Transcript

Welcome back to Jim's Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

As promised, this week I want to look at the idea of the temple veil because many times Protestants will say, Why do you Catholics pray to Mary or the saints and angels?

Don't you know you can go directly to God?

After all, the temple veil was torn.

Or they'll say, Why do you Catholics confess your sins to a priest?

Don't you know you can go directly to God?

You know, you had the temple veil in the Old Testament, but then when Jesus dies on the cross, the veil is torn.

You can go directly to God now.

Now, I was asked this recently, and I quoted from this message last week, but I had permission to do so.

I'm going to do it again this week because the person who asked me had a broader question, which we looked at last week.

But one of the questions that the person asked was about intercession with the saints, and here's how he put it: Now, I've got to say, as a Catholic, I'm going to do my best to understand what the Protestant argument is here.

But that it's overwhelmingly presented in that way: Hey, why do you hold this position when this thing happened?

The veil was torn?

Implied there is some kind of argument that the veil being torn means something for the topic at hand, but rarely does someone really spell out, Well, what do you think the theological implications of the torn veil are?

By all means, Protestants watching this, if you think I'm doing a bad job of representing it, let me know.

I will show you what I'm hearing and then respond to those things.

And I'm going to start by showing how these claims are often kind of vague.

Here's a good example of this sort of thing: you'll see, A priest should not have to have this forced celibacy if that be the case, but the veil's been torn.

We need no priest anyway.

But again, too much to discuss.

So that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

He says forced celibacy is bad.

By the way, we don't need priests at all because the veil is torn, as if that is a standalone argument that's just self-explanatory.

And then he says, Eh, too much to discuss, and moves on to the next topic.

So I mentioned this at the outset to say I'm not seeing a lot of Protestants carefully articulating an actual logical step-by-step sort of argument for how they're getting from torn veils to no saints, no Mary, no intercession, no priesthood.

It seems to be more assumed that those are the implications of the torn veil, and I think that matters because when you actually dig into it, that's completely wrong.

The torn veil does not mean that's the end of the priesthood in terms of priestly intercession, and it certainly doesn't mean it's the end of intercessory prayer.

Now, we can talk about what it does mean, but I want to first get to what it doesn't. So I'm going to look at major ways popular Protestant interpretations tend to get this wrong and then say, Okay, well, if those are the wrong ways, what's the right way to interpret it?

Let's start with getting the priesthood wrong.

This is a classic example from a popular Protestant by the name of John MacArthur: We don't need any priests.

Revelation 1: You are a kingdom of priests.

We only need one high priest, and it's not the Pope.

We have one mediator, the man Christ Jesus.

The veil is torn; we go right into the Holy of Holies.

You are a priest, and I am a priest unto God.

So before I respond to his position, let's just take a minute and try to understand what his position is.

Because if you paid close attention, he actually made three different claims on the status of Christian priests, and on the surface, these claims are contradictory.

And in the midst of them, he just throws out that the veil is torn, and this somehow is proving these apparently contradictory positions.

Now, what do I mean?

If you pay close attention to what he says, he starts by saying, We don't need any priests, so the first position is there are no Christian priests.

The second position is there is one, the great high priest, Jesus Christ.

The third position is actually that all of us are priests.

You're a priest, and I'm a priest.

So he appears to be arguing that there are no Christian priests, that there's one Christian priest, Jesus, and that we're all Christian priests.

Now, at the outset, the reason I point this out is to say he's not even trying to harmonize how these things could all be true.

Now, maybe if you put the right nuances on it, you could hold some version of all of those positions to say, Well, there's no priests of this type, but we're all priests of that type, and Jesus is a priest of this type.

But I mention these apparent contradictions at the outset both to say the Protestants making this argument usually are not doing the actual intellectual work of showing how the torn veil supports any of those three positions.

But second, if you don't have a clear vision of what the priesthood is in your own theology, it makes it really hard to argue against the Catholic vision because your own vision of priesthood is so muddled.

And so you'll find Protestants who say, Well, it's actually blasphemous.

It's wrong to claim any human person that isn't Jesus Christ is a priest.

So Catholic priesthood, this is a scandal; this is undoing the great work of Christ.

And then in the next breath, they'll talk about how all of us are priests.

Well, if it's blasphemous and wrong, if this is a degradation of the unique act of Jesus on the cross, then how can you also say that all of us are degrading Jesus' act on the cross?

So I point this out just to say, if you're a Catholic, pay careful attention to, Well, what does this Protestant person think about the priesthood?

Do they think there's one priest?

No priest?

Everybody's a priest?

And second, if you're a Protestant, maybe consider whether your arguments are internally coherent because I don't think MacArthur's arguments really work together.

And at the very least, many of the arguments that say the Catholic priesthood is somehow offensive to the priesthood of Christ, those, if you took them seriously, would be arguments against the idea of us being a kingdom of priests, which is clearly biblical.

So to be really clear here, as Catholics, we want to affirm that yes, we have a great high priest, Jesus Christ, and yes, all of us, by incorporation into Christ in our baptism, share in his threefold office of priest, prophet, and king.

Remember, the word Christian means anointed.

The word Christ means anointed.

So we're little Christs, as it were; we share in the anointed office of Christ in the threefold anointed office.

In the Old Testament, the three groups of people you see getting anointed chiefly are priests, prophets, and kings.

