A Spring Day
.
by Tadhg
Lynch
It is a spring day in late
March or early April in Jerusalem. The year is
30 or 33 AD. The feast of Passover is just about
to begin. Our journey begins on the outskirts of
Jerusalem. We follow a small farmer as he leaves
his house. His steps will take him through the
city in an ever upward direction – to the temple
built on top of the plateau which is the highest
point in Jerusalem.
He has heard stories about how the temple mount
was called Mount Zion – where the Torah was
given to his people many long years ago. Other
friends have told him that it is instead Mount
Moriah – where his ancestor Abraham went to
sacrifice his son Isaac. He doesn’t know. By the
time he has finished the two mile journey from
his house to the temple mount, he will have
reached 2,300 feet about the level of the sea.
As he climbs through the narrow streets, his
mind is on the coming sacrifice. He walks,
recalling the law which Moses gave his people to
remember the Passover of their deliverance from
Egypt. He also thinks of the sacrifice God
commanded Abraham to make, and the miraculous
provision of a lamb for Abraham in the place of
his son Isaac. His thoughts now turn to his own
son.
The Cost of Redemption
Our farmer’s family have already left home. They
will travel more slowly through the city than he
will. His delay was the result of last minute
preparations for tying up the legs of the
unblemished lamb he had bought for their
sacrificial offering. Now he hastily carries the
lamb through the winding streets on his way up
to the temple for the ritual sacrifice.
As he walks past the market place where he
bought the lamb six days ago, his mind now
returns to the last scene he had observed there
- in the corner reserved for the buying and
selling of slaves. His rural synagogue had
recently purchased a slave – a relative of a
pious member of his town, unwittingly caught up
in debt caused by bad decisions at harvest time.
Our Jewish Farmer knew all about slavery. Much
of the Roman Republic were slaves. There were
just so many reasons for making slaves of
people. Slavery repaid debts, punished crimes,
repatriated prisoners of war and dealt with
child abandonment. And, from father to son, it
was passed down the generations of those it
entrapped.
Greeks, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Slavs,
Thracians, Gauls, Jews, Arabs and many others
were enslaved by the Romans. If a slave ran
away, he was liable to be crucified. His father
had told him of the 2,000 crucifixions and mass
enslavement of the town of Sepphoris when he was
young – caused by some ill-judged civil
disobedience. Yes slavery certainly existed in
our farmer’s Galilee and Judea. Small landowners
often owned a few slaves – men and women working
in the fields outside the houses of fellow
Israelites – foreigners – for a Jew could not
enslave one of his own. Some householders owned
a few slaves for domestic labour, gardening,
marketing, and service as financial agents. They
would not have been all that worse off than the
average tenant farmer – but without his rights
and certainly without his place in the
community. King Herod’s household had thousands
of slaves, labouring day in day out to build his
massive monuments and temples.
As he strides through the square, our farmer
begins to approach the outer court of the
temple. His city has swelled to about 5 times
its normal size for the celebration of the
annual feast of Passover. Three times a year, in
accordance with the levitical and deuteronomaic
command, the city performed a great collective
intake of breath – sucking in devout pilgrims,
agricultural labourers from the hinterland and
important guests. They came from Jericho, Tyre,
Caesarea Philippi and the Decapolis, Sepphoris
and those other newish Greek towns where people
still followed the law and returned every year
to Jerusalem to celebrate the great feast – as
well as every other kind of Jew from as far away
as Damascus and Alexandria.
People are everywhere. The market is a riot of
color and noise, every guesthouse is full,
everyone’s relatives have shown up to claim the
last bit of floor space. At the head of the
market, the farmer passes the place where the
elders of the town would normally sit, passing
judgement upon the smaller matters of the law
that affected the ups and downs of the life of
the people. Every commandment of the Torah, all
613 of them were weighed, counted and measured
here. Just up the steps and in the alcove of one
of the temple porticoes, the Sanhedrin would
meet to decide the weightier cases.
These leaders of the Jewish people; careerist
politicians, family aristocrats, lawyers, rabbis
and the community movement of the Pharisees
would meet here. Here there was order and peace,
here the life of his nation beat from the heart
of the temple through to its outer courts of
justice and down the great arteries of the
legal, social and community life of the Jews.
Here was where restitution, repayment and
rehabilitation commenced. Here was where the
great genius of the Jewish people was realised,
as custom, practice, history and theology
combined to seamlessly weave the distinctive
garb of identity that en-cloaked the nation. But
here was not where, 13 hours before, a man was
tried. There was no room for his trial or
sentence here in the law court, instead he was
condemned to death in a trial held only by
torchlight. Here was where justice, practice and
history were left, forgotten, as the priests and
jurors fled to the houses of their leaders in a
last ditch effort to save the life of the
nation.
On this Good Friday a man was sacrificed. For
the life of the nation, the life of a man was
offered. A just penalty was not given. A just
penalty punishes the wrongdoer. The sacrificed
man was undeserving of the penalty he suffered.
Perhaps his death would give life to the nation,
but it was against the law. The old covenant law
did not allow individuals to take on a personal
punishment like death as a way of making a
compensation for someone else. The life of the
nation would perhaps suffer under the boot of
the Romans, but surely the life of the man would
make no difference in the long-run.
