Sermon: Rebuilding The Temple

For many of the troops fighting in the Great War, the hardest experience of all was to be demobilised and come home. Many were so badly injured or traumatised that they had no prospect of returning to normal life. But for many more, the ultimate cruelty was to find how little those they had left behind knew or wanted to know what they had lived through in France or Belgium. The mud of the trenches, the gunfire, the stench of death meant nothing to their neighbours and friends and family who could not have dreamed of such things. Vera Brittain lost both her brother and her fiancé in the war. She wrote a poem called 'The Lament of the Demobilised':

“Four years”, some say consolingly. “Oh well,
What's that? You're young. And then it must have been A very fine experience for you!”/ And they forget
How others stayed behind and just got on - Got on the better since we were away.
And we came home and found / They had achieved, and men revered their names, But never mentioned ours;/ And no-one talked heroics now, and we
Must just go back and start again once more. “You threw four years into the melting-pot - / Did you indeed!” these others cry. “Oh well,
The more fool you!” / And we're beginning to agree with them.

In our first reading from the Book of Ezra, we heard of people coming home after their ordeal of 2500 years ago: the exiles who returned to Judah after their 70 years' captivity in Babylon. Energies were harnessed and hopes were high for the rebuilding of a ruined land and a ruined nation. And top of the list of priorities was to restore the pre-eminent symbol of Judah's faith and life, the temple at Jerusalem. So in our lesson, the people set about, first rebuilding the altar, then re-establishing the priesthood and sacrifices, and finally laying the foundations of the temple itself. The way the story is told, you are invited to think of it as a return to the great days of King Solomon whose crowning achievement had been to build the first temple. Precisely this had been the expectation of the great prophets of the exile like Ezekiel and the 2nd Isaiah. When the exiles came home, it was a new exodus to a new promised land. It was their resurrection, their Easter. Hopes had never been higher.

But there is an undertow in this story. The story tells of how 'many of the priests and Levites and heads of families, old people who had seen the first house on its foundations, wept with a loud voice when they saw this house.' The wonderful memory, it seems, and the wonderful expectation, were both eclipsed by a less wonderful reality. And this was not only because the second temple was smaller and less glorious than the first had been. There was indeed a profound dis-ease in the community at large owing to the poor relations between two groups of people - those who had gone through exile in Babylon and returned, and those who had never been exiled in the first place, the so-called 'people of the land'. The disappointments and failed hopes following the Great War are uncannningly echoed in 6th century Judah. In the next chapter, we find concerted opposition coming from the 'people of the land' determined to frustrate a project the returned exiles would not let them share in. For a community that was in any case no more a vassal state to the all-conquering might of the Persian empire, life after exile, despite all the hopes and dreams of the visionaries, was deeply troubled.

Unrealised dreams, the failure of hopes set too high are familiar in the landscape of every human life. But the task of reconciling expectation to reality belongs right at the heart of the life of faith, for faith has to find a way of living in the world as it is in its complexity, its disappointments, its conflicts, its unanswered, and often unanswerable questions about meaning and direction in perplexing landscapes that are hard to read and navigate.

Recently I went to the Caravaggio exhibition in London. Caravaggio was one of the very greatest painters of the Italian renaissance. These 16 powerful and moving pictures are his last canvasses, created when the painter was himself an exile and a fugitive across Europe. There are two paintings of the Supper at Emmaus. One of them, the earlier and better known of the two, lives in the National Gallery. In it, a rejuvenated risen Christ reveals himself in bread and wine to the disciples at the meal table, and the whole picture is suffused with a radiant sense of light and wonder, Easter vitality and freshness. The other is from a few years later. The table is the same and the figures are the same, but it's a darker, more thoughtful painting, where the intimate group faces the truth of Easter not only in light but also in shadow, and where the risen Jesus looks older and wiser than in the other painting, wears the sense of having suffered. It's as if the first painting depicts the first fine careless rapture of Easter where anything is possible in the power of the resurrection; while the second is of Easters following, years, centuries on, when believers have learned that even in the era of resurrection, we always live as knowing joy and sorrow, light and shade, for suffering and perplexity and death itself are not yet a thing of the past. This is a painter who could never have sung, as we too easily do, 'No more we doubt thee glorious Prince of life'.

And I take from this the all-important truth that Easter is not yet the happy ending to the story of suffering, not yet an end to trouble and pain, not yet the answer to the questions that continue to mystify us. It is more like soldiers returning from the Great War, not to a land fit for heroes but to a peace that still needed to be won in the strength of victory. It is more like the homecoming of the exiles, not to the outpouring of God's glory on the land but to the tasks of reconstruction and reconciliation. What is announced at Easter is the strength and the power of love alive among us to give us the resolve, the courage and the perseverance to follow the risen Christ and make Easter come true in our broken world. In our second reading, the Letter to the Ephesians spoke about our no longer being 'strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God'. Easter is our return and our homecoming to the most glorious Lord of Life. But it is not yet to have crossed beyond the reach of suffering. For now we still sing the Lord's song in a strange land. But here is the song we sing: 'Love's redeeming work is done'. And as we sing, we know in a way we do not fully understand that we can be at home in this world God made and loves, and in the power of resurrection can bring hope to all people and fulfil this Easter work that is both his and ours.