ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 08.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> NICK: You have referenced the Gospel of Luke. Would you be willing to give us an example of the temple worship from this gospel. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: One of the great themes of Luke's gospel is the fact that Jesus' destiny is in Jerusalem and that he must travel there in order to give up his life. The reason why Jerusalem is so important is because that is where the temple is. And it is so important to Luke's gospel that after the brief prologue of four verses, Luke begins his gospel for the gentiles by taking us into the holy place in the temple where Zachariah is offering up the atonement sacrifice and the angel Gabriel visits him and tells him that he and his wife Elizabeth are going to bear a child who is John the Baptist. Now, that is remarkable that Luke, who is writing gentiles who know nothing about the temple, who have nothing to do with the temple, should begin his gospel in the temple because Luke is telling us, as well as those early gentiles who were becoming Christians, that in order to understand Jesus, you have to understand the temple and the worship of the temple. Now, it's not a coincidence that the very last verse of Luke's gospel, after Jesus has ascended into heaven, tells us that the disciples return to the temple to praise God. Notice that Luke begins and ends his gospel in the temple. The first one is a sacrifice, offering up to God a sacrifice to appease him for our sins. And the final one is the disciples going to where they know of no other place to go to worship God and that is the temple to praise him for the magnificent gift of Christ who has now ascended into the heavenly places. The Gospel of Luke also has what we call an infancy narrative, the first two chapters that tell us the stories of John and Jesus in their infancy. Again, beginning in the temple with Zechariah, the last two passages of the infancy narrative end in the temple with Jesus going at forty days old with his mother and father, his mother for her purification, Jesus for his presentation. And then the very next passage, twelve years later, where Jesus going to Passover with his parents finds himself in the temple among the teachers hearing them, asking questions, and just astounding them in what he knows about God. This is where we hear the first spoken words of Jesus were he says, I must be in my Father's house. Jesus knows that the temple is the house of his father. Now, these are just some examples of the temple in Luke, but let me just offer one more that might help us to understand the significance of the temple. I referred earlier to the fact that when the atonement sacrifices were made, the priests that were offering those sacrifice, like Zechariah, would go into the holy place at 9:00 in the morning and 3:00 in the afternoon to offer up the atonement sacrifices for the sins of the people. In the Court of Women, all the Jews would gather for prayer at that time. And as I said before, the Jews would always pray publicly to God. By publicly I mean out loud. And there'd be all these, really, hundreds of Jews in this courtyard just speaking out loud so it would probably be almost -- I'll just put it this way. It would be very, very loud. If you remember in Luke 18, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, the Pharisee places himself right at the bottom of the steps there in the Court of the Women, in the center of everybody, so that everybody could see him. And here, you have the typical pharisaical attitude. He stands there while the atonement sacrifice is going on, and he says, you know, thank goodness I'm not like all these other people around me. I tithe, etc., etc. He�s talking about his own works. In contrast, the publican, the tax collector, is off in the corner, not kind of exalting himself, but down on his face in repentance. And if you were to translate that literally, it's not God be merciful to me, a sinner, which is one way of thinking of it. Literally what he is saying is, God make atonement for me, a sinner because he knows that those atonement sacrifices are taking place in the temple Now, here's a marvelous example of how a daily we see reflected in the teaching of Jesus how the Jews came together to see how God was going to take away their sins and how in this context, they saw this as the opportunity for them to pray to God to be merciful to them, to make atonement for them, sinners. The final locale of the Jesus' teaching is in the temple. And there are, in Luke's gospel, over two chapters of his teaching during what we call Holy Week in the temple places. Some of his most important teaching is there, including the wonderful parable of the workers in the vineyard where he foresees his own death, not to mention his predictions about the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the world. It is there in the temple, Jesus teaching in the week of his death, that finally, that Sanhedrin gathers together to recognize that it is time to put him to death. The temple, Jesus' Father's house, becomes a place of controversy for Jesus that leads to his death. And of course, one of the last images of the temple, besides the final verse in Luke's gospel, is where, when Jesus dies, the temple curtain is torn asunder. What a remarkable moment that must've been for those Jews who were there at this very heightened time of worship during the Passover week where there were thousands of Jews in there and all those priests in the holy place who, for the first time, could see into the holy of holies. That must've been a frightening moment for them, and there really is no record of what they did in putting that together. But we know that that curtain tore from top to bottom which indicates that it's God�s doing. And that is one of those remarkable moments in the Gospels that show was that now the temple, for all intents and purposes, is obsolete because Jesus is the new temple. And wherever Jesus is, there is a place of worship. And that's why even though the apostles and the early Christians continued to go back to the temple because they were Jews and that's all they knew, they began to realize, especially when they continued to be persecuted and really kind of beaten from going to the temple that it was a good idea no longer to go there and that it was important for them now to find a new place of worship. And that place was wherever Christ was. And as we're going to see very clearly, that was where he was present in word and sacrament because those little house churches where Christians celebrate word and sacrament were now the new temples of God where God was present there. And throughout the Gospel of Luke and into Acts we see that the house now becomes a place of worship, and that, in fact, it now becomes the new temple of God, because it bears the presence of Jesus Christ, his bodily presence.