Join Archbishop Mark Coleridge for Episode 4 of his new podcast “The Navel of the Earth: Jerusalem in Time, Theology, and Imagination.” This episode delves into the four senses of Scripture, illustrating how Jerusalem symbolises both the Church and individual faith. Discover how God’s glory now resides within the community of believers, transforming them into the New Jerusalem. Reflect on your spiritual journey by listening to this Episode.
Transcript
In the first three of these podcasts, focusing on Jerusalem. We have more or less looked at Jerusalem in time and place, and that itself is a fascinating enough story. But in fact, Jerusalem is much more than a city in time and place. And now I want to expand our horizon a little, to consider Jerusalem, as it were, in theology and imagination. And this is a rather more subtle thing to attempt.
So, Jerusalem has been more than just a place. Jerusalem has become an idea. And if I might talk the language of poetry, and hence imagination, Jerusalem has also become a metaphor, a symbol. So, it’s that that I want now to explore with you. Jerusalem not so much in time and place, but Jerusalem in theology and in imagination.
Now, traditionally Christianity has spoken of the four senses of Scripture. Now, the first of them is the literal sense of Scripture. And that’s where we’ve been in the first three podcasts. We have been looking at the literal sense of Jerusalem as it occurs in the Bible and beyond. In other words, Jerusalem in time and place.
Now that’s very important, that we stay grounded in the facts of history. So that literal interpretation is very important. But it’s not the full story, because Christianity traditionally has also spoken of the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. And this is where we touch upon metaphor and symbol, I’ll come back to that.
Christianity has also spoken of the moral, or it’s sometimes called, and don’t get spooked by the language, the moral, or the tropological sense of Scripture. And then finally, the fourth sense of Scripture that we find in Christianity through time is what is called sometimes, again don’t get spooked by the language, analogical. In other words, it looks to the end. Kind of eschatological if I could use another rather baffling word, perhaps.
And there was a little saying, and I’m going to give it to you in Latin. It never hurts you to hear a little bit of Latin. Lettera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, Moralia quid agas, quo tendas, anagogia. In other words, the literal sense of Scripture teaches you what happened, history. And that’s what we’ve been exploring so far. And that’s important. You can never say farewell to the facts of history.
The allegorical sense tells you what to believe. In other words, it focuses not so much upon knowledge of the facts, but upon, what faith requires, what to believe. And then the moral sense of Scripture teaches you what to do. What am I, how am I to respond at the point of action? What am I to do as a result of what I read or hear? And then this final, or anagogical sense that looks to the end, tells you where you’re going.
So, if I can just go over those again, because it can be confusing, but in fact it is fairly simple. And Jerusalem is a prime example of what I’m talking about. The literal tells you what happened. The allegorical sense tells you what to believe. The moral sense tells you what to do. And the anagogical sense that looks to the end, where you’re heading, where you’re going.
Okay, so it’s these, having looked at the literal, Jerusalem in time and place. I now want to have a look at the other three senses of Scripture. In other words, there’s more to a text than meets the eye. And this spiritual reading of the Scripture goes way back in time. It goes back to Saint Paul; you find it there in his letters.
So, it’s in the New Testament. In other words, a more than literal reading of the Scripture. You find it, then, in some of the greatest thinkers and teachers that Christianity’s ever known. People like Origen, who was based in Alexandria, Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas. I mean, these are the giants intellectually, the giants of the Christian story. And in all of these great thinkers and teachers, you find this more than literal sense of Scripture. So, Jerusalem is a city in time and in place. But it’s more than that. Its meaning overflows the literal sense of Scripture.
Now this touches upon the nature of language. Because language always overflows. It always means more than I intend. In that sense, language speaks me rather than I speak language. And sometimes they speak about a surplus of meaning. There’s more to what I say or write than might appear on the page or even be part of my intention.
In other words, all language has in some sense a symbolic or a metaphoric force, particularly a text like the Bible. Which we say is certainly the work of human authors. But there’s something more than human authorship in the Bible, and that’s why we say it’s an inspired text. In some ways, the Spirit breathed text. That God is somehow caught up in the composition of the Scripture. Even though the work of human hands is abundantly clear in the Bible. There’s something more than human authorship.
So, that symbolic force. That’s why in years of teaching, I have often waved the Bible at my students and said to them, this is your life, it’s not once upon a time. It’s not a text back there. This stuff tells the story of your life, this is your life, in a most remarkable way.
So, it also relates to a particular Christian understanding of history. That history is moving towards a future fulfillment. Sometimes this is called an eschatological understanding of history. But again, don’t get spooked by the language. We are moving towards a future fulfillment. And therefore, things in the past can in fact foreshadow things that are to come. Now, we saw this with the Jerusalem Temple, the building in Jerusalem, foreshadowing the body of Christ.