And so we understand that Christ is all of those things and that we share in some mysterious way in that threefold office of Christ.

Every one of us does.

From the ordinary layperson on the street to the Pope in Rome, everybody in between.

So I want to say that at the outset, but we also believe that some, but not all, are called to serve as Catholic priests in a unique capacity.

They're called to a different kind of priesthood, the priesthood in the order of Melchizedek.

Melchizedek, you'll remember, in the Old Testament offers bread and wine, which is a prefigurement of the Mass.

Jesus is described as being a priest in the order of Melchizedek, and he calls not all of his followers, as we're going to see; he calls the Twelve, he calls the Apostles, he calls the chosen top-down, if you will, clerical leadership, and he tells them to offer the Eucharist.

Do this and do this in remembrance of me isn't to you and me; it's to the clergy.

And so that's why we believe that some priests share in this in a way that not all the baptized do.

There's also good evidence of this even in the Old Testament.

So remember, MacArthur's position would seem to logically say, Okay, you could say there are no priests, or that everybody's a priest, or that just Jesus is a priest.

The only position he hasn't staked out is the one I just described: that some Christians, but not all, are called to be priests.

And the thing that's radical about that is Scripture clearly says that.

Go to the last chapter of Isaiah, Isaiah 66. God foretells who is going to come and gather the nations and that they'll offer true worship.

He even talks about how they're going to be bringing an offering to the Lord—that's a sacrifice.

Now, as we're going to see, that's really important because this involves the language of worship and the temple, and this was something Gentiles couldn't do before.

They couldn't make these offerings in the Holy of Holies.

And then, so they're coming to the holy mountain, Jerusalem.

In Isaiah 66, verse 20, God says, And some of them, not one of them, not none of them, not all of them, some of them also I will take for priests and for Levites, says the Lord.

So in the New Covenant, when God comes and gathers his people together—which he's done; Jesus came into history, spoiler alert—he gathers the people together, he brings the Gentiles into the people of God, and he chooses some of these believers, not all of them, not none of them, some of them to serve as priests.

And the fulfillment of the Levites, who are the assistants to the priests, is the diaconate.

This is how Christians understood this from extremely early on.

We find in the year 96, Pope Clement, in a letter called First Clement, comparing the orders of bishop, presbyter (what would now be called priest), deacon, and layman to the Old Testament structure of high priest, priest, Levite, and layman.

So this is not some crazy reading of Isaiah 66; it's just God saying he's going to gather the nations together, and he literally does that.

So that points to there being an actual priesthood.

John MacArthur's position somehow is that the temple veil is contrary to that, but the temple veil being torn isn't contrary to everybody being a priest, and it's not contrary to nobody being a priest.

But there's no work being done there.

See, that's what I mean by having a very weak vision of the priesthood.

And so there's no coherent way you're getting from a torn temple veil to saying everybody or nobody can be a priest.

We can't have some people.

Okay, so that's the first way Protestants in the popular interpretation get this wrong.

The second thing they tend to get wrong is intercession.

Here's a clip to show what I mean: Jesus is now our intercessor.

We don't go through man.

Under the Roman Catholic doctrine, all you do is pray through a priest, and when you pray for that priest, if you want to go a little higher order, you get to pray to monsignor.

If you go past him, you get to cardinal.

If you go past him and you've got enough money, you might get up to Daddy Fran himself, go over there before the Pope in Rome.

But what you do is pray through a man.

Then if you get past Daddy Fran, they tell you you've got to go through Mary.

If you get through Mary, they don't tell you where you go after that; it's no man's land anyway, so who could make a guess?

But the very idea in New Testament Christianity is that we do not go through man to reach God.

Now, under the Old Testament covenant, that's the only way they could get there.

So that was a very confusing description of Catholic theology—the idea that we're praying to priests, and if we have a big thing, we pray to monsignor.

I don't actually know what he's talking about.

That doesn't resemble anything I've ever seen any Catholic do, and I've been Catholic my entire life.

Nevertheless, he seems to be making five claims.

Number one: Jesus is our only intercessor.

Number two: Catholics think that you're not able to pray directly to God; you have to have the intercession of a priest, even though he words it as like we're praying to the priest.

He might mean we have to ask the priest to pray for us, like we can't pray to our Father ourselves; the priest has to pray for us or something.

The third claim is that this somehow explains why Catholics pray to Mary.

Now, before he was talking about priests and monsignors and cardinals and the Pope.

It's like, okay, he's making some kind of argument—I don't know what, but some kind of argument against the priesthood, against the clergy.

But then he starts talking about praying to Mary, and it's like, well, Mary's not a priest; she's not like the super Pope.

So what is he talking about here?

Is the argument that Catholics go to clergy to pray for them until they don't pray?

Or they pray, but they only pray to saints in heaven and Mary?

Or that we only pray to Mary if we have a lot of money and influence?

I mean, I'd love to see him explain all the little old ladies in the pews with their rosaries out, like, Oh, they must be so rich; they must be so powerful that the Pope gave them special permission to pray to Mary.

I have no idea what this claim is, but this is the kind of stuff, as a Catholic, you hear Protestants claiming about Catholicism, and it's like, well, just stop and try to think about the words you're saying.

Does this make any sense?

And it doesn't seem to me that it does.

