Biblical worship

The Character of Jewish Feasts in Biblical Worship

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The three major Jewish feasts are associated with three annual harvests; historically each involved the return of a portion of the harvest to the Lord. These offerings symbolized the reasons for the feast itself: God is the source of the fruits of the earth; God’s gifts of produce are for the sustenance and comfort of the people; and because God gives freely, the worshipers must do the same, sharing their benefits with the needy.

The three principal Jewish feasts (Passover, Pentecost, and Booths) had an agricultural origin, and their meaning as such did not differ greatly from the meaning of “feast” as just described. The three feasts were connected with the most important harvests in the three productive seasons of the year, and they expressed the deep joy of a people that was led and nourished by its God. Passover celebrated the barley harvest in the spring, Pentecost the wheat harvest in the summer, and Booths the fruit harvest in the fall. In keeping with an almost universally known and attested religious custom, the heart of each feast consisted in the offering of part of the harvest to the divinity. The book of Deuteronomy makes explicit reference to this practice in the cases of Pentecost and Booths, two feasts that, unlike Passover, which has been reread and historicized to a greater degree, allow us to glimpse their original agricultural basis:

Celebrate the Feast of Weeks [Pentecost] to the Lord your God by giving a freewill offering in proportion to the blessings the Lord your God has given you.… Celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress.… No man should appear before the Lord empty-handed: Each of you must bring a gift in proportion to the way the Lord your God has blessed you. (Deut. 16:10, 13, 16–17)

What is the meaning of such an offering, which is both the expression and the basis of feasts and their joy? To offer God the produce of the earth is not an act of self-deprivation (renouncing something in order to give it to God) but is an act of self-definition and acknowledgment that the fruits of the earth belong to the Lord and that human beings may use them only as his beneficiaries. This simple action sums up in a symbolic way three basic concepts and attitudes: (1) the produce gathered belongs to God, who is its master and owner; (2) the produce is given as a gift to meet the needs of and to comfort humans; and (3) the fruits of the earth are to be enjoyed not according to the logic of possession and hoarding but according to the divine intention that brings them into existence.

When Israel offered to the Lord part of its harvests in the three important seasons of the year, it was reaffirming this pattern of conviction and choice. Israel professed its belief that the “bread” and “wine” of the Promised Land were not the result of the people’s efforts or of magical practices, but were due to the creative goodwill of God, and Israel renewed its commitment to share these things with others. This accounts for the biblical insistence that on these festival days no one should be in want but all should have and fully enjoy: “Be joyful at your Feast—you, your sons and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, and the Levites, the aliens, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns” (Deut. 16:14). This emphasis on feeding the poor reflects a theological rather than a sociological concern: God intends the fruits of the earth for the enjoyment of all; if the poor, as well as the rich, enjoy them, God’s reign is being brought to pass, and his will is being fulfilled in a concrete way.

Sharing the fruits of the earth is not simply an imperative of social ethics, but is the very heart of the theological directive: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5); here, to “love the Lord” means to obey his will by accepting and doing it within history.

The sacrifice of animals, which had a privileged place in the worship offered in the Jerusalem temple, had at bottom the same twofold meaning as the offering of firstfruits: it was an acknowledgment of God’s lordship over the animal world and a readiness to take nourishment from that world in a spirit of sharing and not of hoarding, that is, as gifts intended for all and not as a privilege of a few.

Israel derived the three agricultural feasts from the surrounding Semitic world. However, it did not make them its own in a purely passive way; it turned them into original creations by enriching them with its own specific spiritual outlook. The name usually given to this process of reinterpretation is “historicization.” By this is meant that the focus of the feast was shifted from events of the natural world to special historical events: the deliverance from Egypt in the Feast of Passover, the gift of the Torah in the Feast of Pentecost, and the enjoyment of the Torah’s fruits in the Feast of Booths.

It is true that Israel “historicized” the agricultural feasts. It is necessary, however, to understand this process correctly: the process took the form not of contrasting the new with the old or ignoring the old, but of further explaining the original meaning and reaching down to its root.