Now, this is an understanding of time and of text that is often called typological. For instance, the crossing of the Red Sea in the story of the Exodus was taken to be a foreshadowing of baptism. The bronze serpent held up in the Book of Exodus, when the people are being bitten by serpents, is seen to be a foreshadowing of Jesus on the cross. Now, this is a very distinctively Christian way of reading the Bible. That things in the past, and there are many, Eve in the garden, foreshadows Mary in the New Testament. There are so many examples. Things and people and places in the past, foreshadowing things and people and places to come. And there’s a greater fullness when the foreshadowing is realised. Sometimes, again, this is called a typological understanding of Scripture.
And at Mass today with the lectionary, you often find this kind of connection between the first reading from the Old Testament and the Gospel. That there is a kind of a symbolic connection or a typological connection. Okay, so the past is a foreshadowing of a greater fullness still to come.
So similarly, Jerusalem in time and place is a foreshadowing of a greater fullness that is still to come. And that’s why we speak of these spiritual senses of Scripture, not just the literal sense, but a spiritual sense that looks to a fulfillment further down the track.
And this is basic to Christian preaching I have to say too. The Christian preacher takes the Scripture and applies it to the life of his or her people in a way that sees in their life a fulfillment of that which has just been recounted from the Scripture. It’s like me saying to my students, this is your life. That if we have the prodigal son, for instance, is the Gospel on a Sunday, the preacher will apply that story to the lives of his people, that they are the prodigal son. But that story, in a sense, is fulfilled in their life. And so, on it goes.
So, there’s nothing particularly exotic or whatever about the language. There’s nothing particularly exotic or unusual about this reading of Scripture. We as Christians tend to take it for granted, but it is a distinctively Christian understanding of history.
So having looked at the literal sense of Jerusalem, let’s have a look now at these other so-called spiritual senses of Jerusalem, not so much in time and place, but in theology. So, in other words, Jerusalem as a religious idea. And Jerusalem in imagination. Jerusalem as a metaphor, as a symbol. Because it’s certainly both of those, a religious idea and a metaphor or symbol.
Now, Jerusalem eventually, this is for Christianity. Is seen as applying to the Church. In other words, the Church becomes the kind of New Jerusalem. So here we see that fulfillment of something in the past. The city of Jerusalem, the place where God chooses to dwell, and which God chooses to protect, in fact becomes, is fulfilled, in the community of the Church.
So, this is Christianity’s way of, as it were, claiming the Old Testament. And this was a big question in early Christianity. How can we read the, how should we read the Old Testament to call it that, the Hebrew Bible? How can we make that our own, or should we reject it out of hand? Because there were people in early Christianity who said, no, no, you don’t read the Old Testament, that’s another world. And the God of the Old Testament is a terrible, dark, vengeful God. We want only the New Testament, the God of grace and peace and love. Christianity eventually rejects that and says, no, no, no, what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is as much our Bible as is the Jewish Bible.
But that required a particular way of reading the Old Testament, to see it as a promise in search of a fulfillment. And the understanding to which Christianity comes, is that the Old Testament is fulfilled in Jesus and in the Church, which is eventually understood, in fact very early, understood as the body of Christ. That’s an extraordinary way of understanding the Church, the body of Christ. I’ll come back to that.
So, Christianity, then, in seeing Jerusalem now as the Church. Is claiming as its own the Hebrew Scripture. Jerusalem in this sense, becomes not so much a place, but a people. And a people whom Saint Paul describes as the body of Christ.
Now, how Paul came up with this to me is mysterious. And he does so very, very early. When you think of it, these were small and often troubled communities that look pretty ordinary, seen from many angles. And he is saying, no, no, no, these communities are the body of Christ. Now, what does that mean? It means that these communities, the Church, is where the glory of God dwells, just as God dwelt in the Jerusalem Temple. God now, where does God choose to dwell among human beings now? Where does the glory settle? Not, it is said, not in a city in time and place, not in Jerusalem, in that literal sense. But in this community that is everywhere.
So, in other words, the glory of God is not tied to a place, it is tied to a people. And again, the body of Christ was that body that hung on the cross and which was pierced by a lance or a spear, and from which there flowed forth that blood and water, the river turning death to life. So, the new temple, in fact, is this community called the Church. And that’s the fulfillment. But this is a long, long way from an understanding of Jerusalem, just as the city in time and place.
So, if you’re looking for the temple, don’t go looking in the city of Jerusalem and seek to rebuild the temple that has been destroyed. The new temple is the body of Christ. And where is the body of Christ encountered? In this community of those who put their faith in Christ. They become the new temple, and in that sense, the new Jerusalem. To which all God’s promises to Jerusalem apply, that God will protect His own.
Jerusalem in fact, was thought to be, because of the teaching of the prophets, inviolable. No one could ultimately violate Jerusalem. It could be destroyed, but it will be rebuilt. And the fact is, it still exists seventeen times destroyed, eighteen times rebuilt.
So, in that sense, the prophets have been shown to be right. Jerusalem is inviolable. And that same sense of inviolability you hear in the New Testament when, Jesus says to Peter, you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. In other words, the Church established by Jesus has about the same kind of inviolability that attached to Jerusalem. So again, you see that kind of shift from historic city to the community of those who put their faith in the crucified and risen Jesus.