But that's his fourth apparent claim.

Fifth, he says Christians do not go through man to reach God.

He makes that very clear; like, you just do not do that.

And sixth, under the Old Covenant, that was the only way—you had to go through a man to reach God; you couldn't just pray directly to God.

So you needed intercession.

Now, I wanted to say at the outset that literally all five of those claims are wrong.

It's not true that Jesus is our only intercessor.

It's not true that Catholics can't pray directly to God.

Every time you've prayed to our Father, you've prayed directly to God.

It's not true that this is why we go to Mary, because we think we can't go to God directly.

Like, even in the Rosary, you have an Our Father next to a Hail Mary.

It's clearly not an either-or situation from the Catholic side of things.

Number four: the idea that Christians can't go through man to reach God would have been total news to the readers of the New Testament.

The paralyzed man who's brought by his friends to Jesus—did Jesus say, Hey, you can't go through a man to reach me?

Totally nonsensical, totally theologically unsound.

Leaving aside the fact that Jesus is himself a man as well as God, there are all sorts of cases where people go to men, like the apostles, to reach God in all sorts of ways, including hearing the Gospel in the first place, but also, as we're going to see, in terms of intercession.

And then, it's also, as we're going to see, not true that in the Old Covenant you had to go to a priest to get to God.

We find people praying directly to God without an intercessor in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament.

So none of those five claims are true, but you'll hear variations of those five things regularly said.

Now, I'm going to unpack a little bit more on how in the Old Testament as well as in the New Testament people pray directly to God when we look at getting prayer wrong.

But right now, I want to focus just on the intercessory claims: the idea that Jesus is our only intercessor, we're not allowed to go through any other man, and that in the Old Testament you had to go through an intercessor—none of that is true.

So that's claims one, four, and five if you're keeping track of his five claims.

And I think it would suffice to say that one of the passages that regularly gets mis-cited here and taken totally out of context is the first half of the sentence in 1 Timothy 2, verse 5. It says, For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Protestants who lean on this verse tend to stop at verse 5, even though it's half of a sentence.

And why do they do that?

Because if you read verse 6, then you realize this is not an argument against intercessory prayer whatsoever.

That this is talking about how Jesus is our one mediator because he gave himself as a ransom for all, the testimony to which was born at the proper time.

In calling Jesus our one mediator, he's the bridge between God and man in the sense that he dies on the cross and pays for our sins, and nobody claims somebody else did that.

There's no Catholic who is saying, You know what?

I've got to go to the monsignor because he died on the cross for my sins.

No, that's not a position.

If that's what you think Catholics believe, then that's just not Catholic theology at all.

When we go to those people with us on earth or we go to the saints in heaven and we ask for their prayers, it's not because we think they died on the cross for us.

Jesus is the sole mediator; he's the one mediator in the sense that Paul is talking about in 1 Timothy 2, verses 5 and 6. But what Paul is not talking about is that Jesus is our only intercessor.

How do we know that?

By actually reading 1 Timothy 2. Because verses 5 and 6 are the third sentence of the chapter.

The first sentence begins this way: First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.

So literally, if you just read two sentences before, you'd realize that we are called to intercession, not that we're prohibited from intercession.

Like, we absolutely should be a people of intercession.

And so that's one of the reasons why, like in a Christian context, if everyone around you is a Christian, you don't say, Well, I'm not allowed to pray or intercede for anybody because they're all Christians, and they have to go directly to God.

Nonsense!

That is nowhere written in the Bible, Old or New Testament.

The exact opposite is written: that you are to make prayer and intercession for them.

And Paul is very clear that this is good and it is acceptable in the sight of God.

What is?

Us interceding and praying for one another.

That is literally the two sentences prior to the one taken out of context to argue this totally false vision that we're not allowed to have intercession.

So then, what about getting prayer wrong?

I said I was going to get to that, and I intend to do so.

Instead of using a clip, there's actually a book that I think does the clearest job of presenting an argument I've heard elsewhere.

The book is called Hebrew Foundations of the Christian Faith.

And I'm not claiming it's any great, well-respected book.

I don't mean that to knock the book; I just mean I'm not citing it because everybody loves this book or something like that.

I'm citing it because I've heard variations of this argument before and think this clearly presents a sort of vision.

Because it's not just, Oh, the temple veil's torn; therefore, I'm right.

He's explaining why he thinks the temple veil being torn means that he's right.

So this is David Hampshire, and here's what he says: As a result of Jesus' death, for those who wish to know and draw near to God, this is now possible.

When one of the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, Jesus replied, 'When you pray, say, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name' (Luke 11:1). For his disciples, thinking of ordinary people being able to pray directly to God would have been unusual; hence the question.

Following the tearing of the temple veil, enabling access for all who wish to draw near to God, the sacrifice of himself, a type of veil (Hebrews 10:20), is the only way that we can approach God.

Okay, so there are a couple of things that I appreciate about this.

First, he's actually trying to make an argument.

He's looking at Scripture and then trying to show how that means what he believes about the temple veil.

So I appreciate that he's making an argument; I appreciate that he's trying to incorporate Scripture.

The problem is the two verses that he cites actually contradict the claims that he's making.

Hebrews 10:20 doesn't interpret Jesus' sacrifice to say this is the only way we're allowed to go to God, and Luke 11:1 doesn't say it was unusual for people to be praying to God.

