MEDITATION ON THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION OF THE MEANING OF JERUSALEM
© International Christian Embassy Jerusalem
By Mrs. Frieda Haddad Abs
The whole meaning of the spiritual dimension of the city of Jerusalem is summarized in a nutshell in the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem… the gloom will not be upon her who is distressed… The people who waked in darkness have seen a great light.” (Isaiah 40 :1 and 9 :1,2)
For us Christians our faith is rooted in history. It proclaims the entry of God into history. Christianity accepts the meaning of history. Outside of this historic dimension, our faith is inconceivable, whereas pagan cults are conceivable. Christian revelation is thought of in history and Christianity attributes a particular meaning to history: it is the locale where man bears his freedom of rebellion. It is also the place where God manifests the fullness of crucified Love. The Cross is the crossroad where the abyss of innocence and the abyss of darkness culminate together: the God of History is God in History.
"The Cross is the tree of life planted on Calvary" (Text of the Office of the Exaltation of the Cross of the Orthodox Church of Antioch). This is why on the Orthodox icons of the crucifixion the foot of the cross sinks deep into a black cave where the head of Adam lies says Origen. Tradition has it that the site of Calvary is the place where Adam was buried (Saint John Chrysostom). Golgotha is in fact according to the Gospels the "place of the skull" (John 19:17), the place where the first Adam, and in him, all humanity is watered with the blood of the Second Adam. The icons of the Resurrection take up this same theme. The Orthodox Office of Matins on Holy Saturday announces: "This day, Moses mysteriously foreshadowed it when he said: 'the Lord has blessed the seventh day.' For it is the blessed Sabbath, it is the day of rest, where the Son rested from all His works ". The prayer of the Church of the East thus signifies the entry of human history into the meta-history of the Eighth Day. The silence of the great Sabbath falls on the ultimate Mystery of God- in- history. The Son of God is still the Son of Man. Christ appears on the icon of the Resurrection (Descent into Hell) triumphantly carrying his Cross and drawing with Him in His glory the first Adam and with him all humankind. The cave of the crucifixion becomes the place of glory and at the back of the icon often appear the walls of Jerusalem, the terrestrial Jerusalem on the left and the celestial Jerusalem on the right: history and meta-history united in a single day- span which the fathers signify by the Eighth Day.
Therein lies the full significance of Jerusalem for us Christians. It is, according to the magnificent words of Saint Gregory of Nyssa (Life of Moses: 247) the cleft of the rock (Exodus 33:22), the house of the Father and of the Son with us and in us (John 14:23), the tabernacle where God protects us under the shelter of his tent (Psalm 26: 5), the locus that God chose to place his Name in (Deuteronomy 12: 5). It attests that it is time which is in the human person and not the human person that is in time contrary to what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant had asserted.
Among the notions that rabbinical thought developed and on which Jewish mysticism was nourished, perhaps none is more enlightening for us - from a Christian understanding of the Old Testament through the mystery-lens of the New Testament _ than that of the term “Shekinah”. This Hebrew term, which is rooted in the Talmud, is the substantive corresponding to the verb “schakan”, the meaning of which is to dwell in a tent. More precisely, the Shekinah, in Jewish thought, is the special presence of God with his people, located in some way in the Tabernacle, and later in the Temple of Jerusalem.
This descent of God to us, however extraordinary it may be, is permanent although it always escapes human understanding. The Tabernacle in fact was properly the "Tent of Meeting" (ohel - mo'ed). From that sacred place among all, the Divine voice was heard, as it became heard later on in the temple of Jerusalem, above the Ark, in
the empty space between the two Cherubim, and more precisely on what was referred to as the Mercy Seat which procures atonement. That cover of the Ark was made of solid gold on which the high priest, on the Day of Atonement, came to shed the purifying sacrificial blood. That was exactly where God resided and manifested himself (Exodus 25:22).
Not only did God speak from there, but it was from there that he appeared (Leviticus 16: 2).
Then came the ritual of the Day of Atonement which culminated in the entry once a year, of the High Priest in The Sanctuary, to carry there, on the very place of the Presence, the blood of Atonement.
It thus followed, and throughout the duration of the Kingdom, that the king proceeded exactly to this place dressed in rags and covered with the ashes of repentance, perched on a donkey leading the people in a procession that took place every seven years symbolizing a renewed return to God. It is hardly necessary to recall the commentary that the Epistle to the Hebrews gives to this rite as it sees in it the figure of the entry of the glorified Christ, once and for all, into the Heavenly Sanctuary, to offer His own blood there to the Father thus introducing us to His All-Encompassing Mercy (Hebrews 9: 6-14). And the Church relives all this in the liturgical “today” of the feast of Palm Sunday.
Isaiah's vision then comes to underline a first extension of Leviticus. Isaiah sees the Divine Majesty as it appears to him in the Sanctuary. At the same time as the prophet’s vision of the Schekinah, the Seraphim or angels of fire appear to him, as they proclaim the unapproachable holiness of God by veiling their faces. Isaiah's reaction is first a sacred dread (Isaiah 6: 5). The fire of the Seraphim, far from consuming him, will purify him precisely of all impurity. Then his mouth were enabled to speak the words of God.