The central event of Jewish history is the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, a single action with three stages: departure from Egypt, the gift of the Torah (or covenant), and entrance into the Promised Land. Israel was liberated from slavery and brought into the “good and spacious land” of Canaan, but the entrance was neither automatic nor taken for granted, for between departure and entrance was Mount Sinai, the place of the covenant where the Torah was offered and accepted. Here is the epicenter and secret of all Jewish history and Jewish originality: the discovery that the land, their own land, would produce “milk and honey” in abundance (Exod. 3:8, 17; Num. 13:27; Deut. 6:3; 11:9), not spontaneously, however, but only if and to the extent that Israel would be faithful to the covenant. This connection between the fertility of the soil and obedience to the Torah is clearly expressed in Leviticus 26:3–6, which is bewildering because the fruits of which it speaks are not the fruits of some special world but the normal production of the trees of any part of our world. Yet if these fruits are truly to bring joy to all and become a sign of communion instead of destruction, a precise, divine condition must be met: they must be cultivated and eaten according to the logic of the covenant, that is, Jews must acknowledge them to be gifts and must consent to their universal destination.

This “historicity” is peculiar to the Jewish situation, but clearly, it does not contradict the meaning of “feast”; rather, it further clarifies that meaning by getting to the root of one of its fundamental aspects. When early human beings offered God part of their seasonal produce, they were recognizing his fatherhood and accepting the produce as his gift. Israel accepted this logic but had a better grasp of its dynamic and its requirement. It realized that if the fruits of the earth are truly to be a gift and a blessing, it is not enough simply to accept them; rather they must be shared through a way of life-based on justice and responsibility. Justice and the fruitfulness of the land are partners in an “indissoluble marriage” in which the two shed light on one another. Israel’s originality lies in its having transcended a purely “natural” view of nature and having connected the abundance of the land’s fruits with its own free choices.

The Purpose of Jewish Feasts in Biblical Worship

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A feast celebrates the positive character of existence. In the face of evil and pain, feasts proclaim the goodness of creation and the freedom to enjoy the world because God made it.

A feast is a statement that the world is a good place because human beings can enjoy it and because God made it. Unwittingly, and prior to any reflection on the point, the celebrants of a feast relate their activity to independent but interrelated poles: human beings, the world, and God — human beings as subjects who are good, the world as an object that is good, and the divinity as the foundation of the two goodnesses. A feast brings out the fact that the world is good and human beings can dwell in it as their native place because it is willed by and founded on the sacred. Here is the heart and secret of every feast; in the celebration of a feast, we reappropriate, beyond and despite appearance, the positive character of existence as a space filled with fruition and making.

Feasts As Rejection of the Negative

As an interpretation of meaning, a feast can be seen as having three moments or phases. First, it is a rejection of negativity and death. The lives of individuals and groups are marked by pain and privation, poverty and injustices, violence and absurdity. Instead of displaying the original harmony, life seems to be under a constant threat that frustrates all efforts and undertakings. Instead of being drawn by a beneficent telos (purpose), it seems driven by a maleficent demon that has donned the hands and eyes of thanatos, or death. A feast represents a suspension of this entire order of things, a profession of faith that this world, in its present form, is not the true world (kosmos) but is negation (chaos) or counterfeit; it is not a home for human beings but an unrewarding wilderness. A feast challenges the primacy of evil and its claim to be ultimate reality; it is a rebellion against evil’s perverse power and its claim to have the final say; it is a sign—that turns into a certainty—that evil can be dethroned and overcome. Therefore feasts are the greatest wealth of a people, especially the poorest among them, for feasts with their myths and rites preserve in concentrated form the most fruitful seeds of hope and struggle that human history contains. As long as people are able to celebrate feasts, they will also be capable of life and commitment.

Feasts As Rejoicing and Sharing

Second, a feast asserts the quality of life and defines its positive side. But what is this “quality” that a feast expresses, not conceptually but in a concrete, corporeal way? Many terms are used to describe this quality, but one seems especially important: you. “You shall rejoice in your feast” (Deut. 16:14 NASB). But the rejoicing here is something other than what is usually understood by the term in our affluent societies. The passage in Deuteronomy continues: “ … you and your son and your daughter and your male and female servants and the Levite and the stranger and the orphan and the widow who are in your towns.” Rabbi Elie Munk comments on this passage as follows:

People should eat meat and drink wine because it is these things, especially that contribute to their gladness. But when we eat and drink, it is our duty to provide the necessities for the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan, that is, for all who are in need. Those who double-lock their doors and eat only with their own families, without helping the unfortunate, will not experience the joy of the mitzvah but “only the satisfaction is given by their meal.” This is why the prophet Hosea [Hos. 9:4 rsv] says: “They shall not please him with their sacrifices. Their bread shall be like mourners’ bread; all who eat of it shall be defiled; for their bread shall be for their hunger only.” (E. Munk, Le monde des prières [1970], 295)

