Of Tents and Temples
On cedars, kings, and a God who can't be contained I The Word in the Wild, Advent 4, Year B
There is a cedar just beside my writing shed that towers over 30 feet tall, its trunk a foot across, and its canopy lush with green all year. It has been laden with berries this fall, small and turquoise. The birds have been feasting on them—Robins and Cedar Waxwings and Yellow-rumped Warblers. In the summer, it is a nesting place—this past year, a pair of Robins raised at least three rounds of fledglings under its shelter.
I look for cedars like this when I go camping, especially in the winter when the wind can bite. A grove of cedars is often a good place to pitch a tent; their thick evergreen foliage offering added protection form the weather. There is a warmth to cedars—their wood emanating with a sweet smell of spice.
It is understandable that King David, would build a house of cedar. I imagine the wood would be beautiful with its pink and red grain. But in the book of Samuel when David implies that somehow a house of wood is better than a tent, God corrects his misguided perspective. God, the bible is clear, prefers a tent. A tent allows one to enjoy cedars without cutting them, but more so, it doesn’t pretend to contain a person in any permanent way. God is present, but can’t be held to one place. Like a tent, God moves with the people—through settled periods and times of exile, through wilderness wanderings and in putting down roots in the promised land. That God is a tent dwelling God is part of God’s resistance to any claims people might put on him, especially those claims that would contain him in one land for one purpose.
The trouble with temples is that they can easily become a house for idols; or even a house as idol. If David built a temple for God, whatever his motivations, it would help solidify David’s power and place. It would also make Israel into the people who control access to God rather than the people chosen for God’s purposes to bless all nations. The temple would act as all idols do—as an object by which to manipulate God’s presence. The temple is an idol, the tent an icon.
I’ve always found Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between an idol and icon helpful. For Marion, an idol is when we have an experience of the divine and we seek to capture it and hold it still. An icon, on the other hand, is an image that opens us beyond the object and toward the divine that cannot be contained within it.
In our reading from Second Samuel, we see God resisting any attempt to hold the divine down, capturing God’s person in a place. God prefers tents, thank you very much. Instead, God makes it clear to David that David’s own throne is for God’s purposes. God didn’t just make David king or bless Israel for its own sake. God has bigger plans, plans that will eventually mean that another peasant boy born in Bethlehem will take David’s throne and will also be the new Temple of God—a temple that can’t be contained in a place, but belongs to the life of a person.
There is a classic formulation that holds that Jesus lives as prophet, priest, and king. But in a significant way, Jesus is actually the subversion and transformation of these roles. Instead of David, the warrior king in a house of cedar, Jesus becomes king by bearing the wood of the cross. He is unlike any earthly ruler. He actively lets go of power and seeks to live among the lowly. Jesus refuses violence, especially in order to defend himself, and he lets go of any trappings of wealth. In this way, Jesus undoes the compromise God made with Israel to have a king. God keeps the promise to David, but in a way that essentially undoes the whole idea of what a king of Israel might be.
In a similar way, Jesus actively subverts the idolatry of the temple itself. His repeated warning that the temple will be destroyed and in three days he will raise it up, is a clear move against those who center their power in Jerusalem. Jesus becomes the new temple and in him worship moves from Jerusalem to the place where “Spirit and truth” dwell. Jesus is the priest who liberates the temple from a building and returns it toward the original vision of God: all creation as a divine and holy dwelling.
Finally, Jesus fulfills the role of the prophet by restoring David and Israel to its true purpose—to be a means of God’s reconciling love for all creation. In Jesus, the whole history of Israel, finds its climax as God acts to heal all things from the chaos of our fallenness and shows a path toward new life through resurrection.
As we move into these days of Christmas, remembering again the miracle of God’s coming among us, we would do well to think of all the human schemes for fulfillment and control and how Christ subverts them. From our domains of knowledge, to religious centers of meaning, to our national interests and political authorities—Christ comes as prophet, priest, and king to undermine and ultimately to heal all our ways until they settle, finally, into He who is the Way, the Truth, and Life.