Eden, Torah, Jesus

Prolegomenon to sacramental theology

Born naked as an infant, Adam was under “guardians and managers” until the time set by his Father. Created to be lord of all, to share in the Creator’s creative rule over creation, Adam would one day be elevated to kingship.

At the moment of his birth from earth and breath, he was a trainee, a servant in the Lord’s garden. Adam could eat fruit from the tree of life, communing in life with his Father. For the time being, however, he was not permitted to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of judgment that signified his entrance into mature kingly wisdom and authority. “Taste not, touch not” was the first lesson of humanity’s pedagogy.

The most immediate and explicit consequence of Adam’s disobedience was exclusion from the garden of Eden, and specifically from the tree of life. That exclusion is the premise of the entire old covenant order. Outside Eden, Adam and his children were not only weak and dependent creatures, but now delivered over to the reign of Death and Sin, living in corruptible, shameful, and now mortal flesh. By Adam’s sin, the whole human race came under wrath, God’s handing-over of humanity to the enslavement they chose for themselves. Cain did not eat the forbidden fruit, but he too was exiled from Eden. According to Paul, death came into the world on the heels of sin, so that after Adam, death spread to all men (Rom 5). And when death spreads, sin spreads.

From the beginning, the garden was a unique location. It was Yahweh’s earthly home, where Adam and Eve communed with Him through the fruit of the tree of life. It was “holy space” because the holy God was present there. After Adam’s expulsion from the garden, holy space became inaccessible space. Yahweh stationed cherubim at the gate of the garden to guard against every attempt at re-entry. From Adam on, to enter the presence of God, one had to pass through cherubic sword and fire. No man could commune in the presence of God unless he first died.

After Babel, the human race became internally divided, as well as separated from God’s sanctuary. In the aftermath of Babel, Yahweh called Abraham as a new Adam, the father of a new humanity. Through Abraham and his seed, God promised to restore the human race to Himself and to knit the human race back together.

The Promise of Torah

As Paul insists, Torah doesn’t contradict the Abrahamic promise. It’s rather a step toward the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise.

Torah is given to Israel outside Eden, after Babel, and it assumes the conditions of Edenic and Babelic curse. Torah does not restore open access to the garden. It does not demand that the cherubim lay down their fiery swords, reunite the nations in one flesh, or make them all one flesh with God. Simply by the fact of its being given to Israel and not to everyone, Torah establishes a hierarchy of access and responsibility. Torah is accommodated to the postlapsarian conditions of the human race.

Yet Torah institutes a partial recovery of Eden. The construction of the מקדשׁ creates a distinction between holy and common space, and thereby between holy and common people and things. The intention behind the sanctuary is, however, frequently misunderstood. Israel’s holy places are restricted spaces, off-limits to all but authorized personnel, priests who have “filled the hand” and wear their robes of glory and beauty (Ex 28-29; Lev 8-9).

The building of the tabernacle and later the temple does not create the conditions of exclusion and distance. Rather, the sanctuary represents a counter-movement to the curse of Eden. After Eden, the Creator had no earthly home; at Sinai, He moved into a tent among the tents of Israel. Yahweh drove Adam and Eve out of the garden; He invites Aaron and his sons in.

For the first time since Eden, a human being stands before the Creator to serve. For the first time since Yahweh stationed cherubim at the gate of the garden, human beings take over the Adamic-cherubic task of “guarding” Yahweh’s house (שׁמר; Genesis 2:15). For the first time since Adam, holy men walk on holy ground, with a veil, embroidered with golden cherubim between them and Yahweh. The tabernacle is holy space, but the boundaries of holy space have become porous.

Having taken up residence among the Israelites, Yahweh invites all of them to His house to share His goods. Under the circumstances, Yahweh’s hospitality must be restricted, the welcome must be a controlled welcome. But Yahweh sets up His house so Israel can draw near as possible.

Purity regulations are frequently explained as expressions of disgust, as distance-marking boundaries. Whatever they are elsewhere, in Leviticus, they are the opposite. Yahweh specifies the physical conditions that make Israelites unacceptable in His presence, but then invites Israel in by publishing the rites by which Israel can be cleansed to approach in safety. The purity regulations of Torah are prohibitions, “Taste not, touch not.”

But the prohibitions are imposed for the sake of access. The No to impurity is for the sake of the Yes of welcome. The purity texts focus on the details of impurity, but the telos of these regulations is to prescribe mechanisms for removal of impurity, which means the closure of distance.

Sacrifice is a “gate liturgy,” a liturgy of return and access, designed for worshipers who are excluded from full and complete enjoyment of the presence of God. Sacrifice does not eliminate distance, but it does what can be done: Like Yahweh’s original sacrifice outside Eden, the sacrifices of the sanctuary cover Israel’s flesh. The worshiper himself cannot draw near to Yahweh’s table to offer himself as “bread” for God (cf. לחם אלוֹהים, Lev 21:21-22), but sends a substitutionary animal to represent him in Yahweh’s presence, to submit to the sword and to be translated to divine smoke and fire on his behalf.

