There are a few ideas in the New Testament that stand out from other religions. Regardless of whether or not these have any merit (they could be complete bunk), it’s worth noting their distinctiveness, especially during the Advent season.
One of these is the idea of “God’s house” – the place where He resides – and, more importantly, who can come into it.
In ancient Jewish thought, God lived in a relatively small room in the center of the holy temple, around which everything revolved. You can’t understand how the Jews of Jesus’ day thought about their world without at least a cursory understanding of this arrangement.
In the most basic terms, if you were non-Jewish, you could enter the temple, but you wouldn’t get very far. Jewish folk could go a bit farther, but not as far as the priests. Only the high priest could enter God’s room, but only once a year. Anyone else would die if they entered.
His fellow priests would tie a rope around his waist before he went in to fulfill his annual duties. If he died, they could drag him out. To them, it was real. God was in there, and nobody dared go near Him.
There is a very clear message in all of this; a problem exists between God and His people, and between His people and everyone else.
You’ll find similar elements in other ancient middle eastern religions; temples, priests, protocols, social heirarchies, and a distant, elusive deity.
Not much new here
What’s distinctive about the Jewish temple is the door to God’s room. Historians estimate it to be 4 inches thick, which would further the idea that God doesn’t want to be bothered.
But it wasn’t a huge, impenetrable obstruction of wood or iron.
It was wool.
If God wants to keep people at such distance, why use a curtain? Wouldn’t a huge, guilded, diamond-studded door send a better message?
Three of four Gospel authors wrote that Jesus’ death somehow took the curtain (they called it a “veil) out of the way, leaving God’s house without a door:
“And Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and breathed His last. Then the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” ~ Mark 15:37-38
On the morning of Jesus’ birth, Herod’s temple stood quietly as a nod to the way that people think about God, i.e., he wants obedience, “cleanliness,” and keeps himself at a distance because people, in general, suck.
While Jewish thinkers for centuries wondered why such a reclusive deity would want a door made of fabric, the New Testament authors put the puzzle pieces together.
The door was always only temporary. One day, it would go away.
What’s distinctive about all of this, especially in ancient religious thought, is that the barrier between God and His priests, and everyone else by implication, is gone, not because people magically became better but because God Himself, via no condition or qualification, took it down. That was the plan all along.
For the next 2,000 years, Christian thinkers would pen reams of thought about how available God is – he is now personal, unconditional, and, most importantly, close.
You won’t find this in any other religious thought, and us humans have been doing religion for a long time.
Again, it could all be nonsense. I’m not claiming that this religion is the only one that’s worth consideration. I have some thoughts about all of that, but I’ll spare you to make a bigger point.
If you’re up for it, let’s assume for a minute that all of this is real: God established his own nation, for whatever reason, and set up a religion that in many ways resembled all the others of its day. When the time was right, He added one element, himself, honoring and preserving the old system but redefining it into something the world had never considered.
Whatever it was that laid so long ago in a cow stall, surrounded by the world’s greatest losers, ushered in something so alien and outside the box that nobody had ever thought of it before.
If that’s all true, what happened on the morning of Jesus’ birth was the beginning of a new system, a new “deal between humanity and God” as the New Testament puts it.
Gone now is the idea that God only loves clean people, or people who have their shit together. No longer do I have to look down on someone for their “sin,” or exhalt someone for their religious adherence.
God doesn’t do that.
I’d argue that He never did.
More importantly, gone is the idea that I’m in some kind of trouble with God, not because I haven’t done anything worthy of trouble, but because Jesus took the trouble that was coming my way.
When some inner voice tries to remind me 1,000 times a day that I’m little more than a screwup, or when it tries to comfort me with the idea that I’m holier than someone else, I don’t have to listen.
The ancient Jewish scriptures looked forward to Jesus’ arrival, this “messiah,” and called him עִמָּנוּאֵל – “immanuel,” or, “God is with us,” as we’ve translated it.
I think that’s a poor translation because, in this word, the “with us” part happens before the “God” part, emphasizing the idea that this reclusive, conditional, high-expectation God is now, at any time, standing next to us.
עִמָּנוּאֵל doesn’t emphasize what or who this God-person is, it emphasizes where he is.
Having ripped down the curtain of separation that was never intended to be there in the first place, he is now the “with us” God.
This has many implications for any would-be Jesus follower, but one of the most important is this: if God now operates free of condition and distance from humans, it is patently un-Christian for us to consider the non-Christian world and deem it unworthy of our presence, circling our wagons, tribing up, and resurrecting the distance that Jesus crucified.
Photo Credit: Nathan Anderson at Unsplash