This passage summarizes the two basic aspects of the joy a feast proclaims and bestows: the enjoyment of things (“eating and drinking”) and fraternal sharing (“providing the necessities for the foreigner”). Instead of understanding joy in a purely psychological or pseudospiritual way, a feast emphasizes its corporeal element and its necessary connection with the fruits of the earth; instead of making this joy something self-centered, a feast asserts its comprehensive and nonexclusive character. True joy is born of two encounters: with the fruits of the earth and with our brothers and sisters. Where one of these two is missing, a feast changes from being an end to being a means; it ceases to be an expression of life and becomes a means of obtaining satisfaction. The joy proper to feast is, in reality, the plenitude of being that is in harmony with the things of this world and with this world’s inhabitants; it is the fruit produced by a recovered Eden, in which the original Adam and Eve, representatives of men and women of every age, live reconciled with each other, with the garden, and with God.

Feasts As Affirmation of a Higher Order

The third and most important aspect of a feast is that it is an assertion of that which is the ontological foundation of the goodness and meaning of the human person. Are the rebellion against the power of evil and the proclamation of the victory of the positive over the negative simply an expression of impotent and deceptive desire, or are they an echo of the truth that conquers falsehood and triumphs over self-deception? A feast reveals its full depth when understood as the assertion of the second alternative: human life has meaning, beyond all its historical failures and despite all its privations, not because it is subjectively given meaning by each individual, but because it is objectively founded by and on the sacred.

A feast thus asserts the existence of meaning and at the same time sets the conditions for the attainment of this meaning, meaning that grows and flourishes because it is located within a different horizon—the horizon of the divine, the sacred—which transcends that of the profane. By means of its mythical narratives and re-actualizing rites, a feast calls to mind and makes present again this foundational root; by returning to this root, human behavior overcomes fragmentation, conquering chaos and recovering kosmos, that is, order, strength, motivation, the human ideal. A feast indeed abolishes the established order (we need think only of the violations of standard norms that are to be seen in every feast), but it does so not for the sake of libertinism and chaos but in obedience to a higher order that is closer and more faithful to the divine intention. A feast overturns the world and re-creates it according to the divine model.

Biblical Worship As Dramatic Re-Presentation

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Recent studies of the history of Israel’s religion have demonstrated convincingly that the formative events of Israel’s faith were dramatically acted out in worship. In fact, some of the Old Testament narratives have reached their present form as a result of the historicizing of cultic dramatic re-presentation.

The Exodus Narrative

The Exodus narrative in Exodus 1–19 is a reclothed festal liturgy from which something of the ritual may be recovered. In Exodus 12:42, the “watch night” drama appears, a re-creating and a re-presenting of the drama in which the Hebrews anxiously awaited the intervention of Yahweh in Egypt, a repeated cultic drama that bridged the gap of space and time and reestablished the saving relationship for each generation with Yahweh. In close connection is Exodus 12, the instructions for the Passover feast, said to be observed as “a memorial to all generations.” The re-creation of the watch night, the blood on the doorposts and the lintel, the eating of unleavened bread and bitter herbs—these acts were re-created annually and physically in active worship. For Israel, no sterile symbolism is present, no more lifeless memory; by re-creating history through dramatic presentation, Israel re-presented her saving history, actualized her salvation, renewed her relationship to her God. Thus, historical recital has given way to historical re-creation.

Narratives of Joshua

The narratives of Joshua 2–6 are rehistoricized festal liturgies from the Gilgal cult. At Gilgal, through dramatic presentation, the crossing of the Jordan was re-created, and the march around the ruins of Jericho reenacted, not in mere historical memory, but in contemporary actualization. The close connection of dramatic re-presentation with liturgical re-presentation as noted earlier is clearly evidenced in these passages from Joshua. Thus, the Gilgal cult, annually or periodically, re-presented the conquest story, dramatizing its history and making it sacramental.

The Jerusalem Worship Community

The greatest example of re-presentation of dramatic form is the Jerusalem worship community. Much has been written about the royal ritual in Jerusalem, with its interlocked themes of David and Zion. Despite those who find minimal cultic influence, one has little basis for doubting that the royal psalms have their setting in a royal Zion festival during which those events surrounding the Davidic dynasty were dramatically enacted at Jerusalem. The Psalms speak of the “night watch” at Gihon, of the procession through the streets of Jerusalem which preceded the entrance of the ark into the temple, and finally of the reactualization of the Davidic king as Yahweh’s servant. The Psalms are primary testimony to historical re-presentation by dramatic actualization.

