A woman at a well asked him a question her people and his had been arguing about for generations. Her family worshiped on one mountain. His worshiped on another, in Jerusalem. Which one was the right one?
He told her the argument was over.
The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. (John 4:21)
Not yours is wrong and mine is right. Neither. The whole question of which ground was finished.
And then his followers went out and spent two thousand years building God houses to live in.
He said it more than once
This was not one stray sentence to one woman at one well.
When people asked him where the kingdom of God was, he headed off the pointing before anyone could start.
Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)
Lo here, lo there. That is somebody pointing at a place. He is saying: do not do that. There will be no address.
When he taught people how to pray, he did not send them anywhere. He told them to go into a back room and shut the door.
When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret. (Matthew 6:6)
And when he described where he himself would turn up, the number was two.
Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. (Matthew 18:20)
Two people. No building, no address, no door, no priest at the door. That is the whole requirement.
The first ones understood it
For about three hundred years after him, his followers mostly had nowhere to go.
They met in houses. Somebody's dining room, somebody's courtyard, an upstairs room. Not because they were being humble about it, and not because they were hiding, though often they were. It was because a room with people in it was the only thing anybody thought was needed.
One of them said it out loud in front of a council that was about to kill him for it. His name was Stephen, and the scene is in Acts, the book that follows the four gospels and tells what his followers did after he was gone.
The most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands... what house will ye build me? saith the Lord. (Acts 7:48-49)
They stoned him in the street afterward.
And then the empire built
They stoned him for saying it. That tells you where the first Christians stood. Saying God has no house was the dangerous position to hold, and they were the ones being killed for holding it.
Then, in the fourth century, Christianity stopped being the thing you could be killed for and became the thing the empire paid for. And the building began almost at once.
Basilicas went up. Then cathedrals, some taking two and three hundred years to finish, paid for out of the wages of whole regions for generations. Stone hauled from quarries a hundred miles off. Gold hammered into sheets and laid over wood. Glass in colors the people in the street had never seen anywhere else in their lives.
And they were called what the old book had called the other thing. The house of God.
There was a holy end and a plain end. A rail across the middle, so that some people could go past it and most people could not. A room behind the rail where the ordinary person did not go at all. The temple got rebuilt. Not on that hill. On new ground, by the people who had his book open in front of them.
Then it went further, into the thing he had headed off. The pointing started again. Lo here. This building is holier than that one. This city holds a relic and that one does not. Come to this ground and something will be nearer to you here than it was at home.
He had told a woman at a well that the argument about which mountain was finished. It got started again, with different mountains.
The problem is one word
A room where people meet is a good thing. Two or three gathered, which is his own number, usually needs a roof and some chairs.
The problem is the word house.
The moment a room becomes God's address, everything he took apart comes back with it. Somebody has to keep the address. Somebody has to decide who may come in and how near the front they may sit. The building starts to have a holy end. Money that was for people goes into stone. And the person who cannot come on Sunday, because of work or shame or a body that will not carry them up the steps, quietly learns that they were further from God this week than the people who could.
That is the old arrangement, working again, in our own buildings.
Where he actually said it was
He gave the woman an answer, and it is worth hearing as an answer and not only as a refusal. He told her what the Father is.
God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. (John 4:24)
A spirit does not have a street. He told her that the Father is looking for people, not for a location, and that what the Father wants from them is not a direction to face.
And there is something he did not say, with a perfect chance to say it. He did not tell her that her mountain was wrong and his was right. He did not send her to Jerusalem. He was standing in the wrong country talking to the wrong kind of person about the wrong mountain, and he took the whole subject off the table.
If you have not been inside a church in years
Some people stopped going and have carried something about it ever since. A feeling that they drifted away from where God was kept. That the door closed behind them.
There was never an address. That is not a consolation we invented for you, it is the thing he said to a stranger at a well before he said it to anybody else, and he said it to her first.
If you want to find a room with people in it, that is good, and he would say so. The roof was never what made it holy. Two or three, he said. He never once said where.