Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these (9.23).As we read in Exodus, the earthly tabernacle that was created was really a copy of a heavenly pattern. Hebrews tells us that the pattern wasn't just blueprints, but a real tabernacle.
Setting aside for the moment some of the difficulties of "real" here, one has to ask how a heavenly tabernacle came to need purifying. How was it that it was corrupted?
I don't really have any definite conclusions on the subject, but I can offer a couple different ideas. Some thoughts from my two or four readers would be appreciated.
The first idea that I arrived at was that perhaps the heavenly tabernacle and the earthly one were connected in some way. The idea of the heavenly poking into the earthly is not unknown in Scripture—the incarnation is one such example, and the sacramentalists would probably argue the same for the Eucharist and Baptism, as well.
The purification of the heavenlies becomes necessary in this view because the heavenly tabernacle was polluted by man's worship. God prescribes a means for worship that is violated over and again in the Old Testament, eventually culminating in Israel's captivity. In other words, the tabernacle represents a two-way street of worship: the method of worship actually does taint the heavenly realm.
Another idea—one suggested by my mother—is that the tabernacle was polluted in some fashion by Satan. He is clearly active in heaven, especially in the book of Job, where he accuses the man of being faithful to God because he hasn't been afflicted.
Reading some in the white spaces, we might assume that Satan's activity extended to the heavenly tabernacle, and therefore it needed cleansing.
My interest here isn't purely speculative. My perspective on sacraments has been undergoing a slow-but-steady change over the years, and I guess it has got me wondering a bit about how our worship really works. It also goes (at least for me) to long-standing questions of Realism and how it fits in with Christianity. Perhaps there are a few too many leaps of logic there, but I find the connections interesting and worth pursuing.
I think the answer is earlier in the text-the polluting influence is us. That doesn't insist on mediaeval notions of symbolic connection (though it could mean that) but that we worship in the real heavenly tabernacle. That's where our worship takes place-where Christ sheds his blood as eternal sacrifice to purify everything that we have defiled by our very existence. It is this purification (among other things) that makes it possible for us to go boldly to the throne of grace. I think I might draw in Isaiah's writings about the gentiles being brought to the temple by levites. There the idea of gentiles polluting the temple is not even considered. Yet gentiles would have corrupted the earthly temple. Instead, this is a temple that has been so purified that it purifies those who enter in, just as Christ cleans unclean.
ReplyDeleteIf by contrast you argue that the heavenly temple was polluted by the earthly one, then I think the blame lays on the shoulders of Israel. Which, given vs 15, may be what he's saying. But we're the ones who are free and we're the ones who benefit from the purification. We actually worship there.
Also, my pastor is preaching on "Eden the first temple" this week. This made me think if the true temple was actually connected to Eden, then the sin of Adam is the polluting influence. That starts to push toward the first/second Adam thing-Christ rectifying what Adam had ruined. Not sure that's where the writer is going, but it's another possibility.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to ponder that. One of the guys from Westminster preached on the "incarnation" of God in the temple in Ps 48.14 (I doubt he would use the term exactly, but in striving to explain the importance of the temple and the strangeness of some Hebrew grammar in the Psalms, he arrived at this conclusion).
ReplyDeleteJesus "tabernacled" among us and spoke occasionally of the "temple" of his body, and I wonder if there is something to this—I could see, for example, the idea of Adam being linked to the tabernacle and Jesus in cleansing the tabernacle cleansing the sin of man.
Maybe it's the lack of sleep lately, but it seems like there's more than meets the eye here.