Curtains

Our meditations upon the woodcuts of Gustave Doré, by which he illustrated the Grande Bible de Tours, reach the climax of Our Lord’s Passion with Luke 23:44-45—

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the Temple was torn in two.

By the standards of its day, the Jerusalem Temple was weird. The very idea that there ought to be but one Temple for an entire nation, for a dozen feuding federated Tribes, baffled most observers in the ancient world. Great cities could have scores of temples, of every deity and design, each housing a cultic image, a statue of the given god in glory.

Some of these were wonders of the world: Zeus at Olympia, Artemis at Ephesus. Yet the Temple of the Hebrew God stood empty—empty!—just a big blank space with some cherubs set around it, and simple sacred box of acacia and gold (this latter being lost before the time of Christ). Here there would be one Temple, one people, one royal line for the one and only God, who could not be contained within the heavens, let alone within the confines of four walls.

Yet this the people treated as the house of God on earth, the home of His sacred Name, the footstool over which He ruled the cosmos. The Temple itself appears to have been a universe in miniature, with a reconstructed Eden at its heart. Here in the garden, in the earthly paradise, Adam once again could walk with God. Priests lit a golden tree of light and offered frankincense within the sanctuary, the smoke of which would carry up and over a sacred veil into the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Holy of Holies.

Said veil represented the border between the mundane and divine, between the Creator and His Creation. This was no diaphanous drapery: the Temple curtain, woven by women consecrated to divine service, measured 60 feet by 30 feet, according to the Mishnah, and thick as a man’s palm. Replacing it every six months required the labor of 300 priests just to carry and hang it aloft.

Only one man, the High Priest, on one day of the year, the Day of Atonement, could pass beyond the curtain, swathed in white, interceding for his people in the presence of the Lord. For one brief moment, the High Priest—and likely at some point the King—stood amidst the angels, as “sons of God.” One of the ironies of the New Testament is that “Son of God” is but a human title, while “Son of Man” remains divine. Christ of course is both.

Imagine then the meaning of the curtain torn in two. The barrier betwixt this world and the next, between the mortal and immortal, the human and divine, has been rent asunder by the death of Jesus Christ. He, our great High Priest, who split the heavens at His Baptism, now breaks a crack from Golgotha into the midst of the Temple Mount, and deep down into hell. Now are loosed the dead and the damned! Now is highest Heaven opened wide to humankind!

The true Son of God, by blood and water from His side, has consecrated all of us as coheirs and as kin. In tearing His flesh, we tore open the true veil, and divine life floweth forth the flood the pits of hell. His Body is our Temple, the house of God on earth, and by the Word and Sacraments we’re members of the same. His Holy Spirit dwells within us, making our bodies His Temple, where the presence of our Lord shall meet the whole of humankind.

Now and forever, God and Man are one in Jesus Christ.