Lent 2019: Tuesday, March 19 - Curtains

New life and restoration must come from God and not from us.  In the Bible, this is often depicted as new life coming from God's house, because that's where God is.  As we've seen, the holy of holies is the room of the temple where God lives.  So in Ezekiel's vision of restoration in chapter 47, we see that water flows out from the temple.  It is a river of life, causing creatures and fish and fruit trees to flourish.  It flows into the Dead Sea, but instead of becoming salty, the salt water becomes fresh.  New life comes out from the temple.  God steps out from the temple, out from the fenced-off place of the holy of holies, and renews the land.

In Matthew 12, Jesus and his disciples eat heads of grain from a grainfield.  As they ate it on the sabbath, Pharisees cry foul.  In his defense, Jesus makes reference to priests who desecrate the temple on the sabbath day and yet are innocent.  As Peter Leithart writes, priests are commanded to do work on the sabbath.  Jesus doesn't mean they are breaking the law.  For others, it would be perhaps.  But not for priests. Working on the sabbath, offering their sacrifices is the way they keep the sabbath.

By the Pharisees light, this is a sabbath-breaking, but what Jesus is in effect saying is that he and his disciples are priests.  How can this be?  We find this is so because the disciples have a traveling temple with them, the new Jesus temple.  Jesus says: "I tell you that something greater than the temple is here."  Leithart writes:

"Jesus Himself is that greater-than-temple Something.  He is the locus of the presence of God, the place where God dwells in fullness.  As long as He's there with His disciples, their work, even if it was work, is legitimate work on the Sabbath.  Where Jesus is, there is the temple and presence of God..." (Leithart, Jesus as Israel, Vol. 1, 245)

What does this mean?  A few posts ago, we talked about how the tabernacle and temple served to provide Israel real but limited access to Eden.  It served to provide hope that God will eventually make a way back to Eden.  That is still yet to happen, but we've made a remarkable turn on the way to that happy conclusion: God himself has stepped from Eden into the world.  The curse of death separates us from that space.  It is guarded by flaming sword and temple veils.  It is a holy boundary to protect us from the holy one.  But the holy one has now crossed over the veil into the world.  He has parted the curtains and moved into our neighborhood.  The one who lives perfectly by Spirit has moved into the world of flesh and death.

The gospels show us Jesus doing everything that God was doing from the tabernacle and temple.  This will continue to be true.  The one change is that it is all out in the open.  Peter Leithart writes:

"The one change - the single shift so massive that it changes everything - is that Yahweh is no longer hidden.  At Sinai, Yahweh established his home in the midst of Israel, but with Jesus, Yahweh takes a further step into the world of flesh, beyond the tabernacle of curtains at Sinai.  And then it becomes clear that the whole sanctuary apparatus, all the purity rules and rites of purification, all the sacrifices, the whole system was a complex type and shadow of Jesus' life and ministry." (Delivered, 137)

All the levitical law of Torah shows us the culture of what it means to live with God in his house.  What would it look like if God came out from his house and mingled with sinners without the veil of the temple barriers?

It would look like Jesus.