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The sacramental
principle in Christianity means that the land is hallowed by
(association).
History signifies
because of what it contained: geography is sanctified because of
what it
housed. "I will be
there", said the voice in the bush to Moses, "as whom there I will
be".
The event of exodus
gives the only feasible clue to the God whom exodus pledges. What
happened became
definitive of what had to be recognized. The actual event enabled-
and
warranted- a mythology
about its meaning, a meaning meant to be, for all generations, a
reliable disclosure of
"whom they had believed". How "all our fathers passed through the
sea" became a theme of
memory. Exodus had sacramentalised their status as "the people
of God", and Passover
simply transacted the meaning in annual experience.
Apostolic Christianity
was heir to this perception of theology, only that the Cross of
Jesus
had become the epic
theme. Jesus, in the meaning of his wounds, became for
founding-Christians "the
place of the Name", where God could be known in how he had
"been there" in the
dimensions of the love that suffered.
This sense of things
inherently hallowed the physical place where all had transpired, the
Galilee of his words and
ministry, the Gethsemane of his sorrows. It was a sense of things
which subsumed, if it
did not supersede, all other sanctifying aegis having to do with
land
and story. In a sense
the significance of the Temple as "the place of the Name", the
expression of divine
identity, passed over for Christians into the person and the work of
Christ. The Pauline
phrase "in Christ" came to mean a spiritual domicile in which
peoplehood-in-faith
became "the body of Christ" was thus 'dis-enlandised' (if we may
invent the term) while
remaining in fond and gentle love, by association, of the "where"
and
the "when" of the
eventfulness that made it so.
Before pursuing this
essential theme more fully in the first Christian mind, it may be
well to
reflect briefly on the
centrality of the basic concept of the sacramental. Despite the
word's
Latin origin, the idea
has deeply Hebraic sanction, though Christian faith had its own
welcome for it. The term
is initially simple enough, namely that things physical embody and
express things
spiritual- a frown, a smile, a handshake, flowers, a kiss, an
embrace. All
these do not merely
inform, they transact. They indicate relationship but they also
effectuate
it. Two realms combine.
I put my sympathy into a gesture, I write my anxiety on my face.
These devices are bound to have
theological counterpart. The Aaronic blessing tells of "the
face of the Lord", the
prophets asked of "the arm of the Lord". All faiths need these
measures of speech.
Without some inter-penetrability of the divine and the human all
thought of God, even
more all worship, would be null and void. Even mystic silence must
return to some sort of
conceivability. Christianity grasps this secret full-handedly with
due,
but not crippling,
compunction. It is faith in incarnation where "Word is made flesh
and
dwells among us, full of
grace and truth". Even faiths that demure over that conception
necessarily turn on some
measure of divine condescension to the human, or human agency
for the divine. For,
otherwise, faith and love and truth would be vacuous for lack of
medium
and meaning.
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