“Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?”
It is a haunting question at the climax of a fascinating gospel account (Luke 2:41–52). The account is familiar: the misplaced child. The frantic search through the Passover crowds. The parental question (which always sounds more hurt, than miffed or angry): “Child, why have you treated us like this?”
In lighter moments, I picture Jesus’s 12-year old response accompanied by a pre-teen eye roll (if the perfect Son of God could perform such a feat): “Why were you searching? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” It is as if his presence in the temple was the most obvious place to look for him. Which in retrospect, I think it was. And is.
To capture some of the mystery that haunts Jesus’s response, the book of Exodus can help us. At the end of Exodus, the tabernacle is completed—the tabernacle, the forerunner to the temple. It is a structure that almost didn’t get made!
You know the story: how Israel arrived at Sinai and God graciously made a covenant with them: “You will be my people, and I will be your God.” Once the covenant was made, God detailed how the tabernacle should be constructed . . . and furnished . . . and its ministers clothed. But before the structure could be completed, disaster struck.
Over Moses’s 40 days up the mountain, the people had grown impatient for this God who’d promised to be with them. So, they made an image—a golden calf, crediting to it their deliverance out of Egypt. It was a rejection of their intimate covenant relationship with God who cannot be represented—or contained—in any image. And once they’d rejected God, why would the tabernacle be needed? Why would God want to continue in the midst of people who reject him?
It is precisely this problem that seems to be at stake when God sends Moses down the mountain to deal with Israel, and Aaron, and the calf. God and Moses spend quite some time dickering back and forth about to whom the people belong (“they’re yours, Moses . . . no, they’re yours God . . . no they’re yours.” It is dark humour at its best . . . or worst?). No one—neither Moses, nor God—seems willing to claim them.
The peoples’ identity is decided (they belong to God), but God concludes “I’ll not go up with [the people], or I will consume [them] on the way” (Exod. 33:2–3). Once again, Moses intercedes on behalf of the people. He knows that it is only God’s holy presence that makes them a special people. So, he pleads with God and God relents and allows that “my presence will go with you” (Exod. 33:14).
When God makes the decision to remain with his people despite their sinfulness, the tabernacle project is back on; it definitely is a go. Why? Because it is the tabernacle that allows God to move from Mt. Sinai. The tabernacle is a prepared, "portable Sinai," a holy vehicle that enables a holy God a holy space to travel with a decidedly unholy people. Safely. Right at the very centre of the community, marking the people as unique; as chosen.
Moses makes the tabernacle, and Exodus ends as that portable Sinai is completed on the first day of the first month (Exod. 40:17). The date is important. Within two weeks of its completion, Israel will celebrate Passover, rehearsing their history of God’s power exerted on behalf of the people; God’s saving power exercised in their midst and before the eyes of the Egyptians. God’s power going out with the people as they exit Egypt.
As a further reflection, many premodern readers saw the first day of the first month as a reminder of the first day of all creation—that day when God made the whole cosmos his tabernacle, determining that there he would dwell and be with his people.
The first day of the first month: the tabernacle is completed, the cosmos in miniature; a place where God chooses to abide with the people he has created.
But even though the tabernacle was completed to God’s specifications, did Moses hold his breath, wondering if God would indeed come with them on the journey? Did he worry that the Golden Calf incident had been just one-straw beyond what God would tolerate? Did Israel wonder if God would really stay with them?
The Exodus narrative tells us Moses completed the tabernacle “as the LORD commanded him” (Exod. 40:16 et passim). And no sooner was it finished than . . . whoosh!!! Without even time for a narrative breath, God moved in. His glory-cloud filled the structure. It is so overwhelming that Moses couldn’t even enter (Exod. 40:33–35)!
God had moved from the mountain top! He had come near! He was with them, just as the glory-cloud had been with them all through Exodus: with them to enable their escape from bondage (13:21-22); with them as Israel’s protector, looking out of the cloud to defeat Pharaoh’s terrifying army at the sea (14:19, 24); with them in the cloud while Israel grumbled about food and drink (ch. 16); with them on the consecrated mountain, making a covenant from the midst of the cloud and for the sake of the world.
And with them now in the tabernacle at the centre of the community, marking them as different, as holy. It is a pattern of "being with" that doesn’t begin in Exodus but is the focus of Exodus. It is the story of Emmanuel; of God with us. A story that begins in Genesis when God speaks the cosmos into existence, sets the garden as a tabernacle, and where he walks with his human creation in deep fellowship.
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And I wonder: during that much later Passover festival, when Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem as a 12-year old boy—a boy beginning to grasp his own full identity, exercising it—I wonder: did he have a sense of déjà vu? Did he recognize the temple he entered that day? When he said to Mary and Joseph, “Did you not know that I must be in my father’s house?” did he know that he had already inhabited it, long ago in Solomon’s day? And before that in the tabernacle? Was he irresistibly drawn to the temple, just as he’d rushed in to fill the tabernacle once Moses completed it? Just as he’d rushed in to fill the temple after its completion?
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God’s glory moved from Sinai to the tabernacle (and later the temple) to be with his people, right in their very midst. But the tabernacle disappeared. And the temple was torn down. Until one day, when God began a new chapter of his old story of "being with." It began as Exodus did, in quietness. Out of the spotlight in a woman’s womb. It began when an ordinary young girl received a surprising visitation. There was no glory-cloud, but there was glory, nonetheless. And through this, a new tabernacle came among us; a new (but very old) expression of God-with-us. Not a tabernacle built out of linens, rods-and-sockets, and tabernacle furnishings. Rather (as Rowan Williams poetically puts it in his poem “Advent Calendar”), one that would come “like crying in the night / like blood, like breaking, / as the earth writhes to toss him free. / He will come like child.”
Once again (as John tells us), God came and tabernacled among us—a sinful and needy people. God—filled with grace and truth. No pillar of cloud and fire, but a veiled glory-cloud that came and rescued us from our own pharaonic imprisonment. Led us through the sea of baptism. Brought us to the mountain. And now sustains us on the journey. Emmanuel—the Church’s beating heart who promises one day to take his people into his promised land. With us, and eager to be so.
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At Pentecost, the tabernacle and temple metaphor shifts once more, infusing it with new meaning. In Ephesians, Paul reflects on the mysterious reality of God’s salvation, that makes of Jew and Gentile one new people. He says:
You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God (Eph. 2:19–22; emphasis added).
Christ has come, the tabernacle in which the veiled glory of God shines out. A temple in whom God draws near and brings us near.
And in Christ, we each are made into a part of that living temple. A structure in which God dwells. That is our vocation; our calling: a people brought into God’s Presence and thus made unique. Special. Changed. Holy. A living tabernacle; a living temple with Christ himself the cornerstone. This we are called to lean into: to live as God’s holy temple.
Amen.
A reflection from a sermon preached in Regent College Chapel, May 28, 2024.
