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Easter 6
25/5/2025

Psalm 67
John 2:13-22

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The housing crisis will likely kill us all (a thought to which I will return!).

The housing crisis in Australia featured as one of the central issues in our recent federal election, with the major parties making the kinds of funding promises they hope voters will not recognise are likely to make matters worse.

My interest today is not to propose any solution to the problem, but to unpack a bit how we think about this (and other) challenges we face. I remarked a moment ago that this was “a” central issue in the lead-up to the election. Putting the matter this way might be the real problem: that we think this to be a single issue, treatable in isolation from other pressing concerns which we think about in the same, isolated kind of way.

How might we think about this differently, speak the problem in a new way?

It has long been observed that there are things which can be said in one language that are difficult to say in another. This is sometimes the motivation people have for learning different languages: books are different in their original languages, and we can even find that we are ourselves different when we speak a language other than mother’s tongue.

With respect to the housing crisis, it would help us to speak a little Greek. In fact, we need just one Greek word – a word buried in a group of English words that designate the biggest challenges we face not only as a society with a cost-of-housing problem but also as humankind as a whole. That little Greek word is oikos, which means “house” (not surprisingly!). In the English words of interest today, the Greek oikos has morphed into the letters E-C, which form the first part of economy, ecology, and ecumenism. These are, more literally, oikonomy, oikology, and oikumenism. Literally, they mean something like the rule (Greek nomos) of the house, the plan (Greek logos) of the house, and the house inhabited (Greek menō, “abide” – etymology guessed).

This is to say that what we call “the housing crisis” is connected to the biggest crises pressing in on us: the perpetual financial crises of our economy, our looming eco-environmental challenges, and ecumenism (generalised from its narrow ecclesial application to local social and wider geo-political relationships). These are all “housing” issues, having to do with where, how and with whom we live.

The house, understood most generally as the space we inhabit, is fundamental to human being. And each house is related to or within every other house, so that any “housing crisis” is a crisis of how we are connected to our systems of production and exchange, our environment, and our social and political relationships. The scarcity of resources, the rising seas, and the wars that threaten to kill us are all “housing” crises. We can’t house ourselves locally because we can’t live appropriately in the broad inhabited world.

And this brings us, finally, to our text from John’s Gospel today: “Zeal for my Father’s house”. This is a classic Gospel text. On an “obvious” reading, the point seems to be, Don’t make the temple into a place for exchange which takes advantage – money-changing, profit-making and rent-seeking. This is a “holy” place, within which only certain words and actions are appropriate.

Those of us who know the story well also know well this understanding of its meaning. But it’s much less helpful a reading than it first seems. This is because it fails to take the next step to ask, Well, where should the money-changing, profit-making, and rent-seeking take place? Is God less annoyed about rapacious economics outside the temple than inside of it?

This is to ask, what does “my Father’s house” refer to? Does the demand for sanctity and holiness relate only to the temple, to the partitioned “religious” space? Does the contaminating marketplace within the temple threaten God with a housing crisis, displacing God from the “holy” place? Or does God have a broader accommodation than this, outside the temple as well as inside?

This bumps us out of mere moral thinking. Moral thinking is always about location in time or space – what I do when or where. Our text today seems to pose a moral question of the “where” kind: what can I do in the temple? An example of the “when” dimension of morality is the prohibition of adultery: No, you can’t have sex with him/her/them when you’re married to someone else (cf. Romans 7.1-3). Morality divides the world into different times and places.

To imagine the temple to be one place and the world to be another is to say there are different moralities operating in those two spaces. This is the problem with the standard reading of the cleansing of the temple, and why the housing crisis will probably kill us all. We imagine that Jesus’ attack upon the temple is about where God lives and what is required when in the presence of God, as if there were places where God is not present. The holy oikos (house) doesn’t really touch upon the wider oikonomy, oikology or oikumenics which constitute the rest of our lives.

And so also for the housing crisis: we treat it as if what has precipitated the crisis in affordability and availability of an oikos is different from the wider economic, ecological and ecumenical crises. But recognising the “house-ness” which operates across the whole of our being makes all places the “same”: all connected, all affecting each other, all sharing in the same problematic.

We don’t have enough houses to live in because we don’t live appropriately in the one house we’ve been given: this world with its exchanges and communities and environment. There are money changers, profit-makers and rent-seekers in God’s worldwide temple. Honesty requires that we admit that we are often enough these ourselves. We are a house divided against itself, and so there are not enough houses. This is the heart of our housing crisis: the assumption that my house has nothing to do with yours, that God’s house is just another building on the street, that the many spaces of the world are more important in their difference than the one space we co-inhabit.

While Jesus’ attack, then, looks to be focussed only on a single place, it has to do with everything, everywhere, all at once. This is not zeal “for my Father’s house” but zeal for my Father’s world. And this is what will get him killed.

And us, too. If – to moderate slightly my sensationalist headline – the housing crisis per se won’t kill us, we will all die in the midst of a housing crisis, whatever Mr Albanese or anyone else manages to achieve, because our economic problems are ecumenical and ecological ones: we don’t know how to live together with justice and peace.

I remarked to some colleagues recently that my preaching seems to be getting a bit “darker” as time goes on. By this, I mean that I’m increasingly aware of the risk of saying stupid things – stupid in the sense of not taking reality seriously. Faith and unfaith alike too often happily skate along sentimental surfaces as if the ice were not paper-thin and the world below not dark and cold. Faith, at least, should not do this; let us leave that to those who believe lesser things.

But political pessimism about what we might be able to achieve is what the gospel would call realism: God’s house – the world – has been made a marketplace, the abundance of the earth has been filtered through the economics of scarcity, and our common humanity has morphed into a competition for survival.

The bad news of the gospel is that the one through whom the world came into being as God’s own home has himself come into the world and been rejected. This is God’s true housing crisis: not that worldly things would push God out of the temple, but that the world itself refuses to be God’s temple. And so God is pushed out of the temple of the world onto a cross. The bad news of the gospel is that our homelessness unhomes God.

The good news of the gospel – as John’s Gospel puts it – is that God claims the cross as a crown (cf. Joh 12.32); even here, homeless, God reigns. There is no pushing God out of the world because there is no “outside” of the world; there is only God, in whom all things have their being in God (1.3).

And so the resurrection has to happen, because God insists that the world continue as God’s own home, because God insists that even at our lowest ebb – the crucifixion of Christ – we know ourselves as God’s own.

God insists on being light in the darkness, life in the midst of death, home for the homeless.

One light,

one life,

one home

for one family in God.

God’s zeal is for this.

Let our zeal be for the same.