A little later Ezekiel will also contemplate the Glory of Schekinah sitting above the cherubim. But with the cherubim, he will discover other celestial spirits, the ophanim, literally the wheels, who are about to set off, because the Shekinah herself is going to leave the sanctuary made of stone where Israel had believed they had attached her for all times. Then arises the unexpected promise: If God had deserted the Temple, He had not however abandoned His people or at least He remained always with the faithful remnant wherever they were as was testified by the Glory of the Presence appearing to the eyes of the prophet in the very land of Exile (Ezekiel 1).
At this point one could fear that the notion of Presence would vanish into abstraction: that God would no longer be present in the consciousness of the people except in the manner of an ideal, a bit like the Thai Buddha who imposes himself on Buddhist consciousness as a personification of the virtues, represented in the temples in physical postures each signifying one of the virtues of the path to Nirvana. But this is just what the rabbinical theology and mysticism of the Shekinah will avoid. The speculations of the rabbis will be very close to the lyrical effusions of the book of Ecclesiastes, in which we read: "Where two are seated together with the Torah between them, the Shekinah is in the midst of them" (words attributed to Rabbi Chamina ben Teradion) but this, far from signifying any evaporation of the Presence, expresses it in a most personal sense. It seems difficult to interpret the words of Jesus in Matthew 18:20, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of them”, other than as a reformulation of the rabbinical saying with the “I” referring to the” Living Word Incarnate”.
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Moreover, in this rapprochement of quotes, the intention of Christ to affirm His divinity emerges with a singular force, and it is clear how he could affirm it without having at all to leave the framework of rabbinical religious thought. The book of Revelation also tells us: "And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. " (21: 3). The use in the Greek of the rare word skènè (tent) and of the verb, both formed with the root of the Hebrew schakan, cannot be accidental. Likewise, when Saint John in his Prologue tells us: "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt (eskenosen) among us" (1:14), it seems clear that this first formula of the Incarnation is at a crossroad path of the currents of thought on the Presence under the Tabernacle and the spirituality of the Schekinah.
In the Holy City, the Bride of the Lamb, the seer of Revelation will not mention any temple:” I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. (Revelation 21:22). However, this ultimate, eschatological Temple of the Living God in us is being built by our incorporation into Christ. We become His Temple, insofar as we are nourished with the Bread of Life, the Flesh of the Risen Christ (cf. John 6). Is not the abode of the Shekinah here on earth henceforth, in the holy sacraments?
The Shekinah once appeared in empty space, on the mercy seat, between the cherubim. It is there that the divine voice spoke, it is there that one could contemplate the Glory of God like Isaiah, without however being struck down, but on the contrary purified and enlightened. The prayer par excellence of the Old Covenant was uttered so that the One who sits between the cherubim would appear (Habakkuk 3: 2-3 and Psalms 97 and 99). Saint John mentions to us this answered prayer when he evokes the two angels dressed in white at the bedside and at the feet of the empty tomb from which the Living One had just risen (John 20: 11-12).
This text reminds us of the icon of the myrrh-bearing women who came to the Tomb, holding vases of spices. On the icon of Rublev or his school, we often see two angels dressed in white, "one at the head, the other at the feet" and who say to the women: "He is not here, He is risen ". They show the Empty Tomb with the mortuary bands. In the end, this is all that remains of hell, debris, dust, emptiness, nothingness, Life is elsewhere. The iconography exactly reproduces the Kaporet and the Tent of Meeting. The two cherubim were symbolic figures: they prophesied the Meeting of the two Adams and foreshadowed the place where the mystery of salvation was fulfilled.
Considered from this perspective, the city of Jerusalem is therefore an icon of the entire mystery of the history of salvation; it is the place where man bears his freedom of rebellion. It is also the place where God manifests the fullness of his love. It is the symbolic field on the other side of the brook of Jabbok where Jacob - foreshadowing the whole human race - wrestled with God and with men all night until dawn,
and where he was victorious, but also the place that Jacob calls Peniel (the face of God) because he said: "I have seen God face to face and my soul has been saved" (Genesis 32: 22-32). The city of Jerusalem is the place where the mystery of the Love of God and the freedom of man have confronted each other throughout the dawn of time, a place of spiritual pilgrimage that calls for silent veneration in fear and in a trembling similar to that of Jacob with his dislocated hip, but also in the joy of the Meeting, of the completion of the kenosis, and of the entry into the everlasting glory.
As we proclaim all this in the Apostles‘ Creed in our corporate worship, let us beseech our Lord who was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, who suffered outside the gates of the city of Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, descended to the dead, and.on the third day rose again, let us beseech Him in the words of Ephrem the Middle Eastern Saint from Syria that He “would grant us the light of His Grace to overcome the darkness that is around us and in us”.
Frieda Haddad Abs
Written for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity - 2022