So Hampshire is making two apparent claims, and again, these are ones that I've seen lots of other people seemingly making but often not spelling out quite this clearly.

The first thing is, you know, before the temple veil was torn, ordinary people just didn't pray directly to God.

It'd be super weird to see a regular guy praying; you'd be like, What?

You can't do that!

You have to be a priest or a monsignor or something to do that.

That's kind of the idea—that was what Judaism must have looked like.

And the people making this claim never think to ask, Well, Jews today, when they don't have a temple, do they pray directly to God?

What's going on there?

There's not even that level of, Huh, I've been making this claim about the Old Covenant; does this match up with what we see about people praying in the Old Covenant?

There's none of that.

But this is a popular belief, and many Protestants seem to think you had to go through a priest to pray in the Old Covenant.

The second apparent claim is that the torn temple veil means that because of Jesus' death on the cross, we can now draw close to God in prayer.

Okay, now, as you may suspect, I disagree with both of these.

In fact, I think both of these are demonstrably false.

So how does this get prayer wrong?

Well, a few ways.

Let's start with the fact that Luke 11, verse 1, contradicts this whole vision, which again, remember, this is one of the two verses that he's trying to point to.

Jesus is praying in a certain place, and when he's done praying, one of the disciples says to him, 'Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.'

Now, did John tear the temple veil?

No. Were they saying, We've never known that we were allowed to pray, but John told his disciples they were?

No. This is a much simpler story.

They want to learn how to pray better, so they're going to their master and asking how to pray, the same way Christians still do 2,000 years on.

Literally, if you talk to someone who has spiritual direction or is in some sort of spiritual authority over someone else, or they're mentoring someone, any of those things, I can just about guarantee one of the most common questions they answer is, How do I pray?

Not, Am I allowed to pray because of the temple veil?

but just, I want to know how to talk to God.

And it's strange and confusing when you first start to do it.

And so the apostles are trying to pray better.

They prayed before this; this isn't the first time they're praying.

They're just trying to learn how to do it right.

That's Luke 11, verse 1. It presupposes they can pray, and not only that, but that John has already been teaching this.

In fact, it's not just John.

One of the knocks against Jesus and the disciples wasn't that they were so weird because they prayed; it was literally the opposite.

In Luke 5, verse 33, the knock on Jesus and the disciples, or at least on the disciples, was that they were slack in prayer—that they didn't seem to take prayer and fasting seriously enough compared to John the Baptist and even the Pharisees.

So the idea that this was some radical new thing that Jesus was bringing to ordinary people is just plainly contradicted by the New Testament.

No, the surprising thing wasn't that they were praying; the surprising thing was that they didn't seem to be praying enough.

Then, jumping forward to Luke 18, you've got Jesus' parable where he talks about two men going up to the temple to pray.

One of them is a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.

Now, in Jewish life, you could hardly get two more unlike people, and yet both of them feel comfortable going directly to God to pray.

So this idea that people couldn't do that in Judaism is just plainly false.

That's just looking at New Testament evidence.

You could bring in a wealth of Old Testament evidence.

You could bring in things like first-century synagogue inscriptions.

I mean, there are a lot of good examples of the fact that people did pray.

In Matthew chapter 6, Jesus says, When you pray.

Now notice, he's talking to people and doesn't say, Did you know you were able to pray?

He's just telling them what to do when they pray.

In fact, he's going to tell them how to do it.

When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites.

Oh, so not only are Jesus' listeners praying, but even the hypocrites are praying.

The difference isn't who thinks they can pray; the difference is how, and the hypocrites are praying badly.

How?

Well, they love to stand and pray in synagogues and street corners that they may be seen by men.

And Jesus warns they've had their reward because they weren't really praying to be heard by God; they were praying to be heard by others.

Then he says, When you're praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do.

So not only did ordinary Jews, from the Pharisees to the tax collectors, pray, but also the disciples of John prayed, and the disciples of the Pharisees and the hypocrites—even the Gentiles prayed.

This was just not the radical breakthrough Protestants claim it to be.

People prayed—Jewish and Gentile, hypocrite and humble, Pharisee and tax collector.

People prayed in the Old Covenant directly to God.

So what does Jesus do?

Well, he responds by giving the Our Father: Pray then like this.

And that's what he does in Luke 11, verse 1, and in the parallel account in Matthew 6, verse 9. But here's the issue: if the only way we're able to pray directly to God is because when Jesus dies on the cross, the temple veil is torn, how does he give them the Our Father now, prior to his death?

So the idea that the torn veil means we can now pray directly to God is also contradicted by the fact that Jesus is giving them prayer directly to the Father during his lifetime.

So yeah, those two claims about prayer are totally wrong.

If you want to know why they're wrong, they're confusing prayer and worship.

I've got another video where I explore that in much greater depth, but for now, it's enough to say there was something you could only do in the temple, and that required the priests, but it wasn't prayer.

So what are the common false Protestant assumptions?

As I see it, there are three major ones.

Number one: before Jesus' death, people didn't or couldn't pray directly to God.

As we've just seen, that is false.

The second assumption is that we can now pray directly to God only because of Jesus' death on the cross tearing the temple veil.

Well, we already saw the Our Father was given before that happened, so that's false.

