When we look at the history of the Church, there can’t any doubt that two of the landmark moments in that history both occurred in the 4th Century. The first was the Edict of Milan in the year 313. This was actually an imperial order about general religious freedom but because the Emperor Constantine was a Christian, it gave Christianity a favoured status among the religions of the Empire, and as a Christian, Constantine actively promoted Christianity. The Edict of Milan though, didn’t make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. That didn’t happen until the year 380 when the Edict of Thessalonica not only made Christianity the state religion of the Empire but also established the Nicene Creed, the one we still use today and say each and every Sunday in church, as the official statement of orthodox Christian belief. It also authorised the punishment of heretics, anyone who didn’t conform to the official version of Christianity.
There can’t be any doubt that these two edicts were very important in the history of the Church because they helped the Church to spread by giving protected status, and even imperial warrant to Christians to proclaim their faith, and that obviously helped to ensure the safety of Christian missionaries and evangelists throughout the Empire. But for some people, these edicts were landmarks in a very different sense because some people see these edicts as marking the end of true Christianity. Some people see these edicts as marking the points in time when the Church ceased to be a people who sought to ‘turn the world upside down’, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles that St Paul and his companions were accused of doing, and became instead an organisation that had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
It must be said that there is some truth at least in the latter of those two strains of thought. If we look at the evangelisation of Britain in the post-Roman period for example, we can see that whether it was British missionaries evangelising in Ireland, Irish missionaries evangelising the Picts in what’s now Scotland or the Anglo Saxons in the North of England, or Roman missionaries evangelising in the South and Midlands of England, we see the same pattern. The missionaries looked first to speak to kings so that they could either convert them to Christianity which would give them royal warrant to proclaim the faith in a kingdom, or even if the king wasn’t for renouncing paganism, at he might allow the missionaries to proclaim their faith in his kingdom and give them some degree of royal protection. What often followed that were laws compelling the king’s subjects to adopt Christian practices. But of course all that would count for nothing if the Christian, or at least Church friendly king was deposed and replaced by a pagan king who was not so friendly to the Church. And so the Church did have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo where there was a ruler who was either a Christian himself or was at least friendly towards the Church.
But it wasn’t only in terms of enabling mission and evangelism that the Church had an interest in keeping things as they were. Regardless of the fact that they hold power, kings and ruling elites are sinners, just like everyone else. But whereas ordinary people might have had to fast or do some other physically unpleasant penance to atone for their sins, ruling elites would pay for their sins by giving the Church money and land, so the Church grew very rich into the bargain. And of course that wealth would be under threat too if there was a change in the order of things. So the Church did have a vested interest in keeping things just as they were and had nothing to gain, at least in earthly terms, in seeing the world turned upside down.
In the Acts of the Apostles, when we read about St Paul and his companions having “turned the world upside down”, it’s in the context of people being won over to Christ through the power and persuasiveness of St Paul’s teaching. We’re told that “some” Jews, “a great many devout Greeks” (and what’s meant by ‘devout Greeks’ is God-fearing Greeks who attended the synagogue) and “not a few leading women” “joined Paul and Silas”. We’re told that because of this, “the Jews were jealous” no doubt because these conversions lessened their power and influence, and as a consequence, affected them financially too. And we read elsewhere in Acts that Paul and his companions were dragged before the authorities, beaten and imprisoned because their teaching and actions hit people where it hurts most – in the pocket.
In this morning’s Gospel we read the story of Jesus cleansing the temple, driving out,
‘…those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers…’
This was part of the business of the temple. People were expected to offer a sacrifice when they went to the temple. Many of them would have travelled a long way to visit Jerusalem for the Passover and to save them from having to take animals with them, they could buy animals when they got to the temple. But the sacrificial animals had to be pure and un-blemished and so those who sold them could charge whatever they wanted, and the people would have no choice except to pay up. And people couldn’t pay with their everyday money either. That would have been Roman coinage and that was considered impure so, to protect the purity of the temple people had to change their money into temple money, and the money-changers, cheated people on the exchange rate. So the animal sellers, the money changers and the temple too got rich at the expense of the poor people who were, to use a modern term, being ripped-off. It’s no wonder Jesus was so angry and drove them out. But I don’t think we get the full impact or meaning of Jesus’ words in the version of this story we read today.
