The veil and the new world

March 28, 2010
Palm Sunday

The Passion of Christ

"It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two."

And the world was made new. The back of the Old World, the Old Law, the Old Testament, broke. The back of the Devil snapped. The stranglehold of death released.

The game changed.

There was an Ark that held the presence of God, the tablets of His law and His physcial presence on earth. It was shrouded in temples and tents and always there was a veil that stood up against it, and always there were a small, select set of people who were allowed to go inside.

Then Jesus died for our sins, and the veil was torn and now the true presence of God is offered daily to the sight of as many witnesses as the church can hold and fallible, sinful men who still live and move and spend most of their lives obsessing over a Fallen World take His true presence physically into their bodies.

The first to speak after this happened was one of the men who nailed him to the cross or stood by and ordered his men to. He was a Roman soldier, a centurion from Italy dispatched to one of the furthest flung conquered lands to keep the peace or, less likely given his rank but possible, another conquered people, earning his Roman citizenship. He was hated there, a people thirsting for revolution who had never before been suffered by their God to waste their lives oppressed - or at least, more full of the stories of Moses leading his people to freedom than the length of their slavery in Egypt. He killed three men that day, and God knows how many more he had killed, but then the world changed.

The sky darkened, and the Earth shook, and he was the first to speak, an enemy of the Jews, a Gentile and likely a heathen, "Surely this man was innocent," and sometimes even, "Surely this man was the Son of God."

And the world was new, because it was a Roman centurion who spoke first. Because the presence of God was not tucked behind a curtain through which only a select few, born into the privilege, could pass.

And in this new world, the apostles and disciples would eventually know how to move, but already they knew that they were no longer a part of it. They stood aloof and away as everyone else returned home. Perhaps they could not bear to watch, but in the ending of the Old World, they stood apart already at the moment the New was born.

They knew that the world had changed. They did not understand everything - or even most of it - until it was explained to them after His resurrection, but they went out and tried to make the world anew. Before the veil was torn they were still plotting revolution, arguing about seats on the twelve thrones of the Kingdom of God and their relative greatness. And then that world ended, and in the New World they cast lots to see who would go where across the great wide Earth, and they spent their lives telling the story of how God became a man and died and changed everything. The rules were different. The Chosen People of God was a title that now extended to everyone, and the rules for His people were different as well.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.

So if you had been born in Mexico and there was a chance for a better life for you and your family across a border, how would you want to be greeted on the other side? Would you want to have to contend with peevish fear of change?

So if you were born with whatever gene flips or chemical appears to influence sexuality away from heteronormativity, would you want to be told that your love could never be sanctioned by God's Church?

You would endure, because that is our call, but loving other people's family as you love your own is what makes you willing to send a son off to fight a just war, is what makes you work a few extra years before retirement because your savings are compromised by the taxes which pay for other people's children to attend college along with yours.

But that's not the only call we have in this new world, it's just the outlook that loves thy neighbor most in current political hot button issues.

Would you stand in the streets and proclaim the Coming of the Lord if you were surrounded by people who did not know the Greatest Story Ever Told? Would you reach out your hand to do His wonders?

I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore or where I'm going with this. I don't really know how the New World operates, even after two thousand years. Because the old rules make more sense. They are quantifiable and concrete and simple - there is a formula we can comprehend and it all requires so much less work than figuring out an entirely new dynamic in the relationship between God and man.

We've made strides in that direction, of course, but we took a long detour in which Christianity was little more than the tool of the powerful to placate and control the masses. And since then we've been running from the laws and rigid regulations of that system which used the threat of damning a man's soul to keep him from rising up against injustice in life. Not realizing that that was exactly what Jesus died to replace with something better.

Every day it seems less conceivable He left this work in the hands of fallible men.

But that's not fair, because, always, this story was there. The story of how God became a man, limited Himself and came down and became like us, and then He died to redeem our sins. God Himself died a terrible, human death, as we must all do, and then He rose from the dead and conquered it and set us free.

And no amount of theocratic tyranny can change that story spreading itself over the wide world, and it is beautiful and it has saved so many souls.

But with it, I believe, was meant to come a radical new system, absolutely radical social change, that leveled the playing field. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the downtrodden, and the meek shall inherit the Earth. The greatest among you has become the least. That wasn't just for after death. The Kingdom of God is now, it is here, that's what we are meant to do.

It's easier to maintain the status quo and wait for the Second Coming. But that is not what we are called to be. We are the beloved children of God, adopted through Jesus Christ's sacrifice, and we are sent to be His emissaries on this Earth.

We are meant to change things. The Kingdom of God is here, it is people striving every day for a better world for their fellow man, to increase love and faith and trust and hope. Now.

The Church cannot forget that the Veil has been torn. Anyone who tries to re-erect a new one now...

His Presence moves among us. He is here. Are we listening? Love one another as I have loved you. To the point of taking apart, at the cost of our own power and eventually of our own life, the system that exploits and kills our fellow man, that keeps us from full communion with the Body of Christ and with God Himself.

And I probably sound crazy, like I've gone too far, but I'm not advocating any kind of revolution on a grand or even personal scale. It's a matter of looking past the ten thousand labels and differences of station and money and race and gender that keep us apart and making our decisions and our judgments and extending our loves from that perspective rather than the world's. Of basing our opinions and our actions on the love we share on equal footing with all of our fellow men, take steps that will lift all men up. At the cost of the comfortableness of the lives we lead.

Because on a Friday long ago darkness fell over the land for three hours and the veil was torn, and we like that centurion must know that the world changed because an innocent man, the Son of God, died at our hands to redeem us of sin. And the world changed.