Temple, Torah, and Annunciation: A Reflection on 1 Timothy 1:8-14, Luke 19:45-48, and Luke 1:26-38
Paul writes in his letter to Timothy: Now we know that the law is good, if any one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane. He’s describing people far from God—liars, murderers, the enslaved and enslavers. Then suddenly he turns: I formerly blasphemed and persecuted and insulted him; but I received mercy, because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief. Paul, zealous guardian of the Law, was himself lawless. The one who thought he was using Torah rightly was using it to murder the innocent.
The Law reveals what we’re avoiding about ourselves. It wasn’t given to make you righteous through performance. It was given to show you the gap between what your soul knows to be true and what your life actually looks like. Paul thought he was righteous—scrupulously observing every commandment, defending God’s honor with violence. The Law should have shown him his rage, his fear, his need for control. Instead, he weaponized it. He made it a tool for avoiding the inner work it was meant to provoke.
This is what we all do. We take what’s meant to illuminate our inner darkness and turn it into a performance. We make righteousness a show we can stage instead of a transformation we must suffer. Paul was performing holiness while murdering people. The Law was screaming at him—You’re full of rage, you’re terrified of losing control, you’re defending an image of God you’ve constructed to justify your violence—but he couldn’t hear it. He was too busy being righteous.
The Lord Arrives and Everything Breaks
When Christ enters the Temple in Luke’s Gospel, He doesn’t arrive as a mild reformer suggesting improvements. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.” He overturns tables. He drives people out. The arrival of God in flesh is violent—not because God is cruel, but because our systems of avoidance cannot survive His presence.
The Temple had become what Paul’s righteousness had become: a system for managing God at a safe distance. You bring your sacrifice, pay your fee, perform your ritual, go home feeling holy. The wound underneath—the fear, the rage, the disconnection from your own soul—never gets touched. The system protects you from encounter. Christ’s arrival destroys that protection.
This is the scandal of Advent. God doesn’t arrive to affirm what you’ve built. He arrives to tear it down. Every false security, every performance of holiness that lets you avoid the actual work of transformation, every theological system you’ve constructed to keep God at arm’s length—the Incarnation shatters it. Not because God hates you, but because He loves you too much to let you hide.
Luke tells us: And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people sought to destroy him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people hung upon his words. Notice the split. The religious authorities—the ones who have the most invested in the system—want Him dead. The people hang on His words. Those whose identity depends on the performance can’t tolerate the One who demands transformation. Those who know they’re broken are drawn to Him.
Mary’s Consent and the Pattern of Receptivity
But before the Temple cleansing, before Paul’s conversion, there’s another moment of God’s arrival: the Annunciation. The angel appears to Mary: And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. Mary’s response is immediate: How shall this be, since I have no husband? She’s not refusing—she’s asking the honest question. Then, when the angel explains, she says: Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.
Mary demonstrates what Paul and the Temple authorities couldn’t: receptivity to God’s actual arrival, not the arrival they’d imagined or tried to control. She doesn’t say, “Let me pray about this and get back to you,” or “I need to consult the authorities,” or “This doesn’t fit my five-year plan.” She says yes to something that will destroy her reputation, endanger her life, and shatter every assumption about how God works.
This is what the Nativity reveals about how transformation happens. God doesn’t arrive on your terms. He doesn’t wait for you to have your theological system sorted out or your righteousness performance perfected. He shows up as an infant to an unmarried teenager in an occupied nation, born in a cave among animals. Everything about the Incarnation says: your categories are too small, your systems are too rigid, your righteousness is too performed. Let it all break. Say yes to what you cannot control.
Paul had to be thrown from his horse and blinded. He had to lose everything—his righteousness, his identity, his certainty. Only then could he receive mercy. Only then could he say with Mary: Let it be to me according to your word. Only then could he write: The grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.
The Law’s True Purpose: Midwife to Receptivity
This is why Paul says the Law is good if any one uses it lawfully. Its lawful use is to break your performance, to show you the gap, to drive you to receptivity. The Law is meant to make you like Mary—aware of your inability, open to God’s impossible arrival, saying yes to transformation you cannot manufacture.
When Paul lists the people the Law was given for—the lawless and disobedient, the ungodly and sinners—he’s describing everyone, including himself. We’re all performing righteousness while avoiding the inner work. We’re all using religion to manage God at a safe distance. The Law is meant to shatter that illusion. It’s meant to show you that you cannot save yourself, that your performance is hollow, that the rage and fear and brokenness you’ve been avoiding are still there underneath all your religious activity.
And then—then—when the performance collapses and you’re left with nothing but your need, God arrives. Not as the God you imagined, not on the terms you dictated, but as He actually is: infinite love entering the mess you’ve been avoiding, feeling it fully, transforming it from within.
The same pattern in every encounter with God: Mary says yes to the impossible; Christ overturns the Temple’s false security; Paul is thrown blind from his certainty. In each case, what must die is the system of control, the performance of righteousness, the avoidance of actual encounter. What rises is receptivity, transformation, participation in divine life.
Advent as Invitation to Let Everything Break
This is what we’re celebrating in Advent—not a sweet story about a baby in a manger, but the terrifying arrival of God in flesh, coming to destroy every false security and every performed righteousness so that we can finally receive the transformation we’ve been avoiding.
The questions Advent asks are the same questions Paul had to face, the same questions the Temple authorities refused to face, the same questions Mary answered with yes:
What righteousness are you performing to avoid inner work? What religious activity are you using to keep God at a safe distance? What theological system have you constructed so you can control the encounter instead of surrendering to it? What would have to die for you to say with Mary: Let it be to me according to your word?
Because God is coming whether you’re ready or not. He’s overturning the tables in your inner temple—all the systems of avoidance, all the performances of holiness that let you bypass transformation. And like the people in Luke’s account, you have a choice: you can be like the chief priests and scribes, defending your system and seeking to destroy what threatens it, or you can be like the people who hung on His words—aware of your need, open to the arrival you cannot control, saying yes to the transformation that will break you open.
Paul received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief. The religious performance had blinded him to his own ignorance. When Christ arrived in blinding light on the Damascus road, the ignorance was revealed, the performance shattered, and mercy flooded in. This is how grace works: not by affirming your righteousness, but by destroying the illusion of righteousness so you can finally receive what you actually need.
Mary shows the pattern: receptivity, vulnerability, yes to the impossible. Christ enacts the pattern: arrival that breaks false security, teaching that exposes avoidance, presence that demands transformation. Paul learns the pattern: everything he built must die, the Law reveals rather than saves, grace overflows when performance collapses.
The Nativity is not a nice story. It’s the announcement that God has arrived in flesh, and everything you’ve constructed to avoid Him is about to be torn down. The only question is whether you’ll cling to the wreckage or say with Mary: Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.
Keywords (ordered by relevance): advent, nativity, annunciation, receptivity, performance-vs-transformation, temple-cleansing, law-as-revelation, false-security, Mary, surrender, inner-work, Paul, righteousness-performance, letting-go
The Greater Horizon 