The third assumption is that Jesus' death on the cross eliminates prayerful intercession.

We get rid of all the middlemen because we can now go directly to God because the temple veil is torn, and we've seen that's false.

Intercession continues in Christianity; it's encouraged and described as good.

Okay, so those three things are false.

Those are common misconceptions and faulty assumptions that underlie why Protestants hear the temple veil is torn and jump to wrong conclusions.

How should we interpret it?

Because clearly, the tearing of the temple veil is important.

The fact that it doesn't mean what Protestants think it means doesn't mean it doesn't mean anything.

That was a bad sentence, but you get what I'm saying.

It clearly is an important moment in Christianity.

So what is going on?

Well, to understand it, we have to go to the fact that there's something that had to happen in the temple.

We get this alluded to in John chapter 4 when Jesus is speaking to the Samaritan woman.

She says to him, Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.

Our fathers worshiped on this mountain (that's Mount Gerizim), and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

Well, where do you worship in Jerusalem?

The temple.

So there is something called worship that is done on Mount Gerizim if you're a Samaritan, or in the temple in Jerusalem if you're a Jew.

What's going on there?

It's clearly something different than prayer, which could happen anywhere, and people were doing it everywhere.

Ordinary people were doing it, and it didn't take priests.

So what is worship as distinct from prayer?

Everett Ferguson, in volume 3 of his book The Early Church at Work in Worship, he's a Protestant scholar, but he nails this right on the head.

He says, Since sacrifice was the universal language of worship in the ancient world, it was natural that the significance of Jesus' death should be interpreted in those terms.

So there are two things he's saying there.

Number one: if you want to understand what worship meant in the ancient world, universally it was sacrifice.

And number two: this is the key to making sense of Jesus' death on the cross from an early Christian perspective.

This is how Christians understood the significance of Good Friday—through the backdrop of a world that they already had, Jewish and Gentile alike, about the necessity of sacrifice and worship in making an offering to God.

Jesus is fulfilling this.

Ferguson goes on to say that the Epistle to the Hebrews most fully developed the sacrificial imagery in reference to Jesus' death.

If you want to see this in action, read Hebrews, but read it with an early Christian or Jewish or pagan perspective mindset.

You know, look at it the way someone in the first century, coming from one of those backgrounds, would read it.

Don't read it with modern Protestant misconceptions that are built on a misunderstanding of what the first century was like.

So Hebrews, we're going to look at it shortly here, actually explains how to make sense of this passage.

Okay, there's one more twist to this because Jesus, in response to the Samaritan woman, accepts this framework but tells her that the hour is coming and now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him.

So he's not coming to change prayer; he's coming to change worship.

Now, he's not coming to abolish it.

He's not saying you don't need worship anymore; you don't need sacrifice anymore.

But he's coming to transform it, and he does transform it on the cross in this really unique and radical sort of way.

And so that's going to be the key.

If you want to understand the torn temple veil, you need to know not only what worship is but what made the temple special.

I've already alluded to one of the two things, but it's two things that are closely connected.

Number one: the temple is the place of divine presence.

The temple is where God is.

That's not to the exclusion of other places, but it means that God, in a special way, resides in the temple.

And number two: the temple is a place of worship and sacrifice.

And that really, in a way, is redundant in this ancient kind of vision of worship—that sacrifice is the language of worship.

And where are you going to offer sacrifice?

Where are you going to worship?

You're going to go where God is.

And that's the temple.

And so that's why you went to Mount Gerizim, that's why you went to the temple in Jerusalem, and that's why if you were a pagan, you went to one of the shrines where you thought the gods might be.

These were places of divine indwelling or were believed to be, and that's where you would go to have these encounters of communion, either with the true God or with your false gods.

That's what a temple was in the ancient world.

So when we're talking about temples, that's what you need to understand: those two features—this is a place of divine presence and a place of divine worship and sacrifice.

Jesus doesn't abolish this, but he does transform it.

So where is the Christian temple?

If the temple is closely connected to this idea of worship, and if the temple is closely connected, of course, to making sense of the temple veil, well, where do we see the temple in Christianity?

There are three places.

Number one: in Jesus' physical body.

As he's walking around, he is the temple of God.

Makes sense, right?

This is a place of divine presence par excellence.

Number two: in his mystical body, the body of Christ, the Church.

And number three: in the individual believers who have been incorporated into his body.

So let's see how the New Testament points to all three of those answers.

Number one: when Jesus, in John 2, says, Destroy this temple, and in three days I'll rebuild it, John tells us explicitly he spoke of the temple of his body.

This is as clear as it's going to get—that the radical transformation is no longer the temple in Jerusalem as the focus of worship.

Now, the temple that is the body of Jesus is the focus of worship.

That is the redirection that has gone on here.

And of course, this makes sense.

Colossians 2 describes how in Jesus, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, that God dwells in Christ in a way beyond how he ever dwelt in the Holy of Holies in the Ark of the Covenant.

This is something more radical than that dwelling place.

The body of Jesus is the perfect temple.

If you understand the temple as the place of divine presence and the place where sacrifice is made, well, where do we see the sacrifice?

Of course, we see that on the cross.

Second, when we talk about the Church, St. Paul refers to it as the household of God.

It's built on the foundation of the apostles, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone, growing together into a holy temple in the Lord.

