Wander along to Hyde Park in London and its northeast corner and on many days and especially at the weekend you will find plenty of people standing on a soapbox at what is know as Speakers’ Corner. You can hear reasonable and unreasonable, likely and unlikely opinions, acceptable and unacceptable being aired. The audience join in, heckling the speaker or warmly applauding some expression of common sense that they hear. It is a bit on an institution, a place from which you are free to speak and express your views.
A speaker mounts his soapbox
Today we have been to the Temple Mount otherwise known as Haram esh-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. We dressed modestly out of respect for those who worship there and, entering from the western side had a fantastic visit. I said that I would share with you what were new experiences. Well we had a good amount of time and so we were taken to the eastern wall of the Haram, the side which faces the Mount of Olives and to the south-east corner, on first sight rather empty and unimpressive but now, I have finally discovered, unmissable. This was part of the extension to the platform that Herod the Great had built for his grand reconstruction of the Temple. But on this side was located the Portico of Solomon. I am ashamed to say that in all my visits to this holy site this fact had alluded me. But here in a colonnaded area people would sit and would listen to teachers. And it was here that they sat and listened to a rabbi who had come down from Nazareth, Jesus. He would have been one of many rabbis who were teaching in what was the equivalent of our Speakers’ Corner in London, a place of debate, of argument, of challenge, and in the gospels we encounter all of that.
The rather empty and unimpressive south-east corner
It is St John who tells us that Jesus was there.
‘At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon.So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe.’ (John 10.22-15)
It was winter, the wind was blowing and they were keeping warm and this dispute begins. But they gather around him because this is what happened in this portico. We can imagine that the same happened at other times in this same place, this place of debate. Gentiles were welcome in this part of the Temple complex, it was the Temple itself that they couldn’t entered but they too could wander the portico, the colonnade and listen to these wandering teachers, these itinerant preachers and this Jesus, this northern guy, with his rag-bag collection of disciples and followers seemed always to gather a big crowd.
The apostles had listened to Jesus speaking here and so it was natural that they adopted it as a place from which to teach. We hear of the Portico again in the Acts of Apostles. Following the healing of the paralysed man at the Beautiful Gate we read
‘While [the man] clung to Peter and John, all the people ran together to them in the portico called Solomon’s Portico, utterly astonished. When Peter saw it, he addressed the people, ‘You Israelites, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk?” (Acts 3.11-13)
Then, according to Acts again, it became the place where the whole Christian community gathered, the church that came together in the Portico.
‘Now many signs and wonders were done among the people through the apostles. And they were all together in Solomon’s Portico.’ (Acts 10.12)
So this ‘Speakers’ Corner’ became the place where the church was rooted in debate and teaching, in signs and wonders. What an amazing part of the Haram, the Temple Mount – and why hadn’t I visited it before?
Remains of what was there are being exposed
But then I wondered whether Jesus was there before. Was this where his parents found him when he was lost all those years before?
‘After three days [his parents] found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.’ (Luke 2.46)
Perhaps, maybe. Did Jesus return to this place of debate 20 years later and continue the discussion. It’s an intriguing idea. The debates of course go on, and they need to. I certainly won’t be missing this part of the Haram again – it was the ‘nursery slopes’ of the church. But just to lighten the mood a poem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, more famous for his argumentative detective. The poem is called ‘A Parable’.
The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,
And warmly debated the matter;
The Orthodox said that it came from the air,
And the Heretics said from the platter.
They argued it long and they argued it strong,
And I hear they are arguing now;
But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,
Not one of them thought of a cow.
God of wisdom,
may we know when and where to speak,
when to stop arguing
and when to simply listen.
Amen.
