I’ve read this passage more times than I
can remember and have always celebrated it as good news and of course it is. But
then I am a “citizen with the saints” who otherwise would have been an alien
and a stranger cut off from the covenant with no hope and without God. I
imagine it was read differently by those who saw the “dividing wall” as
faithfulness and not hostility, who waxed poetic about the perfect law that
revives the soul and makes the simple wise. (Psalm 19:7) Truth is even the
apostle Paul originally resisted the new arrangement with violence by breathing
“murderous threats” (Acts 9:1) against those who claimed Christ as Messiah and
Lord. Years after Paul breached the dividing wall
the commonwealth of Israel was expelled from the household of God by the aliens
and strangers who erected a new wall of hostility. I’m guessing God hoped for a
different outcome but like the “in the beginning” gone wrong this
was a moment when all the possibilities of the perfect future were available in
the present and humans chose to remain mired in the past. That does not mean we
need to stay there. We can embrace this text from the other side of history and
tear down the walls we have erected to divide and conquer. We can stop defining
“us” by denigrating “them” whoever they may be. We can choose to be people who
proclaim peace to those who have been exiled and by living
the hope of the future truly become a holy “dwelling place for God.”
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