So this is where, if you want to encounter Jesus Christ on earth now, you go to his body; you go to the Church.

That is the biblical depiction.

To call the Church the body of Christ is to call the Church a continuation of the Incarnation.

And if Jesus' historic physical body is a temple, that means the Church is also a holy temple in the Lord.

This is where divine presence is made manifest in the world, and this is where divine sacrifice happens.

Third, each of our own bodies is to be respected because, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

If you have been baptized and incorporated into Christ, and you have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit living within you, you're also a place of divine dwelling, which is what the temple is.

And that means as well that your body, as a temple, is a place where you can offer sacrifice.

Now, occasionally you'll find Protestants who hear this idea of sacrificing in spirit and truth, and they'll say, Ah, it's spiritual; it's not bodily.

That badly misunderstands the biblical treatment of body and spirit, particularly in St. Paul, who says in Romans 12, I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

That spiritual worship is bodily worship.

That's what it looks like as a Christian.

It's always bodily worship because it's connected with your body, which is a temple, and it's connected to the body of Christ, which is a temple.

So it's inescapably bodily worship in the same way that if you were a Jew in the Old Covenant, it would be inescapably temple worship.

Okay, so that's been a little bit of a roundabout way of getting there, but how does this make sense then of the torn veil?

Well, as I said, we have to go to Hebrews for that explanation.

In Hebrews 8, it's looking at the Old Testament priesthood and describes how these things serve as a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary.

The first covenant, the Old Covenant, the Mosaic priesthood—all of that is prefiguring a heavenly reality, and it serves as a copy and shadow.

And then in verse 6, so the Old Covenant prefigures the New Covenant; the old priesthood prefigures the new priesthood; the old mediation prefigures the new mediation.

All of that is right there in Hebrews.

In chapter 9, the author goes on to say that even the first covenant had regulations for worship in an earthly sanctuary.

So even the Old Covenant, which is just a prefigurement of the New Covenant, has regulations for worship in an earthly sanctuary.

Now, that word even suggests that that's also going to be true of the New Covenant—that the thing that's being fulfilled isn't superior to the thing that fulfills it.

The foreshadowing isn't better than the thing being foreshadowed.

It doesn't make sense to say Old Covenant worship had regulations for worship, heavenly worship has regulations for worship, but there should be no regulations for worship in Christianity, which is on this journey from the Old Covenant to the heavenly encounter of worship.

It doesn't make sense, right?

You can't say the past was set up to prefigure the future, and the present should look totally unlike the past and the future.

If your worship doesn't look like heavenly worship, that's a problem as a Christian.

And we know Old Covenant worship looked like heavenly worship because Hebrews 8 just told us that heavenly worship is better, but it's prefiguring that.

So when you look at Jewish temple liturgies and you look at the Mass, you'll see the comparisons.

This is one of the regular knocks against Catholicism.

But if Hebrews 8 and 9 are right, those regulations for worship are part of this prefigurement of new and better things.

So I point this out partly to contrast this vision you'll hear from people who think that somehow the temple veil gets rid of regulations for worship, gets rid of ritual.

But God had sent us a message.

He said, My Son has made it easy so that you could come into my presence, and coming into my presence, know that you're no longer on the outside.

There were no rituals needed; Jesus made a new way to God.

So yeah, you'll notice that is just not what Hebrews 9 says when it says even the first covenant had regulations for worship.

It's presupposing the New Covenant does as well, and then it gives an example of what those Old Covenant regulations for worship looked like, and it involves the old temple.

Now, we've already seen Christianity has a temple.

It has a threefold sense of temple: it's the body of Christ, your body, the Church, and Jesus' historic body.

And in the Old Covenant, which prefigures that, there was on the outside an outer tent in which there was a lampstand and a table and the bread of the presence, called the Holy Place.

Now, the Holy Place is to be contrasted from the Holy of Holies, which is the holiest place.

But you'll notice there's already that bread of the presence.

Well, if this is somehow prefiguring the body of Christ, what does that sound like to you?

Because that sounds to me quite Eucharistic.

In fact, when you go deeper, beyond the second set of curtains, you go into the Holy of Holies and you find the golden altar of incense and the Ark of the Covenant, covered on all sides with gold.

It contains a golden urn with the manna, the bread from heaven, which Jesus describes himself as the true bread from heaven in John 6. So this is the bread of angels, and it's prefiguring something in the New Covenant.

Remember how everything in the first covenant is prefiguring things in the New Covenant.

Once again, this looks very Eucharistic.

Then, jumping a verse and a half ahead, these preparations having thus been made, the priests go continually into the outer tent performing their ritual duties.

But in the second one, the high priest goes in but once a year and not without taking blood, which he offers for himself and for the errors of the people.

Now notice here what it is that the priest, and the high priest specifically, and he alone, is able to do.

Not pray to God, but to make atoning sacrifice.

That's this act of worship—not prayer, but worship, like sacrificial offering to God to resolve the sins of the people.

That's a different kind of thing than the people who are in the temple at the same time praying to God for mercy.

They're offering prayer, but the priest is offering worship and sacrifice.

Let's jump ahead then from chapter 9 to chapter 10 because this is all going to be fulfilled.

Jesus' death on the cross does get rid of that old mediation of the priest's sacrificial role.

We don't need to offer animal sacrifice anymore.

Why?