The Lord’s Supper As Sacred Drama

Precisely at this point Christian worship has departed from the pattern of the Israelite cult, with particular reference to the Lord’s Supper. If one will view the history of the Lord’s Supper one will find few periods when the real drama of the Lord’s Supper has been preserved. The theology of the Lord’s Supper has moved from the extreme of the Roman church, with its doctrine of transubstantiation, to the barren symbolism of nonliturgical congregations. Both positions are in error. If Old Testament worship is correctly viewed, then an idea of the actual re-creation of the body and blood of our Lord in the Mass is incorrect. The suffering and death of Jesus were once-for-all, nonrepeatable, unique events in history; in no sense can the event be literally and physically re-created in worship. But on the other hand, the elements of the Lord’s Supper transcend barren symbolism. In the celebration of the Lord’s Supper something happens, not with the elements themselves, but in a dramatic re-presentation of history. To borrow the pattern of the Deuteronomic preachers, “it was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today” (Deut. 5:3). The Lord’s Supper is sacred art, a drama that manifests reality; it allows the worshiper to span the time and space gap of history and stand again with those who first experienced our Lord’s death. In the mystery of dramatic presentation, the worshiper reenters original history; it is not a festal myth, but an actualization. “This is my body, broken for you,” a brokenness that continues over and over again, a presentness of contemporary encounter. Thus, as one partakes of the elements, one becomes part of the original event, which was accomplished for our salvation.

The demand is to recover the true meaning of the Lord’s Supper in Christian worship, a meaning that is patterned from Israelite worship with its motif of dramatic re-presentation. If the study of Israelite worship is taken seriously, the Lord’s Supper must be rescued from its place as addendum in many congregations and restored to the central place of worship. The Lord’s Supper is the reenactment of the Christian Exodus event, the historical beginning, which continues to give the church life. Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:24). Yet to remember is not an intellectual discipline; “to re-member” is to re-create, “to re-member” is to re-present, “to re-member” is to respond. In Deuteronomy 16:3, the Feast of the Passover is said to be observed, “so that all the days of your life you may remember the time of your departure from Egypt.” Here is the annual re-presentation of history. Thus, “Do this in remembrance of me” must mean, “so that you may participate in the sufferings and death of our Lord and respond to them.” For as Israel was redeemed from Egyptian bondage in the Exodus and annually actualized that redemption in the cult, the Christian church finds itself released from a similar bondage and must actualize that redemption by dramatic re-presentation. The Lord’s Supper is truly sacramental in that by participating in the drama of our redemption, God himself reestablishes, maintains, and renews his relationship with us and we respond in obedience.

Biblical Worship and Historical Recital

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The recitation of the history of Yahweh’s redemptive acts forms the basis for creed, liturgy, and preaching in the Old Testament. The Christian church took up the format of historical recital in its hymnic and creedal affirmation of God’s actions in Christ.

Israel’s Creedal Statements

Gerhard von Rad has isolated several creedal statements in the Old Testament which, he has argued, stand at the level of primary tradition. Among these confessions is the Deuteronomy passage:

My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Deut. 26:5–9)

For this writer the creedal character of these verses cannot be denied. The emphasis of these creedal statements is historical: Egyptian bondage, salvation from that bondage by Yahweh, the occupation of the land. Moreover, one cannot escape the fact that these affirmations are in plural address—“we” were in Egyptian bondage, “we” were redeemed by Yahweh, “we” were given this fertile land. Each time this affirmation was recited, the worshiper bridged the time and space gap and became identified with that never-to-be-repeated salvation: he or she actualized, contemporized, re-presented history.

Another example of historical recitation is found in the antiphonal liturgies in Joshua 4:6–7 and 24:14–28. Although the liturgical form has been clouded by the context of historical narration, the liturgy may be easily reconstructed:

The priest:     What do these stones mean?
The congregation:     They mean that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of Yahweh; when it passed over the Jordan, the waters were cut off.
The priest:     So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.

Liturgical Affirmation of Yahweh’s Kingship

H. J. Kraus has suggested that these liturgical foundations emanated from Gilgal, a center of worship that carefully preserved the Jordan crossing and the conquest traditions. In these liturgies the reader is in touch with historical recital of the re-creation of history, a means of allowing the existential involvement of later generations in those acts of Yahweh that effected salvation and that continue to effect salvation.

