the prophets would soon point it out as a weakness. The only
secular building accorded some measure of description in the Old Testament is
Solomon’s palace. And it merits only 12 verses. But the Temple building
was quite a different matter. Its design, its measurements, its furnishings and
its overall beauty are described again and again.
The oldest records, surely, are those preserved in 1 Kings. Building the Temple at Jerusalem is considered by the historian as the culmination of God’s gifts to Israel. The work started 480 years (12 x 40 years: a perfect number) after the Exodus. It took seven years. No expense or trouble were spared. Cedar wood was imported from the Lebanon. Stones were quarried in the hill country. Skilled artisans were employed on contract from the city of Tyre. Ten thousand laborers were working on the site over the period of seven years with a total back-up force of 150,000 workers in the quarries. The furnishing and famishing were the finest known at the time.
The whole interior of the Temple was covered with gold, as well as the altar in the most Holy Place.
The walls of the main room and of the inner room were all decorated with carved figures of winged creatures, palm trees, and flowers. Even the floor was covered with gold (l Kgs 6:22, 29-30).
The dedication ceremonies took seven days. The historian claims that 22,000 head of cattle and 120,000 sheep were sacrificed on the occasion. It is a story replete with superlatives.
God, we would think, should have been very pleased about this. He was - to some extent. He also had his misgivings, if we may express ourselves about him in a human way of speaking. When David proposed the idea of building a temple, the prophet Nathan brought a mixed response from God. David’s son would build the Temple, and God appreciated David’s good intentions but there is no trace of enthusiasm.
“From the time I rescued the people of Israel from Egypt until now, I have never lived in a temple; I have traveled around living in a tent. In all my traveling with the people of Israel I never asked any of the leaders that I appointed why they had not built me a temple made of cedar” (2 Sm 7:6-7).
God had been traveling with the people of Israel. He had not minded living in a tent. It is as if he asks: Why this need of a solid structure? I did not ask for it. Will it improve my being with the people?
In this way the Temple began its ambivalent history in Israel. On the one hand, it did express God’s majesty and presence in a tangible form. It could inspire people with genuine love and devotion. The Temple was God’s holy mountain, the Israelite’s true home.
How I love your Temple, Lord Almighty!
How I want to be there!
I long to be in the Lord’s Temple.
With my whole being I sing for joy to the living God (Ps 84:1-2).
On the other hand, the Temple became a problem. Many people put so much trust in its worship that they shifted from true sanctity to being loyal to rites and sacrifices. If I am only careful to give God the offerings he requires from time to time, I can go on living my own life, they thought. And so they enriched themselves at the expense of poor people or committed other injustices. Prophet after prophet denounced this attitude. On one occasion Jeremiah took up a prominent position at the Temple gate and spoke ominous words:
“Stop believing those deceitful words, ‘We are safe!’ This is the LORD’S Temple, this is the LORD’S Temple, this is the LORD’S Temple!”
“Change the way you are living and stop doing the things you are doing. Be fair in your treatment of one another. Stop taking advantage of aliens, orphans, and widows. Stop killing innocent people....
“You do these things I hate, and then you come and stand in my presence, in my own Temple, and say,‘We are safe!’” (Jer 7:4-6,10).
They were, in fact, making the Temple a “hiding place for robbers” (Jer 7:11). The Temple became a cover-up, a substitute for real morality, a false reason for trust. And just as God had allowed the Philistines to raze the sanctuary at Shiloh, so he would not spare his Temple if it continued to be an obstacle.
“What I did to Shiloh I will do to this Temple of mine, in which you trust. Here in this place that I gave to your ancestors and to you, I will do the same thing that I did to Shiloh!” (Jer 7:14).
In 578 B.C. these words were fulfilled. Nebuchadnezzar entered Jerusalem and burned the Temple. He stripped it of all gold and silver ornaments. He broke its bronze pillars into pieces and took all the vessels and utensils as booty. Only smoldering ruins remained.
I was thinking about all this when I visited the Gothic cathedral at Cologne. It is a very beautiful and impressive structure. Its central nave is 390 feet long. The stained-glass window walls rise up to an incredible height of 140 feet. At least 20 generations worked at it before it was completed (1248-1880). Sitting in the back of the church I allowed the full majesty of this “temple” to speak to me. I felt in its grandeur and beauty it did convey the enormous respect previous generations had for God. It made me pray.
It made me want to join in with that ancient chorus of praise. I imagined how, in past centuries, this church was filled with people on Sundays and feast days, how the church truly expressed the faith of the whole community. And this is where my thoughts started taking a new direction. Formerly, yes. But what about now? The large majority of people remain outside the church. On Sundays only a small group, a “remnant,” comes to worship in this cathedral I saw how easy it would be to judge the situation in Cologne by this building, and not by whether the Father and Jesus’ message and the kingdom are truly alive among the people.
Vatican II has forcibly reminded us of the fact that the church does not consist of buildings and institutions, but of people. Yet, somehow or other, buildings consume most of our attention. They seem to mesmerize us. We do not think of a place as a parish until it has its church building. We imagine that the most important parish activities go on in that building. The parish priest may consider looking after the building and its functions his principal duty. Instead of shepherds of the flock, many have become guardians of buildings. Why are we so fascinated by buildings? Does God want it, or do we want it? “I never asked any of the leaders that I appointed why they had not built me a temple made of cedar.”