So, the Church becomes the place where God dwells, the place that is chosen by God. That is certainly wounded as Jerusalem was again and again and again. Wounded, but holy. Now if we just look for a moment at what the Scripture means when it talks about the Holy City. I mean, in fact, you’ve got the Holy Land, you’ve got the Holy City in the Holy Land, you’ve got the Holy Place, which is what the temple was called in Hebrew. And then within the temple complex itself, you had the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies. So again, you get this word repeatedly. So, the Holy Land, the Holy City, the Holy Place, the Holy of Holies.
What the Bible means by holy is that it is separate, separated by God for the sake of service. Alright, so, you’ve got to keep those two elements in mind. It’s separate for service. Now what is the service? So that through that which is separated, the blessing promised to Abraham of a life bigger than death will flow out through these mediations, from the Holy Place, from the Holy of Holies, into the Holy Place, into the Holy City, into the Holy Land, and into the world. Because the blessing promised to Abraham was to him, his descendants, and all the families of the earth.
So how is that blessing going to flow from the inner sanctum out into the whole world? It flows out through these separations. The Holy of Holies, the Holy Place, the Holy City, the Holy Land, and into the whole world. So, separate for that service. This was true of the temple. And we saw the blessing flowing from the side of the temple in the prophet Ezekiel, out into the world, turning death to life. That’s the blessing.
And similarly now, the Church is to be, wounded, yes, but holy, separated. Called out of darkness into light, the New Testament says. In order, not just for its own sake, to become some kind of glee club. But so that through the Church, out into the world, you know, the desert of the world, can flow this extraordinary blessing that turns death to life. So that’s what it means to call the Church as Jerusalem, wounded, yes, in all kinds of ways. But holy, chosen by God, separated by God for the sake of service. In other words, to mediate that blessing to the whole world.
Therefore, in the Church, it is not surprising that you would find the best and the worst of humanity. And that has certainly been my experience of the Church. And I suspect it might have been yours. But if this is true of Jerusalem, it is not surprising that it is also true of the Jerusalem which becomes the Church.
But it’s not just the Church, because Jerusalem in time also is understood as an image, a metaphor, if you like, or a symbol of the individual soul. And this is where you touch upon the moral understanding of Scripture. What am I to do? How am I to respond? The so-called tropological sense of Scripture. So again, the soul is understood as the place where God chooses to dwell. Not just in the community of the Church, as it were, out there and around me, but also deep within me, in that deepest of deep places that we call the soul. That it’s there that God chooses to dwell. And that’s why the soul is understood as a place of pilgrimage. Just as you go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, you have to go down, down, down into yourself and find God there. Hear the voice of God there.
So, pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A pilgrimage into your own soul, enter into yourself. And that’s a theme throughout Christianity and other religious traditions as well. And there alone you will find God, the God who chooses to dwell there, to make a home in the human soul. The soul that is wounded, again, like Jerusalem, and like the Church. But which also lives in hope of healing with the divine indwelling. So, the wounded soul, the wounded city, the wounded church. But again, made holy by the indwelling of God.
Now all of this looks to the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit is breathed into us by the risen Christ. And it’s that that gives substance to the words that we hear in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, we will come and make our home in you. So, this understanding of Jerusalem as the soul has that sense of God making a home. It’s an extraordinary expression. Making a home in the soul of the individual.
Now, to go down to that deep place, to go on pilgrimage to the deep place, to find God there, involves struggle. You’ve only got to see in a classic of English literature, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, the kind of struggle that it involves. Because Bunyan’s pilgrimage in many ways is a pilgrimage into his own soul. And a lot of the struggle contains the hope of a moral transformation.
And the question that arises from the depths of the soul is the question that they asked John the Baptist in the Gospel, what must we do? For the sake of this change of life, or for this moral transformation, the transformation that leads from turmoil to peace. In that sense, leads us out of the desert, back to the garden of Paradise. So that’s the goal of all moral transformation. Is that peace, the great shalom of God. So, what should we do? How should we act? If we are to find our way to the peace of God. The God who dwells therein.
Now, to move to that place of peace, there needs to be a process of healing. Again, the Church is wounded, but holy. Jerusalem, the city is wounded but holy. The individual soul is also wounded in all kinds of ways.
The Irish poet Yeats said, that to go deep into yourself, into your own soul, is to go down to the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. That’s not the full truth, but there is truth in it.
So, you’ve got to go down into that dark and empty and chaotic place, and that’s where you discover God. And that’s where in that moment of discovery, that’s when the real healing can happen.
So, Jerusalem, as the Church and Jerusalem as the individual soul. There you have two of the spiritual understandings of Jerusalem in time and place. All are important. But it’s Jerusalem in time and place, the literal sense, that’s where we start. And only then can we build upon a literal understanding of the city in time and place to move to these other understandings. The broader and more resonant understandings of Jerusalem, yes, but as the Church and as the soul. And in speaking in that way, we take on board this distinctively Christian understanding of history. That the past looks to a future that will bring a surprising fulfillment. But that that fulfillment was always within the plan of God. Who leads us beyond time and place into the larger world.