Ps 114 (The Temple, the People, and the Incarnation)

The psalmist of psalm 48 asks those with him to look at the Temple, to lovingly examine its every detail, and to understand that when one gazes at the Temple in this manner one is “seeing Yhwh”. For him, it is not that the Temple represents Yhwh or that the Temple is a metaphor for Yhwh and his glory. Instead, it is that when one looks at the Temple one is looking at Yhwh. He has become incarnate in some fashion, truly, within the stones and structure of the Temple. It is a deeply significant point. The Presence has stitched itself into the stones.

In this psalm we see something similar but now the psalmist sees Yhwh as stitched into Israel. Instead of the Temple or the sanctuary, the people themselves have, Moses-like, become irradiated with Yhwh’s glory to such an extent that they partake in his staggering and tremendous authority. The cosmos looks upon them the same way the psalmist of Psalm 48 directs us to look at the Temple—it sees Yhwh-in-Israel.

Israel and the Temple—they are rungs on the ladder toward Incarnation, when the Word becomes flesh. In Jesus we are given the “point of the story”. The Temple could have the Presence taken from it. The People could be in danger as well. As much as Yhwh identified with either the Temple or the People, they could, for that very reason, also become objects of a curse, of abandonment. That does not mean that Yhwh’s covenant with them was abrogated or done away with—they were under a curse precisely because that is what the covenant calls for. What it does mean, though, is that they were never perfect vessels because they did not maintain the Presence in perpetuity. In Jesus, though, we see a life that maintains the Presence to the end. He becomes the perfect Israel (as in this psalm) and the perfect Temple (as in Psalm 48). And, because he does so he becomes the one into whom the Cosmos is baptized. The Cosmos and the Bride now have a vessel into which they can be grafted that will be for them what we see in this psalm—a deified humanity that is a perfect image of God to the Cosmos. God became man, so that man might become God. And, in so far as the Cosmos and the Bride live “in Christ”, they also die, not into Death, but “into Christ”. But that is for another reflection. The point here is that in Christ we see the fulfilment of this Psalm—the perfect and perpetual deified humanity. Jesus is the Chariot Throne. He is the “son called out of Egypt” called to “the sanctuary” and called to his Father’s “royal dominion”. That is what the gospels, Paul and Revelation all describe. And in Acts (and Paul) we see what it is like for this ‘new Israel’ to be baptized into this Presence Throne—it is to become a “royal priesthood”.