"I saw no temple in the city." (Revelation 21:22)
In the old Jerusalem, the heart of the city was the Temple, and the heart of the Temple was the throne, the kapporeth, or mercy-seat -- the empty space above the Ark of the Covenant, between two golden cherubim. It was the most potent sign of Israel's repudiation of idols, the great speaking absence between the images. In the middle of the life of the covenant people is the space where God is. To go and see God in Jerusalem is to look at the curtained holy place and know that behind it is the empty space from which mercy and promise come forth, the "help from the sanctuary" and the "answer from heaven" referred to in the psalms.
In our history, the only possibility of knowing God is to face, at least sometimes, the silence, the absence between the cherubim. Only by doing so can we learn to look to a God who is free to forgive and re-create because he is not bound by our imaginings. The mercy-seat is the place of reconciliation, because here we make no claim on God, place no restriction on him by our guilt-conditioned fancies, but only stand before him in trust and expectancy. While we still live in history, our images of God are always shaped by our past, our memory. How then shall we meet the God who is free from all this, free to give us a future, without the silence of the sanctuary, without the moments when we face the emptiness between words and images?
In the new Jerusalem, however, there is no temple, because its temple is the Lord God and the Lamb. The place of atonement and promise is no longer the hopeful silence between our words; it is the whole space of the city, the whole common life of the redeemed community. The light of presence is not a sanctuary lamp but the light in which the people of God see each other's faces. God is not a thing to be seen, not even a distant sun in the sky. God is the common air we breathe, the very possibility of seeing and moving. Clement of Alexandria spoke of the goal of our life as a coming to be at home with God -- a state where there is no gap between knowing ourselves, knowing each other, and knowing God. In this city beyond our history and our imagining, we shall not be the prisoners of our memory; even its pains and traumas will speak to us of God. Our language and our bodies will not be mechanisms for isolating ourselves, but will be the sharing of God with each other, the showing to one another of the divine freedom and creative mercy. "His name shall be on their foreheads." We shall be to each other not idols but icons, effective signs of God's transfiguration of the world; and God will no longer be for us the eruption into our lives of an alien silence.
Meanwhile we live between the old Jerusalem and the new. We cannot be without that alien silence, the emptiness between the cherubim, yet we live in hope of a city where no space need be set aside for a mercy-seat. It is in the life and death of the Lamb of God that the silence culminates; it is in his life and death that we know there is no more need for a mercy-seat, and the veil of the sanctuary is torn down. To stand before Jesus in his action and passion is to stand, as did the ancient Israelites, before something that intrudes between our images and fancies. The merciful freedom of God steps into the world, becomes a physical hand outstretched, a name spoken, a meal shared, something resisting all categories we wish we could bring to it. A god? No. An angel? No? A virtuous man? No. A prophet? No, but a life whose acts are the acts of the Wisdom of God, the beginning of his ways. And at last, a silence not between the cherubim but between two thieves, and an absence between two white-clad figures in a burial vault.
Here is our altar and our sanctuary. This life and death and empty grave are the mercy-seat, the space of God's freedom. If we pray and wait before God in silence, then, as the greatest Christian mystics have so often said, that is a silence that can never forget or blot our the humanity of Jesus. Our prayer moves between the naked trust of listening for a God whose ways we cannot speak of, and a pondering of the particular history of Jesus' words and deeds and suffering. All our prayer is nourished from these two sources -- silence and the reading of the gospel.
Jesus is our holy place, which also means that he is the promise of a new kind of holiness. Here is a life in which the detail, even the triviality, of a human story becomes the word and name of God to us, so that we know that the contours of a human story can be the presence of God. If we are so drawn into the words and acts and passion of Jesus that (as Paul said) his life and death are at work in us, we become sanctuaries to each other, holy places, mercy-seats. And at the last, when we come at last to be at home with God and the Lamb, this process will be complete; we shall speak God's name to each other in the very fact of our being. There will be no temples.
In concluding, there are two things worth remembering about the holy places of the Christian church. First...holy places are normally linked by history, dedication, or both to Christian persons. They are places that recall to us a life in whose detail and movement Christ has been made visible. Second, they are places whose structure and function cannot be understood apart from the reality of a community (which is how they differ from pagan temples, ancient and modern). They are for Christian persons assembled, and in that assembly we are learning the lessons of John's vision, learning to read the name of God on the foreheads of our neighbors, to see each other as signs of God's mercy and liberty. We are learning to see God face to face as we learn to see each other face to face in trust and hope. When we have learned to look to each other for signs of God's promise, then indeed, for the whole human world, "there shall be no more night."
-- From A Ray of Darkness by Rowan Williams
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