Homily at Aldenham School

I offer, for your edification, the text of the homily I preached this morning at Aldenham School. It is a bit of a strange combination: they anticipate the Sunday lectionary readings on Friday mornings (so we have the cleansing of the Temple from John 2), but today is St Patrick's Day so I wanted to get him in too...

It is written “zeal for your house will consume me”.

In our gospel passage we hear of one of the few recorded examples of Jesus getting angry. Here, he has come to the temple to keep the festival of Passover and he finds, not people praying, but traders selling goods and money changers. The house of God seems to have become a marketplace. Living in Camden, famous for its market, I can well understand why this was not what he might have expected.

There is something about unmet expectations that often makes us angry...
I am sure if your teacher arrived late to class and found you all having an absolute wail of a time, chatting, playing around and having fun, but not really doing much work, he may well be annoyed with his class. He expects work, his expectation is unmet and so he is angry. Of course, I am sure this is never the case.

Jesus came to the Temple, he expected prayer and sacrifice. Instead he found tradesmen and worldly business taking place. His expectation was unmet and so he became angry.

His disciples, looking on, remembered the line from the scriptures “zeal for your house will consume me”. This means that they expected Jesus to have a passion for the temple, the house of God.

So far, so good. But what does that mean for us?

In another source Jesus says “the kingdom of God is within you”. The place where God dwells is not a building of stone, like the temple in Jerusalem, but something within us.

Today is St Patrick’s Day. Now, 17th March means drinking Guinness to most people, and that is no bad way to mark it. But there is a little more to St Patrick than shamrock and Guinness.

I want to read a quote from St Patrick’s (kinda) autobiography, his Confessio:

"[God’s] fear increased in me more and more, and the faith grew in me, and the spirit was roused, so that, in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers, and in the night nearly the same, so that whilst in the woods and on the mountain, even before the dawn, I was roused to prayer and felt no hurt from it, whether there was snow or ice or rain; nor was there any slothfulness in me, such as I see now, because the spirit was then fervent within me."

Patrick seems to have a grip on the idea that the presence of God is within him. He shows this chiefly by finding himself able to talk to God wherever he is, whatever he’s doing. He doesn’t need a building of stone to find his God.

And so, the zeal Jesus had for the temple, for the dwelling place of God is the zeal he has for our hearts and souls. There is a hymn that begins “Jesus, lover of my soul”. Jesus is the lover of our souls: the passion he had for his Father’s house, he has for us. He expects that in our hearts God will be found. And indeed, his expectation can be met if we are willing.

It is written “zeal for your house will consume me.”

Amen.

Oh, and happy St Patrick's Day to all my readers. I'll be quaffing much Guinness later.