Ruck

At the moment Jesus died, three of the four Gospels stop describing Golgotha and cut, without warning, to a scene half a mile away, inside the temple. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each record it with almost the same words: the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. No one on the hill could have seen it. It happened behind walls, in a place only priests could enter. And yet the Gospel writers considered it so important that they interrupt the death of the Son of God to tell you about a piece of fabric. To understand why, you have to understand the veil. God's instructions for it go back to Exodus: a curtain of blue, purple, and scarlet yarn and fine twisted linen, with cherubim woven into it, hung to divide the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place, the Holy of Holies, the room where the presence of God dwelt above the ark. The cherubim were not decoration. The last time cherubim stood as a barrier in Scripture was at the gate of Eden, with a flaming sword, after Adam and Eve were driven out. The veil was Eden's gate, rebuilt in cloth. It said one thing: you cannot come in here. By Jesus' day, the temple was Herod's vast rebuilt structure, and the curtain matched its scale. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, describes the temple's great veil as a Babylonian tapestry of blue, scarlet, purple, and linen, embroidered with a panorama of the heavens, an enormous hanging some sixty feet high. Later rabbinic tradition, recorded in the Mishnah, claims the veil was a handbreadth thick, woven from seventy-two cords each of twenty-four strands, and that it took three hundred priests to immerse it when it needed cleaning. Those numbers are probably rabbinic exaggeration, and it is honest to say so. But even discounting them, we are describing something the size of a building's wall, thick, heavy, and woven by expert hands. It was not a bedsheet. No man could tear it. And Mark is precise: it tore from top to bottom. From the top, sixty feet up, where no hand could reach, downward. Whatever tore the veil did so from God's side of it. Now consider who was allowed past that curtain. One man. Once a year. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest, and only the high priest, passed through the veil into the Holy of Holies carrying the blood of a sacrifice, to sprinkle it before God for the sins of the nation. Every other day of the year, every other person alive, was kept out on pain of death. The high priest of the year AD 30 was Caiaphas, the man whose bones now lie in a museum drawer. That was the whole system: one mediator, one day, one room, and a curtain that stood every other hour of every other day announcing that God was here and you were not permitted to approach. Then, at three in the afternoon on a Friday outside the city, Jesus cried out, "It is finished," and breathed His last. And in the temple, in the middle of the afternoon sacrifice, with priests at their duties, the barrier ripped open from the top down, and the Holy of Holies stood exposed to anyone standing in the Holy Place. For the first time since Sinai, a human being could look straight into the place where God dwelt, and nothing stood in the way. The letter to the Hebrews, written to Jewish Christians who knew the temple intimately, explains what the Gospels only show. It calls the old system a shadow and says the high priest entering once a year with the blood of animals was pointing forward to something. Then it says this: "We have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh." Read that slowly. The curtain is His flesh. When His body was torn on the cross, the veil was torn in the temple, because they were the same barrier being removed by the same death. The high priest brought blood into the Holy of Holies once a year, and had to come back next year. Jesus, Hebrews says, entered once for all, with His own blood, and then did something no high priest ever did: He sat down. There was no more work to do. There is a strange witness to that afternoon from an unexpected source. The Talmud, the vast collection of rabbinic writings compiled centuries later, records that "forty years before the destruction of the temple" a series of ominous things began happening in the sanctuary: the lot for the LORD on the Day of Atonement stopped coming up in the priest's right hand, the crimson thread that was supposed to turn white as a sign of forgiveness stopped turning white, the westernmost lamp of the menorah kept going out, and the great temple doors began opening on their own at night, so that a leading rabbi rebuked them, warning that they were foretelling the temple's destruction. The temple was destroyed in AD 70. Forty years before is the year 30, the year of the crucifixion. This is a rabbinic source, not a Christian one, written by men who did not believe in Jesus and drew no connection to Him. It should be handled carefully, since the Talmud was written down long after the events. But according to Judaism's own memory, from that year onward, the signs of atonement in the temple stopped working, and no one could say why. The torn veil pointed two directions at once. It announced that the way to God was open. It also announced that the temple's purpose was finished. Within a generation, in AD 70, Roman legions burned the building to the ground, exactly as Jesus had wept and warned it would be, and not one stone was left on another. There has been no veil, no Holy of Holies, no Day of Atonement sacrifice since. The system that ended on that Friday afternoon was dismantled by history forty years later, and it has never returned. What replaced it is a man, seated at the right hand of God, and a door that does not close. People think that the cross is where a good teacher was killed by his enemies. But at the instant of His death, the one room on earth that God had walled off from humanity was flung open from the inside. Nobody stormed the temple. Nobody broke down the door. God tore the curtain Himself, and He tore it downward, toward us. This is what it means for you. There is no longer a room you cannot enter and no priest you must go through. The curtain that separated you from God did not wear thin over time; it was ripped in half by His own hand, at the cost of His own Son's body. Hebrews draws the conclusion for you: "Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace." Not creep near. Not earn your way near. Draw near, with confidence, because the way is open and it is never going to close again. The veil is torn. Walk in. Jesus is the great High Priest who opened the way, once for all. Thank You, Jesus.