"True Worshipers"

Today we celebrate one of the principal feasts of Holy Orthodoxy: the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple. It is a momentous feast, observing the end of a whole life-world. Let us briefly sketch out some of the historical background to understand it better.

In the sixth century B.C. the Persians were the most powerful force on earth subjugating the Babylonians along with their vassal peoples. They believed that the favor of their god, to whom they offered blood sacrifice, lay behind their ascendancy. They saw themselves as god's agents on earth assuring the well-being of his life-world.

In Jerusalem the Persians ordered a Temple be built on Mt. Zion which would house the administrative center of their province Judah: collecting taxes, administering laws, convening tribunals, and ensuring the continuity of orderly worship, and, of course, feeding their god's insatiable thirst for blood. For these things were the first duties of the Persian emperor.

Writes Prof. Yihai Kiel of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,

This, of course, is exactly what we find in Deuteronomy and Leviticus: two books reflecting the Persian Scriptures with their attention to diet, personal hygiene, and acceptable social conduct. And Babylon's Code of Hammurabi (1772 B.C.) predates Moses by two centuries (according to the Rabbinical record) The Mesopotamian Code of Ur-Nammu (2050 B.C.) is earlier still.

In Judah, there would be no angels ascending and descending upon the sons and daughters of man (Jn 1:25). These were expressions of the religion of the Patriarchs to be suppressed even until the time of Jesus. Sadducees prohibited talk of angels, the afterlife, and the immortality of the soul. For a conquering power must retain control at all costs. They alone must be dispensers of permission. To countenance such powers given to individuals, encountering angels who reveal a far higher authority, would have been seen as dangerous, rising to sedition. And as late as the first century A.D., the Zion Temple authorities strictly forbade such talk.

Following invasion and conquest, the task before any imperial power, in general, was to maintain civil order: centralized government, centralized taxation, and centralized control of religion. And these task were carried out by Nehemiah, the Persian governor, leaving religious control to Ezra, his scribe and priest.

Ezra's achievement can be seen in the Persian religion being cleverly grafted on to the existing Hebrew Bible. Remember, Judeans of the first century could neither read nor write (literary rate of 3%). They did not sit before their televisions and object: "What's this? A different actor playing the leading role in my favorite drama?!" Access to holy texts was mediated by religious officials. And Ezra's appropriation of those texts can be seen plainly — the last passage of 2 Chronicles is the first passage in the Book of Ezra — and not so plainly seen — with blood sacrifice being written into the narrative in many places.

Yet the intrusion of a foreign power could not finessed. After all, there all these people in charge, speaking Aramaic (the Babylonian language) and dressed in strange garments, resulting in a Levant that was balkanized into many varieties of Hebrew belief. For example, the Essenes down to the first century A.D. rejected blood sacrifice. They would go down to the Temple and set their faces prophetically against the Temple and performed an examination of conscience in a ritual way.

And one notable Teacher, the Son of God, called the whole enterprise into question, wryly mocking it in His Parable of the Good Samaritan. You will recall that the Temple priests and the Levites receive their come-uppance in this story. And, on one occasion, Jesus riotously protests in the Temple itself — overturning cages where sacrificial animals were sold, beating the men who sold them with a whip (which He made), and crying out, you shall not make my Father's house a "place of trade." We should read this phrase very carefully and not export our modern English idioms into the mix. It was an οικον εμφοριον / oikon emphorion. What was being traded? It was a vain attempt to trade blood sacrifice for salvation. And this Jesus could not tolerate.

At the arrival of these Persian agents and their ascent to power, whole migrations of Hebrew peoples began — to the south in Elephantine of Egypt where they built a Temple honoring YHWH (a Name which was not permitted to be said in Jerusalem), and to the north, in Samaria, where a Temple was built on Mt. Gerizim, also keeping the old ways, the ways of the Patriarchs.

As we have seen, in the era just preceding Jesus' birth, the the rulers of Judah, the Maccabees, had taken this Persian hybrid religion, which they called Judah-ism, to a new level insisting that all Hebrews be conformed to it.

But let us turn away from the society at-large and focus on the disciples of Jesus in a personal way. After all, they were not from Judah. They were from the historical Northern Kingdom, away from hated Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the last place they wanted to go!

Now tell me, what would your prayer-life be without a Father in Heaven? When I pray to God, I unfailingly say, "Gracious Lord, Almighty God and Father ....." If I could not, my experience would be very different.

What would your journey toward holiness be without a Holy Spirit? Can you imagine it? We see a world around us alive with His Presence.

And what would your conception of life be without a Kingdom of Heaven? What would it be to have the Bosom of Abraham taken from you? And at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, these were the things He proclaimed. (The end of the first chapter of St. John's Gospel.) That is, Jesus announced a restoration of the old ways — a restoration of the Hebrew life-world and intimacy with God. Not the distant god worshiped in the Zion Temple, but intimacy. More than any other thing, that is what this feast is all about.

If we were asked to single out one thing that prompted God to be born into the world when He was born into the world, what would it be? The Roman Empire represented no threat to God's people. Said Jesus, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's." No, it would be that hateful house of blood that sought to subjugate the hearts and souls and minds of the historical Hebrew people with the absurd offering of dead goats as a substitute for genuine spiritual life. The whole concept was mocked by God in the Psalms: