Read – Mark 13: 1 – 8

Here is a box!
It’s quite a plain box and, you’ll notice, it’s taped up.
I want you to imagine that God is in this box!
If God is in such a box, how should you treat it?
What should you do with it?
Where should you put it?
Should you decorate it and make it look beautiful?
Put it somewhere special?
Guard it?
Only let ‘special’ people near it?
Pray to it?
Open it?
I wonder….?

In Jesus’ time people thought that God could only be found, not in a box, but in the Temple.

But, being God’s Son, Jesus knew differently!  Jesus knew that God couldn’t be confined and contained in a fine Temple any more than God can be kept in a box!

But when Jesus told his disciples that the Temple would be ruined, they must have been horrified, because a ruined Temple was a threat to the most important thing for their understanding of God.

You see they believed that the Temple building was the holiest of all places.  There was even a ‘box-like’ part of the Temple known as the ‘Holy of Holies’, the exact place they believed God could be found; and you could only go into it if you were one of the most religious men of the Jewish faith – one of the Chief Priests.

The Temple had a reputation as the most beautiful building in the whole world – a building befitting God’s dwelling place and therefore vital to the Jewish faith.

It was built by King Herod, but it was still under construction in Jesus’ day.  It was the largest and most imposing structure for hundreds of miles in any direction.  The disciples commented on the structure and size of the Temple as they left it, heading for the Mount of Olives, from where they would be able to see the impressive scale of the Temple.

The Temple was the centre of all religious life because, they believed, God lived there and the very idea that the Temple would be destroyed was terrible, too awful to even contemplate.  To destroy the Temple would threaten the very being of God Himself, and their whole faith would be destroyed.

But because of Jesus we believe that God can’t be kept contained either in a box or a Temple.  God’s dwelling place is in the most ordinary of places and people and the most difficult of situations.

It seems absurd to imagine that destroying a Temple could destroy God any more than opening a box could (if we believed God was in there) because God can’t be trapped anywhere!  In fact, if it were possible to put God in a box, the best thing we could do would be to open it!

Rev. Janine