Or one may cite a central thrust of the Jerusalem worship community, namely the liturgical affirmation of the Psalter—Yahweh has become/is king. Despite the discussion this affirmation has evoked, no thought of a dying-rising Yahweh is intended; nor was the kingship of Yahweh predicated in an annual cultic renewal ceremony. Nevertheless, in the Jerusalem temple, this liturgical affirmation brought the worshiper face to face with the reality of Yahweh’s kingship, not a theological abstraction, but an experiential and existential encounter that demanded a response. Indeed, one may posit that just such a worship encounter underlies the temple sequence in Isaiah 6, an encounter with the cultic reaffirmation of Yahweh’s kingship, which redirected the prophet’s life. Thus, in some sense, in the Jerusalem worship community, Yahweh’s kingship was reactivated in worship, and he “became king” for those who entered into the experience. Cultic recital provokes existential identification.

Historical Recitation in Preaching

To be sure, Israel’s worship was not limited to creedal and liturgical confessions—a flexibility developed within the cult, as witnessed by the book of Deuteronomy. In fact, Deuteronomy is a gigantic cultic actualization. Deuteronomy 5:3 reads: “It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, all of us who are alive here today.” This passage perhaps originated between the eighth and the sixth centuries, a time far distant from the Sinai event; nevertheless, centuries later Israel could corporately and culticly confess that the present generation stood anew at the foot of the holy mountain. Moreover, historical recitation and re-presentation give way to preaching, a fact that explains Deuteronomy’s homiletic or parenetic (that is, preaching) character. The creed is expanded into an injunction and a call for obedience as each generation is recalled to affirm Israel’s ancient faith, to bridge the time and space gap, to participate existentially and creatively with those events that culminated in the covenant. Thus, Deuteronomy, with its pattern of creedal recitation and homiletic expansion, sets the pattern for Christian preaching.

Historical Recitation in Christian Hymn and Creed

These examples of Israelite historical recitation illustrate the means by which Israel sought to re-create her history by liturgical re-presentation. Small wonder that the early church also presented its message by historical re-presentation. The early Christian hymns and creeds contained in the Pauline corpus (1 Cor. 15:3–7; Phil. 2:6–11) are harmonious with the Israelite pattern of historical recitation and re-presentation, for their emphases are on the historical, concrete memories of our Lord’s life and death. Even more illustrative is the creed in 1 Timothy 3:16: He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up into glory.

The death and resurrection of our Lord was a once-for-all, unique, unrepeatable historical event, and the early church, following the pattern of its spiritual ancestor, constructed similar historical recitations. In worship they stood again at the foot of the cross, by which they bridged the time and space gap, by which the Christ event continued in contemporaneity through cultic re-presentation.

And the church continued to formulate creeds. To be sure, such classic creeds as the so-called Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed were formulated to preserve dogmatic integrity; nevertheless, the basic character of these creeds is rightly historical. Of course, Israel would not have opened her creeds with the theological abstraction of God’s “almightiness,” nor would she have spoken of the outset of creation. Nevertheless, when the Apostles’ Creed begins the article of Jesus Christ, the Hebraic cultic pattern is maintained: “born of the virgin Mary,” “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” “died, was buried, raised on the third day.” To give audible expression to the Apostles’ Creed in worship is not an intellectual exercise in dogmatic assertion; in this audible expression something should happen—the worshiper should encounter anew the historical elements of our faith, and in some sense, experience the sacramental contemporaneity of our Lord with the worshiper. If one is to take the Israelite worship community seriously, then one is confronted with the demand to reactivate the purpose of re-presentation by historical recital, to view creedal affirmations not as tests of theological soundness, but as a means of existential identification with the past, as a means of bridging the time and space gap, as a means of re-creating the original event and existentially participating in those events that have accomplished our salvation.

Undoubtedly, many Protestant evangelicals have eschewed creedal statements primarily because the basic purpose has been lost; nevertheless, from the example of Israel’s worship community, such creedal re-presentations should be restored to Christian worship in order that the church may possess a more vital sense of its history, that it may become more aware of its corporate relationship with the church of all ages, and that it may participate in God’s saving act in Jesus Christ and recognize the demands that event makes on the individual. The loss of historical identification undercuts the dynamism of the Christian faith; Israel’s cultic pattern has pointed the way to a recovery of that historical involvement in Christian worship.

Holy Places, Holy People in Biblical Worship

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Although holiness belongs to God, it may be imparted to objects, or even to people, which become the bearers of the holy.