The animal must be killed in the course of its approach to Yahweh’s fire: It cannot be otherwise, since the worshiper approaches Yahweh from a condition of “flesh,” under wrath, exiled from Yahweh’s cherub-guarded house. Even the animal cannot get into God’s presence without suffering death at the hands of the cherubic priests with their swords and fire. Yet through the animal offering, the worshiper is able to draw near to the Creator. Augustine’s definition of sacrifice (City of God 10.6) as any act by which the actors seek to be united to God in holy society perfectly captures the sense of Levitical sacrifice. Sacrifice traverses the boundary between profane and sacred space, as the animal serves in a priestly capacity to enter the sanctuary on the worshiper’s behalf. It includes a moment of substitutionary death, but the animal dies in the process of drawing near to God.

Yahweh expelled Adam from the garden in wrath. In the tabernacle system, Yahweh goes out into the howling waste to find His unfaithful bride and bring her back home. He goes outside Eden to give a taste of Eden to Adam’s children who live east of Eden. Torah is part of Yahweh’s mission as the Good Shepherd who seeks and restores the lost.

Torah Fulfilled

Jesus is obedient to the detailed regulations of Torah. He does not break His Father’s commandments. More deeply, He faithfully enacts the mission of Torah in order to undo the curses of Eden and Babel.

Announcing the coming of God’s kingdom, Jesus enacts all that the Torah aimed at and partially achieved. In Jesus, Yahweh steps out from behind the temple curtains into Israel’s flesh, offering access, welcome, festivity, hospitality, forgiveness, joy, and abundant life. To draw near to Jesus is tantamount to drawing near to the temple. Anyone who eats with Jesus is closer to Yahweh than any priest had ever been. Jesus purifies the unclean by the finger of God, the touch of the king that communicates the sanctifying power of the Spirit.

Wherever Jesus goes, Eden is realized again, an Eden of open access and abundance. Jesus welcomes Gentiles, and heals and eats with them too, undoing Babel. Jesus teaches the way of justice, a righteousness that surpasses the scribes’, and around Him forms a community of followers, living by the Torah of Jesus. Jesus calls twelve disciples, confers apostolic authority on them to make them partners in his mission and leaders of the renewed Israel he assembles. That band of disciples, following, eating and conversing with the incarnate Creator, is the seed form of the church. It is the first, barely visible, beginning of salvation in social form.

From the beginning, both John the Baptist and Jesus announce that Israel is doomed. He tells parables that depict the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders as murderous villains, so angering His targets that they plot to murder Him. He rides into Jerusalem as the king of Zechariah 9, condemns the temple as a den of thieves while pre-enacting its eventual destruction, excoriates the scribes and Pharisees as prophet-murdering hypocrites, shames Jewish intellectuals in public dispute, and prophesies that the temple will be dismantled block by massive block. Everything He speaks and does fulfills Torah, and Jesus knows that His mission puts him on a collision course with the Jewish leaders.

And it does. Jesus spends most of His public ministry teaching and enacting a new way, but the rulers and authorities of this world do not let Him get away with it. Jesus is crucified as a rebel against Torah, because He claims authority to purify and heal, because of His lordly act in the temple, because he acts as if He was Himself the place of God’s presence. The Jewish leaders want Jesus dead because He threatens the elemental system that they consider the unchanging physics of religion and society. Romans want Jesus dead to protect the peace and calm of a bit of the Eastern empire, and to vindicate Roman power and honor.

Torah and Roman justice are both commandeered into a supreme act of injustice – killing the One who enacted the justice that Torah and Roman law aimed to achieve. Jesus lives by the Spirit in the midst of the flesh, and the guardians of Torah and Romanitas cannot tolerate the transgression of the Spirit who blows where He wills. They crucify Jesus, a son sacrificed to the interests of the slaves, a mature man slaughtered by children content to remain in their childhood.

On the account just offered, He died because He provoked the murderous rage of those with authority to kill. That is a psycho-historical answer to the question, it is also a theological answer, because the Jesus who provoked the murderous rage of Jewish and Roman leaders was the incarnate Son of the God of Israel, the Creator God who expelled Adam from Eden, offered promises to Abraham, appeared on Sinai to deliver the law. That God comes to take His throne, but those He comes to rule do not want this one as their ruler and judge. God comes to His own, and His own do not receive Him.

Yet God is not finished. The rage of Jew and Gentile does not keep Him from keeping His promises to Adam and Abraham. Death itself does not prevent Him from opening Eden and forming one new humanity from post-Babelic shards. In the resurrection, the Father overturns the verdicts against Jesus, proves Jesus to be His beloved Son, and raises Him to continue His mission, now on the far side of death. He regathers His disciples and sends His Spirit to them.

Filled with the Spirit of Jesus, reconciled to their Father, they continue to live as they lived with Jesus – eating and drinking and rejoicing, preaching the kingdom, casting out demons, providing for the needy. They invite others to share in the new humanity, the society of salvation, baptizing the nations into the table fellowship of the church.