When
the Roman legions conquered Jerusalem in 70 AD, they sacked the Jewish temple.
They entered into the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, which for centuries
only the Jewish High Priest had ever set eyes upon. They expected to find
treasures galore, like they had found in every other temple they had ever
looted.
They found sacred objects of gold in the Holy Place outside
of the innermost chamber. The Arch of Titus in Rome shows the famed seven-branched
candlestick, a table for showbread, and sacred trumpets being carried out by
Roman soldiers. But in the Holy of Holies they found nothing. It was empty.
There was no famed ark of the covenant or anything else. This
was not because the ark had been safely hidden away for Indiana Jones to later find.
The holiest object of the Jewish religion had been lost centuries earlier and
nothing ever took its place. There remained only the empty space to symbolize the
presence of God.
Even when the Hebrews still possessed the ark, there was no
image of God on it. On the lid of the ark were two cherubim facing each other with
their wings outstretched. God was said to dwell in the empty space between the
cherubim. YHWH was unique among the gods of the Ancient Near East. Whereas all
the other gods were depicted with images, the Hebrew deity was imageless.
The ark itself was originally just an empty box as well,
before the Hebrews began to fill it with sacred objects, such as "the
golden pot that had manna, Aaron's rod that budded, and the tablets of the
covenant" according to the Letter to the Hebrews. That is the way we
religious people are. We tend to fill up the empty places with material objects,
doctrines and traditions until there is no place left for God.
On Earth Day the pastor of our local church began a series
of messages on the biblical creation stories. Last Sunday she pointed out that in
the first chapter of Genesis God spent the first three days making empty spaces
and the next three days filling them in. I had never thought of it that way
before. Emptiness and Fullness. Like any good sermon her words kept me thinking
long after the benediction.
The universe started off as “empty and void” according to
Genesis, and God preserved the emptiness in the midst of the fullness of
creation. God created things but then separated them in order to maintain empty
spaces. Separating the light from the darkness, separating the heavens from the
earth, and then separating the waters on earth to form inhabitable land.
The Tao Te Ching says,
Spokes unite
in the hub,
but it is emptiness at the center
that makes the wheel turn.
A pot is
made of clay,
but it is emptiness in the center
that holds the contents.
A house is
made of wood,
but it is emptiness within the walls
that makes it inhabitable.
A human is
made of flesh and blood,
but it is emptiness at the center
that makes us
useful.
God is in the empty space. That is what the spacious
interiors of the great cathedrals communicate. That is why the wide expanse of
the heavens amazes us. That is why mountaintop vistas take our breath away. That
is why the Grand Canyon awes us. That is why prayer and meditation are so
powerful. We encounter emptiness at the center of our being.
That is where divine and human meet - in the Holy of Holies of
the soul, the open space of consciousness which is our true nature. We are not these
physical bodies or the busyness of the human mind. We are the space at the
center. The treasure we seek is found in the emptiness.
Posts