The Holy Place

The men and women who first received the biblical revelation were acutely conscious of the ways ordinary things could take on an extraordinary, numinous quality as bearers of the sacred. The concept of the sanctuary, or holy place, comes readily to mind. The Old Testament records many occasions when the fathers of Israel worshiped at holy places. Some of these places were already sacred sites for the Canaanites, but they became Israelite sanctuaries as the result of a theophany of Yahweh God. When he appeared to one of the fathers to give or reaffirm the promise of the land, the patriarch would mark the site by erecting some holy object such as an altar or a memorial stone.

Altars. At Shechem Abraham “built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him” (Gen. 12:7). This location continued to be a holy place where Joshua later led the people in the renewal of the covenant with the Lord, erecting a stone as a memorial to this event (Josh. 24:1–8). Thus, the Israelite sanctuary was “a token of the covenant and a guarantee of its blessing” (Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture, 2nd ed. [1959], Vols. III–IV, p. 214). A classic expression of the significance of the holy place occurs in the account of Jacob’s dream at Bethel, in which he sees a ladder reaching to heaven on which messengers of God are descending and ascending; the Lord appears and pronounces his promise of blessing, land, and descendants. Awakening, Jacob exclaims, trembling, “Surely the Lord is in this place.… This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:16–17). Before leaving, Jacob sets up a sacred pillar, the stone on which he had been sleeping, and anoints it as a bearer of the holy, “God’s house” (Gen. 28:10–22). The sanctuary is a place where earth and heaven meet, where “angels ascend and descend”; for this reason, ancient temples were usually erected on hills or, in flat country, on artificial elevations. Ascending Zion in pilgrimage, the later Israelite worshiper cries, “I lift up my eyes to you, to you whose throne is in heaven” (Ps. 123:1). The sanctuary is a place bearing a numinous aspect where the divine can break through into the ordinary, where man can sense the presence of the holy and communicate with him.

Mount Sinai. The archetype of the holy place in the biblical narrative is the desert sanctuary of Sinai. Here, the Lord appeared to his people in full and fearful theophany, in a presence of such intensity that only the specially consecrated could approach the mountain. After the Lord had set forth the stipulations of the Book of the Covenant (Exod. 20–23), Moses and the priests and elders of Israel went up the mountain to meet with Yahweh and to eat the covenant meal; there, in a further manifestation of the numinous, they “saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself” (Exod. 24:10).

Ark and Tabernacle. These numinous aspects of the Sinai sanctuary were transferred to the ark of the covenant, where Yahweh was “enthroned between the cherubim” (Pss. 80:1; 99:1), and to the tent of meeting, as the place where Moses “entered the Lord’s presence to speak with him” (Exod. 34:34). Not only the sanctuary structure with its altar, but all its furnishings and utensils, as well as the offerings presented there, were consecrated as “holy,” set apart for the exclusive use and service of the Lord.

The Temple on Zion. Before Israel’s entrance into Canaan, Moses spoke of “the place the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes to put his Name there for his dwelling” (Deut. 12:5). This unnamed place turned out to be Jerusalem and Mount Zion, which David captured as a center for Israel’s worship (2 Sam. 5:7). Zion had long been a Jebusite holy place, the “Salem” where Abraham had paid a tithe to Melchizedek, the king and “priest of God Most High” or ’El ‘elyon (Gen. 14:18–20). But when David transferred the ark to Zion and when Solomon’s temple assumed the role of the tabernacle, the sanctuary on Zion became, in effect, a continuation of Sinai, where the Lord “appeared” in theophanic majesty in the worship of Israel. Several of the psalms celebrate the numinous appearance of the Lord in his temple or in Zion with imagery that reminds us of the giving of the covenant on Mount Sinai (Ps. 50:1–6). Exactly how the Lord “appeared” in the worship of the temple is not clear, but there are indications in the Psalms that the liturgical recitation of the covenant Law, associated with a procession of the ark of the covenant, was a high moment when worshipers might experience the Lord’s presence in an especially compelling way.

“Holiness adorns your house,” sang the Israelite worshiper (Ps. 93:5). Israel’s theologians understood, of course, that the sanctuary was inadequate as a bearer of the sacred. “But will God really dwell on earth?” asked Solomon. “The heavens, even the highest heaven cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27; cf. Isa. 66:1). In the New Testament we meet with the concept of the heavenly sanctuary, of which the earthly one is but a copy (Heb. 8–9; cf. 2 Cor. 5:1; Rev. 11:19). No human edifice can convey the fullness of the presence of the holy. As Jesus explained to the Samaritan woman, the deepest and most authentic worship of the Father could occur “neither on this mountain [Gerizim] nor in Jerusalem” (John 4:21). Although Christ spoke of Jerusalem as “the city of the Great King” (Matt. 5:35), he foretold the impending desecration and violent destruction of its sanctuary (Matt. 24:2), a judgment on a religious establishment that had violated the Lord’s covenant.