In St John’s version, Jesus is angry because people have turned his Father’s house into “a market”. But in other versions of the story, Jesus refers to those responsible for this as “robbers”, and in St Mark’s version, Jesus says,
“Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
I think this, the earliest version of the story, is perhaps the best version because it gives an added dimension to Jesus’ anger. This trading went on in the temple precinct, not in the temple itself. So all this buying and selling, this robbery, as Jesus called it would have been going on in the Court of the Gentiles, the place where God-fearing Gentiles would have gathered to worship God because they weren’t allowed into the temple proper. So what all this trading and cheating and profiteering was doing was preventing non-Jewish people from worshipping God: it was preventing the temple from being the house of prayer for all nations that it was supposed to be. And there is a great and much needed lesson in this for the Church today.
We know we live in difficult times for the Church, and that’s led to the Church to become very focussed on finance, on making money and saving money. In fact this has become such an issue for the Church that it’s now stopped claiming that what it does is “all about money” and now openly admits that much of what it does is about money. And yet the Church is not poor. The Church might cry poverty, but its accounts don’t reflect that, quite the opposite in fact, in terms of its assets the Church grows richer year after year. But people are not stupid, they can see this and how many people are being prevented from coming to Christ and to God because of what they see as the Church’s attitude towards money? Which, rightly or wrongly, many people do see as yet another example of the rich getting richer at the expense of ordinary people. How many people have we met, for example, who’ve said things like, “The Church is loaded but all they do is cry poverty to try and get more money out of people” or “I won’t go to church because all they want from you is money” or “I won’t go to church because all they want you for is to see how much they can get from you”?
We know that one of the reasons for the growth of the early Church was that it was a religion that turned the world upside down. It was a religion that taught a slave was the equal of their master, in fact there’s an old tradition that bishop Onesimus of Ephesus whom St Ignatius of Antioch wrote of in the late 1st Century, was one and the same as the slave Onesimus mentioned in St Paul’s Letter to Philemon. It was a religion that appealed to slaves, to women, to the poor, to the marginalised, to the weak, in fact to all those whom the world, if it regarded them at all, regarded as worthless. It was a religion that appealed to these people because it challenged that status quo, and it was made up of people who, far from seeking to ingratiate themselves to ruling elites in order to make the task of mission and evangelism easier, were prepared to challenge ruling elites and urge them to change their ways in accordance with the teachings of Christ. In a week when it was reported that the Archbishop of Canterbury has had to apologise to the pastor of a Palestinian Christian Church in Bethlehem for refusing to meet him because he’d been advised it may have caused problems, can we honestly say we belong to the same Church which once turned the world upside down?
Of course, we can’t turn the world upside down on our own, but we can turn, at least try to turn, our own little worlds upside down by trying to live in the way that those early Christians did and by trying to do the things they did. We can try to think less of our own comfort and more of those who have little or no comfort. We can try to be more courageous in proclaiming our faith and not worry so much about what people will think or say about us for doing that. And when we get the opportunity, we could remind our Church leaders that Christians are called to turn the world upside down and urge them to show less interest in maintaining the comfort of the status quo and more interest in bringing to Christ the multitudes of people who are downtrodden by the status quo.
Amen.
Propers for Lent 3, 3rd March 2024
Entrance Antiphon
I will prove my holiness through you.
I will gather you from the ends of the earth;
I will pour clean water on you and wash away all your sins.
I will give you a new spirit within you, says the Lord.
The Collect
Almighty God,
whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain,
and entered not into glory before he was crucified:
mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross,
may find it none other than the way of life and peace;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19:8-11
1 Corinthians 1:22-25
John 2:13-25
RCL (St Gabriel’s)
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 