Ps. 15 (Temple entry)

In the psalms, there is no greater human yearning than to experience Yhwh’s presence within the Temple. It is the absolute pinnacle, destination and fulfillment of all desire; for the psalmist, it is a torrent of desire. When the psalmist attempts to describe the experience of Yhwh within his Temple, his language tends to be the most poetical of all passages; it has to bend in order to give some sense of the reality of the Presence. Yhwh’s presence is experienced as one of wild and festive delight. It is prodigal, overflowing and partakes of the joyfully ‘useless’ quality of beauty and glory.

It is, also, tremendum—a terrible and terrifying beauty. Indeed, the first time that Israel, as a people, approach Yhwh it is at Sinai. And they cower in fear at his presence. They tell Moses to experience Yhwh in their stead. Yhwh’s presence is not tame or pretty. It is tremendous. And it judges. That which is impure and that which is not holy, is not permitted and, more importantly, is potentially destroyed in the Presence. This experience can be traced down through every prophet who is brought into Yhwh’s presence, from Ezekiel to Isaiah.

The Presence is, then, blessing and threat. It is a blessing to those who are conformed to its own holiness and a threat to those who are not.

This is precisely why the pilgrim, standing at the threshold of the Temple, poses a question to Yhwh about who is worthy to enter into his Temple. The question itself embodies the psalmist’s understanding that the Presence is both tremendum and the ‘fulfilment of all desire’, both threat and blessing. In other words, the Presence itself is what calls forth this question; in a way, the Presence asks the question before the psalmist does. This fact leads to a final consideration before we look more closely at the psalm itself.

The Presence—the Glory of Yhwh—because it is both threat and blessing, is a consuming beauty. What I mean is that, as the fulfillment of all desire, as that which the psalmist desires more than anything, and, at the same time, that which utterly judges the psalmist, the Presence is not something the psalmist experiences as an object. Rather, and more aptly described, it is the Face. It is the Lord over all who stand in its presence. Once in the Presence, one is immediately made aware that one is surrounded, hemmed in, and always-already seen; one cannot hide from this beauty. It creates a world around the pilgrim.

 

With all of this in mind, the question the pilgrim poses to Yhwh and Yhwh's response takes on a much greater depth. The psalmist essentially asks, "Who is worthy to see you?" Yhwh responds that the one who is worthy to look upon him must himself look and act like this. We should note here that what Yhwh describes is not an act of cultic purification; there are admonishments about ritual purity here. Those requirements, I believe, are simply assumed by the pilgrim. What Yhwh does require is more closely aligned to the requirements, for example, in the Decalogue—the realm of human freedom that either responds to Yhwh or not. And, as with the Decalogue, many of these requirements are those that cannot be enforced by the community (how would the community ever know if you ‘coveted your neighbors wife’?). Instead, it requires an interior policing of the individual; a personal adherence to the Torah of Yhwh. What we witness here is that the Presence consumes and has authority over even this interior realm. To be aspire to be in the Presence, one must come to grips with the fact that the Presence searches out the heart, the hidden recesses of each person, and it weighs that person’s interior adherence to the Torah.

More deeply still is this: the pilgrim's entire life (his cultic to his personal, interior life), therefore, must mimic the Presence itself. His life is, itself, a theophany of the theophany he is eagerly wanting to see.  And here we come to the truly profound realization that it is in these commands that man is most fully understood as the ‘image of God’, and why man in particular is the greatest theophany of God in so far as his interior life is lived in obedience to Yhwh’s Torah. Man, in his obedience to Torah, reveals Yhwh to a degree that no other creature can. Man’s obedience is, for this reason, a revelation of the ‘glory of Yhwh’, a theophany. The pilgrim that does this spreads the Temple-life across creation, bringing Yhwh’s holiness that is experienced in the Temple into the community and creation as a whole. That is why life-and-liturgy  can be so intimately wed together.

This is, in fact, what Adam and Eve were created to do. Eden, while closely mimicking the Temple and, in particular, the holy-of-holies, and while Adam and Eve are, in some sense, understood as the regal and priestly authority in Eden—Eden is not itself the Temple. What we see is that Adam and Eve were created in order to spread the holiness of Yhwh throughout all of creation, through their ‘images’. Had that occurred, creation would have been the Temple without the need for Temple in Jerusalem. And, it is this vision, precisely that concludes Scripture in Revelation when the Bride descends upon the earth. At that time, there will be no Temple or sun, because the Lamb will be the light—all of creation will, at that point, become the Temple and holy-of-holies.

Ps. 14, Part 2, conclusion

All of that said, why is this ‘third option’ appear to be a valid choice? Why is earth allowed to at least appear to be self-sufficient? In asking this we should glimpse that the heart of these fools is the heart of Adam. When he succumbed to the lie of the Tempter, he was not engaging in idolatry; he was not explicitly acting in rebellion against Yhwh. He was, instead, choosing himself. For the Scripture writers, it this primal choice that stands at the heart of every other choice against Yhwh. And, in this choice, he became, at least for a time, the atheistic fool of Psalm 14. What we see then is that creation itself allows for this ‘space’ to be created, where man can inhabit the lie that he is his own measure. It is not immediately met with rectifying justice. In Psalm 14, we see that this ‘space’ can actually persist for quite some time. Long enough in fact that those who should possess the ‘fortunes’ of the world have actually had those fortunes consumed by the wicked. In other words, things can become completely inverted, with the fools on top and the wise on the bottom, much like the exodus and much like the various captivities.

 It is because this inversion is possible that the psalmist, towards the end, looks forward to the time when heaven will again assert itself and reorder everything. When the ‘captivity’ of the righteous will end and their fortunes be restored. When appearance and reality will once again coincide (in many ways what Adam accomplished was the severing of appearance and reality). Importantly, however, even within this inversion, Yhwh tends to maintain a realm where appearance and reality, where earth and heaven, still coincide—and he does so on Zion and in the Temple. It is there where earth and heaven meet. It is there where Yhwh, the king of heaven, dwells. And this is why, at least in part, the psalmist sees deliverance coming ‘from Zion’. Against all of the folly of the ‘sons of men’, who think that the earth has either been abandoned or severed from heaven, there remains a place that Yhwh claimed particularly for himself. And throughout the prophets, it this place that becomes ‘ground zero’ for his redemption. Constantly, Zion is understood as the place from which ‘living water’ will flow and cover the earth in life-abounding prodigality. The beginning of the end of exile will start in Zion.

Notably, this is why, when Jesus is crucified, ‘blood and water’ flow from his side. Jesus, as the new Temple, became that source of sacrificial blood and cleansing water that was to issue from the Temple at the end of time.