Jesus and the Holy Place. Nevertheless, Jesus understood and accepted the concept of the holy place in its deepest sense. He questioned the focus of the Pharisees, who swore by the gold of the temple or by the offering on the altar—in other words, by the products and symbols of man’s religious commitment. To the contrary, said Jesus, it is the temple that sanctifies the gold and the altar that sanctifies the offering (Matt. 23:16–19). Jesus’ language, incomprehensible as it may seem to us, was not incomprehensible to the early church, which continued to respect those places where God had manifested his presence in a numinous experience. Thus Peter speaks of that time when the apostles were with Christ “on the holy mountain,” by which he meant not Sinai or Zion but the Mount of Transfiguration (2 Pet. 1:16–18). The proliferation of holy shrines in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, however fanciful it may seem in Protestant perspective, is a witness to the persistence of this biblical concept.

The Numinous Aspect of the Church

When we appreciate the importance of the sanctuary in biblical worship, we can understand why the New Testament authors draw upon the imagery of Jerusalem and its temple to convey the significance of the church. Addressing Christian believers as a body, the apostle Paul asks, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple” (1 Cor. 3:16–17). Again he declares, “we are the temple of the living God” (2 Cor. 6:16). (In both these passages he uses the plural form, speaking not to individuals but to the church collectively.) As a temple, the church of Jesus Christ is “a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Eph. 2:22). These are not simply moralistic expressions; they point to a reality that transcends the idea of the church as a mere human association.

John the Revelator most fully develops the picture of the church as “the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:2). As the bride of the Lamb, the new sanctuary displaces the harlot “Babylon,” the old temple, and its religious establishment. The appearance of the new holy place brings a renewal of the covenant, in the declaration that “the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people” (Rev. 21:3), words that echo the covenant formula of the Israelite prophets. The sanctuary is a picture of the covenant God living among his own, enthroned on the praises of his people (Ps. 22:3). As John takes the concept further, we are brought face to face with the numinous brilliance of the Holy City (Rev. 21:10–11), “for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp” (Rev. 21:23). So overwhelmed is John by the vision that his description strains at the limitations of language. The Holy City is a temple yet not a temple: “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22). There is a numinous, awesome aspect to the church as a bearer of the holy, a vehicle through which we may encounter the fearful presence of the King of kings.

Holy People

The mortal who would trespass into the territory of the sacred runs the risk of wrathful outburst and sudden destruction. It is paradoxical, then, that human beings can serve as bearers of the holy, vehicles through whom the numinous makes its presence felt. Study of the history of religions brings to light many instances of “holy” men and women, people whose presence is “larger than life,” awesome, commanding, not to be trifled with. In such personages, the worshiper senses the workings of the divine. Biblical faith, too, is familiar with the concept of people as bearers of the holy.

Priests. The Pentateuch takes pains to spell out the procedures of vesture, sacrifice, anointing, and life-style by which a priest may become and remain consecrated, in order to enter the Lord’s presence (Exod. 28–29; Lev. 8; 21). Through his consecration, some of the holiness of the Lord is imparted to the priest, enough to “inoculate” him against an outbreak of the wrath of the numinous. A special aura of holiness rested upon the high priest. He alone could enter the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary containing the ark of the covenant, on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16). A person accused of manslaughter was protected from the avenger of the deceased, provided he remained in a city of refuge until the death of the high priest then in office (Num. 35:25–28).

Prophets. The Scripture often calls the prophet a “man of God”; the term is applied to Moses (Deut. 33:1), Samuel (1 Sam. 9:6), Shemaiah (1 Kings 12:22), Elijah (1 Kings 17:18), Elisha (2 Kings 4:40), David (2 Chron. 8:14), and to a number of unnamed prophets or messengers of the Lord (Judg. 13:6; 1 Sam. 2:27; 1 Kings 13:1). In these instances the term man of God (or woman of God) does not mean a righteous person but one of special endowment, a bearer of the numinous, even one to be feared. The people’s reaction to Moses when he returned to them after speaking with the Lord was one of great fear because “his face was radiant” (Exod. 34:29); as a result, he had to wear a veil whenever he came out from before Yahweh. The biblical narrative ascribes miracles to prophets such as Elijah and Isaiah as the distinguishing mark of the “man of God” (1 Kings 17:24). Especially noteworthy is the numinous aura associated with the person of Elisha; he raises the dead son of the Shunammite woman by lying upon him, body member to member (2 Kings 4:32–37), and even after his death a corpse, thrown hastily into his grave, returns to life upon contact with Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:20–21). The earlier prophets seem to have been distinguished by special appearance, having a tonsured head in a manner similar to later Christian monks (1 Kings 20:35–42; 2 Kings 2:23). A man or woman of God can make mistakes, disobey the Lord, and pay the penalty but still be known as a man or woman of God (1 Kings 13:26; 2 Kings 23:17). Samson was consecrated to God by the Nazirite vow (Judg. 13:7) and was moved by the Spirit of the Lord (Judg. 13:25); even when he turned away from the Lord, he remained an awesome man, capable of exploits larger than life.

