It’s very special to be back here in a place where I and many others have prayed over the years. You’ll have special places like that too. And some of you may, like me, have been to what we call the Holy Land, and stood before the Western or Wailing Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem. The masonry blocks are massive. All that’s left now is the platform. And even in this state it is a hugely imposing edifice.

That of course was Herod’s Temple, the one Jesus would have known and that Paul would have had in mind as he wrote to the Corinthians, and which was flattened by the Romans some twenty years later in AD70. It was a major rebuild of the one whose building was the focus of our first reading this evening, authorised by Cyrus of Persia in 538BC after he had allowed some of the Jewish exiles to return home – for its predecessor too had been razed to the ground by the Babylonians forty years before that.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the Temple in the historic Jewish faith, and the height of the joy and depth of lament it evoked are part of what make its Psalms so moving to us still. There is a physicality to that faith, and the very land and the encounter with God within it are absolutely central. The former at least still drives the politics of the Middle East today.

The evidence suggests that the brute fact of it being there, and of its ritual being maintained, was more important than the religious experience it evoked, although the two must have remained in some tension, perhaps as they too still do in our own day. This was where and how the right order of things and their shalom, their peace, were established and maintained. It was clearly a magnificent piece of human handiwork, but at its heart was God and his sovereign will to be present within it, even if it was only his footstool. This was the shekinah, the glory of it; and ichabod, the glory has departed, was the corresponding lament when the ark was once lost.

Herod’s Temple was as I see it a place of contradictions. Herod himself as scion of the forcibly converted Idumaeans was a Jew but not a Jew. The priestly class were clearly in control of it, but the Sanhedrin that met within it had lost confidence in the High Priests some generations before Christ and a rabbinic descendant of Hillel usually sat in its chair. By the time of the great revolt the Temple was as much a focus of the factional struggles within the Jewish people as their joint opposition to Rome. But above all the question that Solomon posed at the very beginning surely still remained: “will God really dwell on earth with men? The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple that I have built!” Can a man, a man like Solomon let alone a man like Herod, really make a home for God? Is that how God is with us and will be with us, if that can be so?

It was into this milieu that Jesus came, with a radically new understanding of the Temple. Groups like the Essenes were severe critics of the Temple, largely because of what they saw as its corruption; but they still envisaged its purified re-establishment. Jesus, though, in his own self-understanding that in him God was once again with his people – if you have seen me, he says for instance, you have seen the Father; and I and the Father are one – in that self-understanding he goes on to picture his own body as the Temple in which God and his people meet. Here is, he says, one who is greater than the Temple; and the Temple whose destruction and rebuilding he speaks of is his own body.

No wonder they pick up stones to kill him. It is strange talk indeed, blasphemous towards God and dangerous for the nation. A verger doing cartwheels in Westminster Abbey seems hard enough for our own religious authorities to swallow. Imagine what it would have been like if the chaplain of Selwyn had denounced the Abbey as a venue entirely and then gone on to imply that it was his prayers and blessing alone that could really seal the knot.

And yet N T Wright, the famous New Testament scholar and former Bishop of Durham, has made a career of explaining to us that something like this was exactly what Jesus meant; and that to grasp this – the importance of the Temple in the Jewish faith and the significance of Jesus’ setting of himself in its place – makes complete sense in the light of the Gospel, of the new offer of peace, of a new kingdom on earth as well as in heaven, of a new relationship between God and man. The New Jerusalem after all, as described by John, has no need of a Temple, for its Temple is the Lamb.

All this is, I hope, of some interest, if only as revision. Where it leads to though is not only interesting but important for the issues of today. At however great a discount we put the present government’s rhetoric about a Big Society – and for me the discount is pretty large – it is clear that on the one hand the government is not going to go away any time soon; and that on the other we in the church have been in the business of the Big Society since the time of our Lord at least, as the PM has the grace to acknowledge last week, and it would be odd if we didn’t engage with it, however critically.

I mention the Big Society because the vision of the coming kingdom- on earth remember as well as in heaven – is precisely our starting point for our own social thinking; and for us it only makes sense if it has Christ as its Temple, and Christ’s teaching, in for instance the Sermon on the Mount, as its manifesto. So we will want to cross-examine such thinking as there is about the Big Society and in two ways, one theoretical and one practical:

1. First, what exactly is its philosophical and theological underpinning? This cannot be avoided. Every system of power and thought stands on some set of assumptions and values; and they cannot just be abandoned to the marketplace of pluralism unless the market itself is their greatest value. And after recent events having the Stock Exchange as our Temple seems less appealing than it may once have done. There will of course be an immediate squawk that no one faith could possibly be so privileged these days. I beg to differ. The person and teaching of Jesus, for me, offer not just a choice among choices, an authority among authorities, but a person and place in which we can dare to privilege because he to his core uses that privilege for others. A Hindu-style pluralism has a surface attraction; but it still leaves us open to use even its power not for others but against them. In Christianity at its purest, and I would dare to say that this is a lesson our own church has increasingly learned, we must always give power away. That is why the C of E is so often condemned as woolly and ineffectual. That is why the Archbishop gets into trouble for daring to question the legitimacy of the killing of bin Laden. That is why I found myself saying to a cleric who was bemoaning recently how often we are “used”, that perhaps being used was a key part of our identity. And that is why an Anglican royal wedding at Westminster Abbey is not such a bad thing after all. The Radical Orthodox movement in theology demands that we challenge any discourse that does not root itself in analysis such as this – and interestingly Philip Blond, the author of Red Tory and an architect of the Bog Society programme, is a theologian of this stripe. There is a debate to be had, and I hope to play a small part in helping it happen here in Cambridge. Watch out for a major conference next year.
2. Secondly, if there are important philosophic issues to be addressed, it is also important that any so called Big Society lives out such values as it aspires to from the beginning, in its methods as well as in its programmes. So it is absolutely vital that government does not just take its hand off the tiller, but uses al its influence to ensure that as wide a group of people as possible share both in the development of new social forms, and in the benefits that flow from them. We have not got off to a very good start. The so-called Big Conversation that launched the programme was vestigial. I have heard many people who are normally well engaged and willing to be engaged saying that they feel so far at least quite disenfranchised. Cutting funding to regional, intermediate and umbrella bodies (such as for instance the
   Faiths Councils) is making that worse; and the deadly coincidence of a shrinking economy with the aim to enlarge society has spawned huge cynicism, and highlighted ways in which the already marginalised such as those with disabilities or in deep rural areas are easily made more so. Classic checklists of virtue and value such as the Sermon on the Mount need to be constantly run over our activities, and those in charge of them need to remain fundamentally open to challenge and change, if the Big Society is to live up to its name. If we manage to bring about a serious Cambridge Conversation on these things next year, I am passionate therefore that we do not only bring together the great and the good, though I hope we shall, but also a good cross-section of the county who can witness to how things really are.

To go back to where we began, engagement like this is the natural consequence of Jesus’ proclamation that God was with man in a new sort of way, with a new sort of Temple, building a new sort of Kingdom. This is now the way to glory and peace, however strange it seems in the light of what went before.

And there is a coda, which Paul’s puts very clearly, in the form of a question. “Do you not know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” If we are to dare to accept the name Christian and seek the life of Christ, then we take this new Temple with us wherever we go, and can never opt out from the new kingdom agenda, because, in Christ, the Temple is us.

Whether its glory or peace you yearn for, it’s over to you.