New Testament holiness and Old Testament holiness

  • Some­thing I read in an essay in “God and Man” by Fr. Anthony Bloom brought together thoughts of the sea­son and reflec­tions about the Ark of the Covenant. That’s a pretty long jour­ney to take in a cou­ple short para­graphs, but I’m glad I came across it, because it helps me tie up some loose ends.

    Father Anthony’s essay was enti­tled “Holi­ness and Prayer,” and in it he says:

    The scan­dal of the New Tes­ta­ment, the impos­si­ble thing, is that the Inac­ces­si­ble One has become acces­si­ble, the tran­scen­dent God has become flesh and dwelt among us. The holi­ness which sur­passed every human notion and was a sep­a­ra­tion reveals itself to be oth­er­wise; the very holi­ness of God can become infi­nitely close with­out becom­ing any the less mys­te­ri­ous; it becomes acces­si­ble with­out our being able to pos­sess it; it lays hold of us with­out destroy­ing us. …

    In Christ, we are some­thing which could be revealed by God but which could not even be dreamed of by man: the full­ness of Divin­ity in human flesh. Here is the crux of holi­ness. It is acces­si­ble to us because of the fact of the Incar­na­tion. This does not lessen the mys­tery of God: a purely tran­scen­dent God is eas­ier to under­stand or imag­ine than the God of the Incarnation.

    I meet these sorts of peo­ple some­times and they amaze me. They say they believe in God — or a god, at least — who orders all things and hears our prayers and makes the stars go around, but they just have to draw the line at the Vir­gin Birth or the Res­ur­rec­tion. I don’t even know what I’m sup­posed to say. You would have to believe that God is involved on one hand with in the very least aspects of your life and on the other with the most immense func­tions of oper­at­ing the uni­verse with­out believ­ing that He would work a mir­a­cle some­where in the mid­dle — namely, in human his­tory and soci­ety. And that is, after all, what Christ­mas commemorates.

    Or maybe this says it better:

    And when we stand or imag­ine the creche of the Nativ­ity in our imag­i­na­tion or in plas­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tions and can take the Child-God in our hands, we are con­fronted with a greater mys­tery than that of the imper­cep­ti­ble God. How can we under­stand that the full depth of infin­ity and eter­nity lies here, hid­den and at the same time revealed by a frail human body that is frag­ile and trans­par­ent to the pres­ence of God?

    As Father Bloom explores this point, he con­trasts the holi­ness of the Old Tes­ta­ment with that of the new.

    … the Old Tes­ta­ment was aware of a cre­ated holi­ness within the cre­ated world. Every which God lays hold of and which becomes His own pos­ses­sion, such as the Ark, a per­son, a holy place, par­tic­i­pates in a cer­tain way in God’s holi­ness and becomes an object of rev­er­en­tial fear.

    I had been think­ing about the Ark of the Covenant because Greg sent me this arti­cle from Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine. A reporter went to an Ethiopian Ortho­dox monastery that main­tains that it keeps the Ark and has for many, many cen­turies. Ethiopian tra­di­tion holds that the Ark came into the coun­try in the 10th cen­tury BC and has been kept there ever since (and how it came there is a fas­ci­nat­ing story in itself, and worth read­ing the arti­cle for, but I’ll leave that part for now). The reporter doesn’t see the Ark because no one sees it except one monk. That monk deigns to meet with the reporter, but leaves more ques­tions behind than answers:

    A few feet from where I stood, through the iron bars, a monk who looked to be in his late 50s peered around the chapel wall.

    “It’s the guardian,” the priest whispered.

    He wore an olive-colored robe, dark pill­box tur­ban and san­dals. He glanced war­ily at me with deep-set eyes. Through the bars he held out a wooden cross painted yel­low, touch­ing my fore­head with it in a bless­ing and paus­ing as I kissed the top and bot­tom in the tra­di­tional way.

    I asked his name.

    “I’m the guardian of the ark,” he said, with the priest trans­lat­ing. “I have no other name.”

    I told him I had come from the other side of the world to speak with him about the ark. “I can’t tell you any­thing about it,” he said. “No king or patri­arch or bishop or ruler can ever see it, only me. This has been our tra­di­tion since Mene­lik brought the ark here more than 3,000 years ago.”

    We peered at each other for a few moments. I asked a few more ques­tions, but to each he remained as silent as an appari­tion. Then he was gone.

    “You’re lucky, because he refuses most requests to see him,” the priest said. But I felt only a lit­tle lucky. There was so much more I wanted to know.

    The com­menters to this arti­cle were over­whelm­ingly skep­ti­cal; some were down­right con­temp­tu­ous. I was struck by how very lit­tle they could imag­ine what it would be like to be exposed to this kind of Old Tes­ta­ment holi­ness. Com­menters offered sug­ges­tions of how the monk could’ve been over­pow­ered, how an infrared cam­era would reveal whether there was a metal object inside. One com­menter is of the opin­ion that if the ark is there, then the monks should turn it over to the world so that it can be seen by every­one, like a trav­el­ing cir­cus. None seem to under­stand what the reporter felt.

    It’s hard to believe in any­thing in the world as it is now. That might be one thing that the holi­ness of the Old Tes­ta­ment and the holi­ness of the New Tes­ta­ment have in com­mon — they are both over­looked, both dis­re­garded. Peo­ple who regard them­selves as enlight­ened think lit­tle of them, when they think about them at all.

    But some­times mir­a­cles are quiet, and always they’re unex­pected. As the sec­ond verse of “O Lit­tle Town of Beth­le­hem” tells us:

    How silently, how silently
    The won­drous gift is giv’n!
    So God imparts to human hearts
    The trea­sures of His heav’n.
    No ear may hear His com­ing,
    But in this world of sin,
    Where meek souls will
    Receive Him still,
    The dear Christ enters in.


    Related posts:

    1. Fairy tales, the Old Tes­ta­ment and Napoleon Dynamite
    2. Fast­ing and peace
    3. Is this what the [bleep] is going on?
    4. “The Russ­ian Priest”: On our rela­tion­ship to the state
    5. Read­ing the lives of the saints

    November 28th, 2007 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 11.28.2007

    I am fas­ci­nated by the idea of the Ark being in Ethiopia. I know that my priest men­tioned that he doesn’t believe it, but there’s a bit of hope in me.

    The arti­cle sounds inter­est­ing, thanks.

  • Cather­ine K.

    There was also a very nice arti­cle in National Geo­graphic in 2002 or 2003 about this. There was also a related arti­cle in the same edi­tion about a part of Ethiopia with a rather extreme land­scape, and the most beau­ti­ful churches from long ago (no longer used, if mem­ory serves right), and what you could still see of the iconog­ra­phy was quite striking.

  • Grace

    I find myself a lit­tle intrigued with all of it as well. Not enough to hop a flight or any­thing, and not enough to try to con­vince any­one that the Ark absolutely *must* be where they say it is. But heck, what’s life with­out a lit­tle mys­tery, right?

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