The Apostles. Although the New Testament uses the expression “man of God” more in the sense of a godly person equipped for the service of the Lord (1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 3:16–17), it also portrays the apostles, like the prophets, as bearers of the numinous. People laid their sick friends in the street in the hope that Peter’s shadow might fall on them (Acts 5:15); it was enough for Peter to confront Ananias and Sapphira with their duplicity, and they fell dead at his feet (Acts 5:1–11). The people of Lystra acclaimed Paul and Barnabas as gods and were prepared to sacrifice to them (Acts 14:11–13). Handkerchiefs or aprons from Paul’s body were carried to the sick, and they were healed (Acts 19:11–12). In recording such incidents, Luke is not simply chronicling the ignorant superstition of ancient peoples. The awe-inspiring aspect of the apostles, despite their lack of formal education, is a recognizable quality in their lives, the result of the fact “that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

Jesus Christ. The powerful, wondrous impact of the holy is evident throughout the gospel portrait of Jesus Christ himself, from his birth to his resurrection and ascension, and requires no lengthy demonstration here. To those already mentioned, we would add only a few examples. As a woman, suffering from a persistent hemorrhage, touched the hem of Jesus’ garment, Jesus immediately sensed that “virtue,” or power (dunamis), had gone out from him (Mark 5:25–34). Led to the edge of a cliff at Nazareth by a mob angry at his indictment of their lack of response to the love of God, Jesus was able simply to pass through their midst and go on his way. When soldiers came asking for Jesus the Nazarene to arrest him, Jesus replied, “I am he,” and “they drew back and fell to the ground” (John 18:6). The first preachers of the Resurrection referred to the miracles of Jesus, familiar to their audience, as acts that attested him as specially endowed and set apart by God (Acts 2:22). In his own preaching, Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God, a realm breaking into present time and space in supernatural manifestation. We can understand much about the principles and operation of the kingdom of God when we view it as another expression for God’s covenant with his people. As to its inner dynamic, however, the kingdom is a mystery. It cannot be completely comprehended in rational argument and detail; its principles of growth can only be hinted at through picture and comparison, its power suggested through miracle and sign. Above all, it is present in the person of Jesus himself, as the bearer of the holy.

Like the prophets before him and the apostles afterward, Jesus was opposed, vilified, and persecuted by those who could not, or would not, look beyond the external to the reality of the unseen. Yet the final vindication of Jesus’ identity as the incarnate revelation of the holy is that most awesome of all events, the Resurrection, which not only displays the workings of the Creator in the person of his Son, but releases in his worshipers some measure of that same quality of sacred and mysterious power. Thus, the New Testament frequently refers to the body of believers collectively as “the saints” or “the holy ones” (Greek hagios, equivalent to Hebrew qadosh). Scripture makes it clear that the entire covenant community is “a kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:6), “a royal priesthood” (1 Pet. 2:9), consecrated to approach the Presence in worship. The awesome encounter with the living God is not the preserve of a spiritual elite but the inheritance of all who call on him.

Conclusion

This survey has attempted to demonstrate that in biblical worship there is a numinous dimension of awe, dread, majesty, transcendence in the presence of the Holy One. The worship of God is not confined to the flatness of the rational, the sentimental, or the moral. The error of much of both orthodox and modernistic Christianity is that it has tried, by default or by design, to constrain worship within these limits. Religion has been reduced, in the words of the nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, to a “feeling of dependence,” or more crudely, to “morality tinged by emotion” (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958]). Or it has become a matter of words and statements, precise definitions, carefully crafted confessions. Or it has degenerated into a mere social ritual, an exercise in group identification. In such a domesticated form, it lacks the intensity, depth, mystery, and abandon of biblical worship and so fails to speak to the deepest instincts of the soul.