The Neverending Story, Part 2: Eden, the Temple, Priests and Vocation
“Afterthoughts” is a new Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is by recent guest, Dave Courtney, and is part 2 of 4 of a follow-up article series to this week’s episode featuring The Neverending Story. Enjoy, then, the latest entry in this new chapter of The Fear of God…
FOR PART 1 OF THIS SERIES, CLICK HERE
Eden, The Temple, Priests and Vocation: The Collision of Heaven and Earth and the New Creation Reality
I think there is room to add a little bit more to this discussion. As mentioned, In the Judeo-Christian story the Temple is an Edenic image of creation, and likewise the creation story is a temple text that evokes this sense or vision of what the world not only was created to be in the goodness of God, but can be (and thus truly is) in our present reality. In the story of Adam and Eve we see humanity submitted to this forced migration into the “wilderness”, this world beyond the “temple”, a movement that is framed by this series of potent and accumulated curses that represent the resulting division that flows from the reality of Sin- one divided against the other, humanity set against creation (the land), the serpent against humanity, and ultimately this setting of humanity over and against ourselves with the lies the serpent sows leading to this notion of competing desires and the emergence of a true and a false self that must now be overcome in order to see the true nature of God.
The question at this point in the narrative then becomes, how can this Edenic vision for the world - less a utopia than a vocation and a reality where God and Humanity dwell together in the created order - be reimagined in the midst of this division between the way the world is (wilderness) and the way we hope the world to be (Eden)? Herein lies the central thrust of the Biblical story, where the temple (first imagined in the tabernacle and lastly imagined in the “New Jerusalem”, both described using the same diameters) is constructed as a reflection of this hoped-for imagining of a new world, a building that stands in the light of the promise of the covenant of Adam, Abraham and Noah by “imagining” a hoped for world in the world that is.
This is where we arrive at this image of heaven and earth colliding in the space of this temple, which is seen as the space where God dwells in Creation and where humanity thus finds its true identity as image bearers. This is also where we see the hoped for means by which this heaven and earth collision and this marriage of God’s dwelling and the articulation of the human vocation comes about by being declared through the foreshadowing of a righteous representative, one who occupies this space between heaven and earth and who thus bears witness to this unified reality in the emerging roles of prophet, priest and king. These offices come together in the person and ministry of Christ, the very embodiment of the Temple moving from a building in this present world to now occupying the whole of the cosmic order in a person as it is torn down and raised again, bringing about the promise of new creation in the declaration of Jesus as God with us. Similar to Ende’s Neverending Story, the Biblical story has a cosmic view in mind that then translates to matters of national context (empire and kingdom and social concern) and then ultimately into the particulars of Bastian’s, and thus our stories. The most beautiful part of both of these stories for me is the way in which the priestly nature of Christ’s ministry, imagined in Bastian’s own movement towards entering into the suffering of Atreyu’s journey, is then extended to us as “priests” of the new creation called to enter into the suffering and stories of others, thus moving us from the particulars of our story and outwards towards the cosmic picture.
This is, I think, what helps give greater definition to the mirrored imaging of Atreyu and Bastian existing within their stories across these divided worlds. As the line that separates their stories as truth and fiction gradually blurs, so does the reality of these two worlds once torn apart become unified. We begin to gain a sense of how it is that the Christ-like nature of Bastian’s journey connects to our own identity as imager bearers tasked then to be Christ to others as part of the human vocation.
As Gmork, the symbolic vision of the Garden’s serpent, is defeated, we see the Powers that hold this world in its grip loosened and the Powers that declare its true identity evoked, revealed and enacted. Even though it seems this has been reduced to merely a grain of sand in this present world, it is a vestige of faith and hope, a mustard seed sized vestige, given to us so that we can then begin to imagine (or reimagine) the world anew, one made in the true image of its creator rather than the false one that Gmork represents. It is here we can then freely call upon the words of the Empress as she, seen in the very image of such a child herself, makes known the true order of Creation to a struggling human endeavor:
“It was the only way to get in touch with Earthling. He has suffered with you. He went through everything you went through. And now, he has come here, with you. He is very close, listening to every word we say. He doesn’t realize he’s already a part of the Never Ending Story. Just as he is sharing all your adventures, others are sharing his. They were with him when he hid from the boys in the bookstore. They were with him when he took the book, in which he’s reading his own story right now.”
This is the great mystery made known in our midst through the person and ministry of Christ, one that breaks through Atreyu’s deeply expressed struggle by reconciling his experience and his journey with the fact that the Empress promises a new creation if only we would speak its name into our present reality. The fear and trembling that we see in their approaching the Empress, framed by the awe of the Rockbiter’s wondrous encounter of the space she occupies, comes from this very notion that the Empress’s own image points us back to Atreyu’s, and thus Bastian’s own story as the means by which this new reality is to come about. The necessary vocation is defined in the “incarnate” nature of Bastian’s ministry and then, as Ende intended, works its way back to us.
This is a dangerous story indeed, but one that promises a life changing adventure.
COME BACK TOMORROW FOR PART 3