Could it be that church buildings give us prestige? Surely that is one of the main reasons why Solomon built the Temple. He wanted Jerusalem to equal other cities in fame and splendor. Could it be that we are afraid of tackling the more difficult challenge of the spiritual apostolate? Is our stress on buildings an escape from having to bring God among the people? Does a building give us a false sense of security, as if, once we have a building, things are all right? We need places where we can assemble for liturgical worship, of course. Furthermore, a good church is a visible reminder of God’s presence in a community. But do these reasons really warrant the time, money and energy we devote to church buildings?
One thing I know. For the Jews the Temple became an obsession. After its destruction it assumed even greater proportions in their thoughts. Ezekiel comforts the exiled people with a vision of the future Temple. It is an ideal structure, like a dream. He tells of the lifegiving stream that will flow from the Temple. Starting like a small brook, it will become a huge river. Ezekiel obviously is speaking of an idealized, spiritual Temple, but his contemporaries took the dream literally. They needed a visible structure to hang onto, to hope for.
The book of Chronicles, also dating from after the Exile, recounts the building of Solomon’s Temple in much greater detail than the original records. A larger share of the planning is attributed to David, possibly because they could not stomach the fact that the Temple was the achievement of a king who lapsed from Yahwism in later life! Also from this period date the descriptions of what the Tent of the Lord’s presence had looked like during the desert years. Exact details are given of the framework, the panels, screens, decorations and utensils. Why all this preoccupation during a time when the Temple lay in ruins or had only partly been restored? The answer must be that the Temple had become a psychological and social need for the Israelites. They wanted God to live among them and they thought the external reality, and detail, of the structure was important.
“Make the interior of the Sacred Tent, the Tent of my presence, out of ten pieces of fine linen woven with blue, purple, and red wool. Embroider them with figures of winged creatures. Make each piece the same size, 14 yards long and 2 yards wide. Sew five of them together in one set, and do the same with the other five. Make loops of blue cloth on the edge of the outside piece in each set. Put fifty loops on the first piece of the first set and fifty loops matching them on the last piece of the second set. Make fifty gold hooks with which to join the two sets into one piece” (Ex 26:1-6).
God is supposed to have dictated in chapter after chapter the material, colors, and how to fasten the loops and how many loops there should be. It had to be executed “exactly as I have commanded you” (Ex 31:11). There is an awareness in all this of the function of detail in liturgical worship - a point for reflection, no doubt. But it also betrays a preoccupation that would end up in the pharisaism of Jesus’ day. Is it accidental that the story of the golden calf stands right in the middle of this dream on the sanctuary? The people wanted something visible to represent God. “We do not know what has happened to this man Moses, who led us out of Egypt; so make us a god to lead us” (Ex 32:1). Could the obsession with the Temple belong to the same temptation - to reduce God to what is tangible and visible?
The Temple was rebuilt in a modest form under Zerubbabel (completed in 515 B.C.). Then Herod the Great began a monumental reconstruction in 20 B.C. A major part of the new Temple was ready when Jesus began his public ministry. He loved the Temple. He prayed in it to his Father. He used it for giving instructions on the kingdom. But Jesus knew that neither this building, nor any other building, could ever be the center of that kingdom. The heart of his kingdom could only be a spiritual reality. “The time will come when people will not worship the Father either on this mountain or in Jerusalem” (Jn 4:21). The body of the believers will be the temple of the future. In fact, each believer will be a temple of the Spirit, just as he himself was a true temple. The old Temple as the central place of worship, as the building representing God’s presence, had to go.
Jesus replaced it with a worship without Temple. To re-actualize the sacrifice of his covenant, his disciples were to come together, in any suitable place, to celebrate his memory. They were to take bread, give thanks to God, break the bread and share it, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you.” Then they were to take the cup and say his words, “This cup is God’s new covenant sealed with my blood, which is poured out for you!” (Lk 22:19-20). He would be present among them in the sacrificial signs and in their being together in his name. He would be present in his word, which they would recall and to which they would respond as a community.
The early Christians used church for any community of believers that came together in such a fashion. These believers met in people’s homes, in public halls, in open spaces outside the town. They did not have buildings specifically for worship. They felt that God was close to them, as he had been with the Hebrews in their desert years. When the veil of the Temple was rent, a new closeness to God had been re-established. For, in Jesus, God himself had set up his tent among them. In him they had all penetrated into the inner sanctuary.
We have, then, my brothers, complete freedom to go into the Most Holy Place by means of the death of Jesus. He opened for us a new way, a living way, through the curtain- that is, through his own body. We have a great priest in charge of the house of God. So let us come near to God with a sincere heart and a sure faith (Heb 10:19-22).
What mattered in the new covenant was that all were close to God. “None of them will have to teach his fellow countryman to know the LORD, because all will know me, from the least to the greatest” (Jer 31:34). A people without temple buildings, but close to God.
There is food for thought in all this when we think of the priority we accord to church buildings. If we use church buildings at all, they should be understood to be no more than convenient places constructed for practical reasons. To a limited extent they can perform some of the services rendered by the Temple of Jerusalem: They can be reminders of God’s presence, symbols of community faith, places set apart for prayer and worship. But their limitation should also be recognized. And, as Jesus’ followers, we need to retain the sense of being a liberated people, no longer bound to any building, truly God’s family wherever we meet in his name. As true Christians we will have mixed feelings about sacred buildings. We will respect and use them while not allowing them to dominate our faith and practice.
In this, too, we will be close to Jesus. For while he was clear that his kingdom would not be built on external structures, he regretted the future downfall of the Temple. But when he wept over Jerusalem, it was the fate of his people, not of the Temple walls, that moved his heart.