Our farmer does not know this. He did not know
the man of Nazareth who so recently had climbed
those steps to preach about his own impending
death. He may have sensed the vague, repeated
stirrings of revolt. He may have had some
friends – who were tired of the Hasmonean policy
of complicity with the Romans – who wanted to
rise up and free Jerusalem, or doom the nation.
He does not realise, that as human and divine
meet here within the temple they are meeting
outside his town, on a tree, in the late
afternoon sun.
Our farmer has by now joined thousands of other
Jewish men in the court of the temple before the
holy place… He is probably a bit weary of the
hustle and bustle, but this is what this time of
year is all about – the chance to gather
together and be caught up once again into the
mystery and immense power of the communal
sacrifice that sets the Jews apart from the
nations all around them. That makes them who
they are. That makes him who he is – a Son of
Abraham. He passes through the columns – they
are massive. It would take three men with arms
outstretched to span the base of one. They mark
the edge of the temple court – it is heaving
with men and women – not from the Jewish race –
anxious to see what is going on inside. He walks
past signs in Greek and Latin warning gentiles
to go no further. They read: "No foreigner
is to enter within the balustrade and terrace
around the sanctuary. Whoever is caught will
have himself to blame for his death which
follows."
He pushes through the court of the Gentiles and
passes the low step marking the court of the
women and enters. The temple is remarkable –
there are no statues, no plants, no votive
offerings such as are seen in the “temples”
which are springing up all around Judea –
influenced by the recent craze for all things
Greek. The noise dims considerably. He crosses
the court of the women and begins to climb the
15 steps to the court of the Israelites – his
nation. He enters. Thousands of other Jewish men
are in the court of the temple, before the holy
place itself, the earthly throne room of God –
the silent, empty, mysterious room where God
dwells. Alone. He brings and ritually slaughters
his lamb. There is a special way to do it – and
one of the priests does it for him. While psalms
of praise and thanksgiving are sung by the choir
of Levites, the priest takes the blood of the
lamb in a basin and pours it out at the altar as
a way of offering the lamb to the almighty Lord
of the universe. The body of this lamb will
become the center of the family meal at the
feast which celebrates the Exodus, the
redemption of the people of Israel from the
bondage of Egypt.
At the very moment the Judean farmer is offering
his lamb, the Messiah dies on the cross and the
veil of the temple is torn in two. The inner
veil, the veil concealing God from man in the
holy of holies is now parted. The pathway to God
is open. Previously, God’s face had been
concealed, now God has removed the veil and
revealed himself in the crucified Jesus as the
one who loves to the point of death. His death
fulfils the ceremony of the Passover lamb and
begins the true redemption of the human race.
The pathway to God is open. We too now stand
there. We too see the Passover lamb stricken,
and slain. We too see the many men, bound
together in community from far and near across
the middle east 2000 years ago, chanting and
singing the psalms of praise, as Passover
sacrifices are offered continually on the alter.
But we are not of them. We are not their people.
We can have no share in the redemption and
forgiveness of the lamb in the temple offered
over and over and over again. This is not the
covenant in which we share. For now there is no
temple. For now, even the very foundation of the
temple is buried beneath layers of rock, ash,
debris and the ruin of two millennia of war and
life and death. There are no more sacrifices.
The blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a
heifer do not actually deal with sin – they
never really did. They were sketches which would
help men to understand what was to come and
accept it when it arrived. The era of the old
temple and its sacrifices is over. The reality
has now come, the crucified Jesus who reconciles
us all with the Father. Christ was the
substance, the reality. Christ’s death on the
cross was the true sacrifice for sins, the
offering for human sin that alone was truly
acceptable to God.
Our farmer leaves the temple and gathers his
children outside in the melee to leave on the
short journey back to his home. It is dark and
stormy, and a freak earthquake has shaken the
city. There is panic outside the temple and he
holds tight to his children. He will return
again – in a year’s time – to repeat his
sacrifice. Perhaps he will have to bring a
bigger lamb, because his family will grow next
year. He will live to see the hunting down of
the radical elements of a dangerous new sect,
proclaiming an idolatrous and blasphemous good
news about forgiveness of sins through a man. He
will live to see the destruction of the temple
and the beginning of the dispersion of his
people. His world will turn very dark, as he
thinks the meeting place for God and his people
has been destroyed.
He does not know that it has been destroyed
already, even as he has prayed this day. He does
not know that one has met and carried a cross
through his town. He does not know that the life
of God and man has met and carried the weight of
sin he brings every year to the temple and
nailed it through his hands to the wood of a
tree on a hill outside his town. He does
not know that the life of God and man has left
the body of the one called Jesus of Nazareth to
begin the triumph over sin, death and Satan
prophesied in the first book of his Torah.
He does not know that the enmity put between
you and the woman, and between your offspring
and her offspring is decided. He does not
know that the head is crushed, bruised a mortal
blow in the hanging of a human man and
God upon a tree and that the bruised heel is
struck the last time. He does not know, that the
life of God and man has met and will never be
the same again.
Tadhg Lynch
is a member of the Servants
of
the Word, a missionary brotherhood
of men living single for the Lord, and a
Mission Director for Kairos, an
international outreach to young people.
Tadhg is originally from Nazareth
Community, Dublin, Ireland.
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