Because we have a new and better victim and a new and better priest.

So Hebrews 10, verse 19 says, Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary.

Notice again the temple language, by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.

Pause there.

If you want to understand the tearing of the temple veil, Hebrews 10 says you need to realize that it's the torn flesh of Christ.

The tearing of the temple veil in the temple in Jerusalem is just a foreshadowing or a prefigurement or an image of the tearing of the actual veil in the true temple.

Because remember, in John 2, Jesus goes into the temple and speaks of the true temple of himself—his own body.

And so the temple in Jerusalem, sure, the veil is torn, but that's just a foreshadowing of the tearing of the true temple veil, which is the flesh of Christ.

That is where we find this ripping open the side of Christ.

That is what it means to say he’s opened up this living way for us through his flesh.

That’s what the curtain is—his flesh.

And it goes on to say in the next half of the sentence, And since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

So it’s true we can now access the presence of God in a new way.

We could pray before, but we now experience his real presence in a deeper way.

So this is going to make, I think, a lot of sense of what happens with the tearing of the temple veil.

It needs to be read through this temple lens, which is incredibly Eucharistic because it’s all centered around the body of Christ and how we can now receive the body of Christ and enter into this real relationship with God at a level we couldn’t before.

But I don’t want to miss one other dimension as well.

I’m going to mention this in passing: that if you read this, the temple as representative of Christ, then there’s a sort of sense in which we can see a divine tearing of garments.

So when Jacob thinks that his son Joseph is dead, what does he do?

He wrings his garments (Genesis 37:34). That’s an old Jewish expression of sorrow—you tear the garments.

And so the garments of the temple, so to speak, are torn because the garments of Christ, his flesh, are torn.

That is, I think, one of the dimensions going on here.

But the more directly evidenced one, the one that’s more explicit in Hebrews 10, is that this is about the tearing of the side of Christ.

In John 19, verse 34, one of the soldiers pierces Jesus' side with a spear, and at once there comes out blood and water.

So the new access we have to God is through the open side of Christ.

The blood and water—what does that represent?

Well, from the earliest days of Christianity, this was understood to represent baptism and the Eucharist.

No one was denying that, yeah, blood and water literally came out, but they saw in that a symbol of the fact that it is through the healing waters and the healing blood of Christ that we’re able to enter into communion with God in this deep and abiding sort of way.

In 1 Corinthians 10, St. Paul points to this as Christian sacrifice.

He says, and those of you who follow this channel know I love this passage, so I’m going to go to it one more time: he says, How do we as Christians participate in the body and blood of Christ?

How do we enter into this in this deep way?

Well, he uses the language of sacrifice.

He says first, Because there is one bread—or literally, like one loaf—we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

Somehow, receiving the one loaf, the Eucharist transforms us into the body of Christ.

This is unlike the temple; going to the temple didn't make you the temple, but going to the body of Christ makes you the body of Christ.

There is a way in which the body of Christ, the Eucharist, makes the body of Christ, the Church.

That’s mysterious, and that is a much deeper conversation I’m going to just allude to and not explain adequately for another time.

But how does that make sense of how we can receive and participate in the body and blood of Christ?

Well, there are going to be, as I said, two sacrificial examples.

The first one, 1 Corinthians 10, verse 18, is the practice of Israel: Are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?

If you understand what happened in the temple, when you would eat the temple sacrifice, you couldn't go and offer it in the Holy of Holies.

How did you participate?

You ate it.

Well, likewise, you can't die on the cross, so how do you join in Christ's sacrifices?

You receive him in the Eucharist.

That’s what he’s saying here.

And if that wasn't clear enough, in verse 20, he says the same thing about pagans.

He says, implied with pagan sacrifice, They offer to demons and not to God.

I do not want you to be partners with demons.

So when they would offer demonic sacrifices to demons, they would become partnered with them by making these unholy sacrifices.

And so he says, You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

There’s a clear parallelism being drawn between the sacrificial cup of the Lord and the sacrificial cup of demons, the sacrificial table of the Lord and the sacrificial table of demons.

It doesn’t make sense to say, Well, ours is just a symbol, but they had real communion and real sacrifice and real participation, because then you’re making it look like the pagan and the Jewish rites are better, more efficacious than the Christian rites.

But second, it just doesn’t make sense of Paul’s whole line of reasoning.

He’s presupposing that this is a sacrifice not unlike the kind of sacrifices you’d have in Judaism or paganism.

This then brings us—we’ve gone through Hebrews 8, 9, and 10. When you get to Hebrews 13, verse 10, there’s this line that has confused many people because the author says, We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat.

Well, who are those who serve the tent?

He’s referring here to the Jewish priests, and his point is we have something holier than the Holy of Holies because we have an altar in which we receive the living presence of God.

Again, you’ll find people who interpret that verse in different ways, but it looks like strikingly Eucharistic language.

If you want to understand the torn temple veil, yeah, it’s true we have direct and unmediated access to God.

Every time we receive communion, we are receiving from the altar something that the high priest on Yom Kippur could only dream of doing.

Think about it: everyone, Jew and Gentile, high and low, could pray, and God is everywhere.

None of what we’re saying about the temple, none of what we’re saying about the Eucharist, denies God’s omnipresence.

But there is a greater sense of the reality of his presence.

This is somewhat mysterious.

