“And
the veil of the temple was rent in twain from top to bottom.” Mark 15:38
The veil that separates the created world
from the transcendent Creator has been rent, torn by the death of Jesus Christ.
Though we cannot, in this world, comprehend the vast reality of the Creator who
is apart from and above the created order, we have, in the sacrifice of Jesus
on the Cross, a demonstration of the heart of God: God’s demonstrated love for
humanity. The veil that has separated us is removed, but at a great and eternal
cost.
So long as we live here as creatures in
this world, there is a separation between the Holy of Holies and the world as
we experience it, between the transcendent Creator and the creature. There is a profound distinction but also a merciful
connection thanks to the grace and love of God.
A similar distinction and connection exists
between the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross and our lives. We cannot
achieve on our own what Jesus has in his self-offering but we can be connected
to his sacrifice thanks to the grace and love which he provides through his one,
perfect and sufficient Sacrifice, the sacrifice that he has made and in which
we participate most particularly and profoundly by sharing in the Holy Communion
of his body and blood as we do today in the Mass of the Pre-sanctified.
In order to cross the threshold of the
veil, we must embrace the Sacrifice of Christ freely given for us on the Cross.
In order to cross that threshold beyond which we may be given the vision of God,
we must accept the awful reality of the suffering and death of our Saviour.
Crossing that threshold is our purpose and the goal of our life as human beings
created in the image of God, but separated by sin and death.
The existence of God is what has been
called a “demonstrated unknowablity” in the words of Fr. P. Cleevely in the
Chesterton debate in 2014. Because we
are mortal creatures there is a sense in which we see the reality of God, as
St. Paul put it, “as through a glass, darkly”,
The glass or mirror is an analogy with the early mirrors used at the
time of the Roman Empire which were polished brass giving very limited
reflections of objects.
St. Paul goes on, “but then we shall see. . . (that is once we cross through the veil,
across the threshold,) we shall see face
to face”, that is by virtue of the Sacrifice of Jesus for us; by virtue of
the fact that he has torn the veil of separation for us to enter into the
nearer presence and the vision of God.
The cost of the sacrifice that Jesus made
is immeasurable by human standards; it has cosmic and eternal dimensions. The
removal of the veil by the sacrifice of Christ is the very axis of time and
eternity, of history and of meaning.
In his addresses about
the Power of God: given on Good Friday in 1951, Dom Gregory Dix, a Monk of
Nashdom Abbey in England, described the sacrifice of Jesus in the following
words. He describes the depth of the
horror and awe of the sacrifice Jesus made for us to rend the veil.
[See
previous post for the Dix Quotation.]
And so today, on this
Good Friday, at the axis of time and eternity, we give thanks for Jesus, the
one who has gone before us, through the veil, and who offers us the way, the
way to cross the threshold of hope into the vision of God.
“And
the veil of the temple was rent in twain from top to bottom.”
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