There’s something that’s called the Shekinah glory of God, that God was somehow more present in a palpable sort of way in the Ark of the Covenant.

It was around the Ark that the whole temple was built to allow a place to come and experience the presence of God.

But only the high priest could go in and do that.

You could come near; you could go to the Holy Place, but you couldn’t go to the Holy of Holies.

Hebrews 13 is like, Well, you can do something even more than that.

You can receive the true.

Remember, Jesus is more truly the temple than the temple of Jerusalem was because in Jesus, divinity dwells bodily, fully.

You get the full presence of Christ when you receive the body of Christ.

That’s when you receive the body of Christ in the Eucharist—the blood and water flowing from the side of Christ pointing to this.

That’s when you’re incorporated into Christ in the Church through baptism.

All of that is pointing to the fact that there is a fuller dwelling of divinity now, and so we have something richer.

This is the thing that’s so strange: that the same Protestants who knock Catholics for allegedly having to go through all these intermediaries think that their communion is just a symbol.

And it is!

It's not just Christ; we have Christ bodily, and we receive him in the Eucharist.

You may agree or disagree with that as a Protestant, but what you should realize is we claim to have a more direct, unmediated access to God than you do.

You can go to him spiritually in prayer, the way everybody else could before and after the death of Christ.

We can now receive something new by receiving divinity bodily in a way that even the Ark of the Covenant, even the Holy of Holies, was only a foreshadowing.

This is something greater, so that even those who served the tent would need to convert to Christianity to experience the fullness of this.

Okay, very last point: if all this is true, how do we make sense then of the priesthood?

Like, if you’ve got this incredible unmediated access where you can receive Jesus in the Eucharist, doesn’t the temple veil at least abolish the idea of an intermediate sort of priesthood?

Not really.

I mean, yes in one sense, no in another sense.

Here’s what I would say: you can receive God directly in the Eucharist, so in that sense, that’s as unmediated as it gets.

When you receive communion, there’s no one between you and God.

You may receive him at the hands of the priest, but he is in your body dwelling.

That’s as unmediated as it gets.

Nevertheless, the Eucharistic ministry of offering the sacrifice—of representing the sacrifice of Christ to the Father—and there’s a lot of sacrificial theology we’re just not going to get into right here, that is something that Jesus gives, as I said before, to the apostles and not to everyone.

How do we know that?

I already alluded to it; we see it at the Last Supper.

But Malachi 1, verse 11, there is this promise that in the New Covenant, from the rising of the sun to its setting, incense is offered to my name in a pure offering by the Gentiles, that the Gentiles will offer true sacrifice to God.

Now, one of the reasons that matters is that sacrifice doesn't go away in the New Covenant, because if it did, we'd have to say worship goes away—that Christians don't worship God.

That would be a mistake.

So true sacrifice is offered, and the earliest Christians understood that to be a reference to the Eucharist.

But the Eucharist is explicitly offered not by everyone, but by those chosen by Christ in a special role.

This begins with the apostles in Luke 22 at the Last Supper.

Remember, this is where he says, Do this in remembrance of me.

That do this is to those who are with him.

Who's with him?

Luke 22, verse 28: You are those who continued with me in my trials.

And then he promises that they'll sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

This is a reference quite clearly to the twelve.

Now, this is going to include not just those who are there present, because one of those twelve, Judas, is going to fall away, and he’ll be replaced by Matthias in Acts chapter 1. But also, this Eucharistic ministry is continued by those appointed by the apostles in every generation afterwards, or else we wouldn't be able to follow Christ's command to do this.

And I want to just point out that even though it doesn't say the twelve sitting on the twelve thrones, this is clearly what's happening in the parallel description we get in Matthew 19. It says, You who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes.

Just in case anyone's confused, this is a reference to apostolic ministry, and that continues on—not by apostles, but by the ministry of those clergy who are ordained by the apostles and then ordained by their successors.

In other words, at the time of Christ, someone who was following Jesus Christ but wasn't one of the clergy couldn't just go home and offer the Eucharist.

So, you know, Mary Magdalene—obviously holy; she has a much better track record than the twelve apostles when it comes to faithfully following Jesus from everything we see—she doesn't get to go and offer the Mass.

There’s no provision for that.

That was true then, and that’s true now.

It’s not a sign of holiness, but it is a sign that there’s a special priesthood.

Remember Isaiah 66, the promise that some would be chosen by God as priests and Levites.

That’s what we see in the Eucharistic or sacerdotal sacramental priesthood.

So I hope that’s clear: the temple veil does not get rid of the priesthood.

It does not get rid of the need to intercede for other people.

It does not eliminate our going to other people to pray for us.

The temple veil, instead, shows us that the temple—the orientation of our worship—has now changed in a radical way, away from the temple in Jerusalem and towards the body of Christ.

And now we have a new and living way to the Father because when we receive his Son, we are receiving the fullness of divinity bodily.

So this is a great promise that is in no way a knock on any Catholic theology but is uniquely, I would argue, fulfilled in a Catholic sacramental understanding.

You just don't find a good fulfillment of that anywhere in Protestantism.

I hope that helped.

We’re going to be in a very different world next week as we look at Sennacherib in the Old Testament and try to make sense of one of those confusing seminal Old Testament passages.

But for now, for Shem and Spopery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.