Lift Up You Ancient Doors
by Mark Mosley
Feast of Sts Constantine & Helen, Equal to the Apostles; Feast of the Ascension in the West
Anno Domini 2020, May 21
The three most central events for Israel in the Old Testament are:
1. Abraham when he encounters God through the meal of hospitality, the sacrificial covenant of blood on Mt. Moriah, and the blessing with bread and wine by the mysterious priest-king Melchizedek. This blessing of God’s inheritance by a divine figure who invites mystical elevation is repeated at this same place with Jacob’s vision of the ladder.
2. Moses when he encounters God on Mt. Sinai where God’s WORD—His Name (YHWY/ LORD) & His Law—are revealed to God’s people.
3. King David when by God’s anointing and protection enters Jerusalem with the Ark of the Covenant to join heaven and earth on Mt. Moriah and establish a fulfilled Kingdom, a “city on a hill” of Mt. Zion.
Psalm 24
is the song at the finale of the story in 2 Samuel 6. It is the first psalm of the “Songs of Ascent,” which are the celebration of King David leading the Israelites up to the mountain of God to enter into Jerusalem—the holy hill where Abraham was blessed by Melchizedek and made an oath with God (Gen. 14:17-24); and where Jacob had his vision of the ladder of divine ascent into heaven (Gen. 28:10-18). There on Mount Moriah, David will re-claim the ark of Moses and God’s law and “seed” it in the Promised Land as the umbilical cord of the kingdom of God. The gates which have barred the Israelites from this promise have been “lifted up” by the King of Glory (God) so that David may lead his people, 30,000 in procession, into the kingdom. The gates are not just physical barriers to the entrance of the city—the gates are personified as all the kings, princes, and powers that have prevented the fulfillment of the Kingdom of heaven on earth. The gates are a metaphor of cosmic dimension that have barred the promise of God to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses from being fulfilled. Psalm 24 becomes the hymn of this promise, the triumphal chant billowing up from God’s mountain, the banner of its mystical and cosmic fulfillment.
Psalm 24 was chanted by the priests in the Temple every week, on the “first day of the week,” to commemorate the creation of the world. Under David’s kingship, it becomes the creation of “earth as it is in heaven,” the place of peace, the Jerusalem. By ascending up the steps of the Temple on Mt. Moriah, there is a recapitulation of Adam and Eve and all their descendants—walking up the path to the God of Glory who speaks from His throne with the Holy Law of His Kingdom.
For Christian Jews in the New Testament, Psalm 24 is robed with another layer of royal meaning with the entry of Jesus the King into Jerusalem. He rides with a procession of ecstatic and childlike jubilance as the one from this earth to nurture this land, the one who offers blood sacrifice, the one who delivers the law, the one who rises from sleep and ascends into heaven, the one who opens the ancient doors to Jerusalem, and the One who breaks down the cosmic force of death as the barrier that has kept us from fulfilling heaven on earth. Jesus is Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jacob, David, and God. He has “finished” all that is man and all that is God. In Hades, Christ goes to battle with death and emerges victor. He shouts with triumphal entry, “Lift up you everlasting doors and let the King of Glory enter!” He ascends into the holy city of Jerusalem on earth; and keeps ascending “the divine ladder” into the holy city of the new Jerusalem of heaven. Jesus is the anointed one, the Messiah of this ancient promise of Jerusalem entered.
Jesus is the sacrifice of blood on Mt. Moriah. Jesus is the WORD, the Name and the Law given on Mt. Sinai. Jesus is the King of Glory who establishes the heavenly Kingdom of Mt. Zion. Jesus is the One born from the mountain of God, the co-mingling of tree and holy fire, the sweet-smelling smoke of the visible & the Invisible. Christ the Blood. Christ the WORD. Christ the King. Christ the material and co-mingled Presence resurrected and
ascended
into life. The gates He lifts up are the gates of death which shall not prevail.
As stated, Psalm 24 was chanted the first day of every week as a hymn of creation. For those earliest Christians, while the Temple was still present, Psalm 24 was chanted by the priests every eighth day, the day of resurrection for Christians! Psalm 24 was an annunciation of Christ. The Theotokos is the “gate” by which the ancient gates are torn down. The cave of the Church burns with the love of the Holy Spirit and opens Herself to offer heaven. The Mountain and the Temple are transformed by a mother into a mystical Tree that speaks with tongues of Fire.
You have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel. See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. (Hebrews 12:22-25)
For Orthodox Christians, at midnight on Pascha the people process around the Temple of God with the priest leading us for a bloodless sacrifice, the Gospel held up as the law of love, and the cross leaned forward as a banner of victory. Psalm 24 elevates us to the “high point” where the people ascend to the doors. And the doors of the Church Temple are pounded like thunder trembling from a mountain. Psalm 24 is read aloud so that His people may know to enter through these
doors to the Holy City of Light and Life—the Pascha that death cannot touch.
For all Christians today, when we process as God’s people up to the doors of the Temple of our Church building, we enter into a type of heavenly Jerusalem where God and humanity meet through the sacrifice of blood and the giving of the law of love and the coronation of humanity with the singing of Psalms and spiritual songs. We are literally joining those who have gone before us on Mount Moriah, Mount Sinai, and Mount Zion. May we become ever aware that we are allowed like kings and priests to lift up our heads and enter this holy ground.
But apart from the awe of this memory that Psalm 24 manifests for the Living Temple and Church Triumphant, what does Psalm 24 do when sung in the catacombs of one’s own heart? Put in rather blunt modern and American lingo, “How does Psalm 24 help me?”
Scripture is not just a historical record; not even just a spiritual encouragement through memory, ritual re-enactment, or reading. Scripture must take on flesh, real flesh, our flesh. We must put it on, the robe around our heart.
What are “the gates” that have prevented you and I from walking in the Presence of God to ascend to a holy place of “clean hands and pure heart” where we can claim a citizenship of mercy and love? What keeps us a stranger, a defeated warrior, one who is in bondage to other princes of darkness, or mumbling in exile, or one who is already dead in spirit and cannot enter into the gates of paradise?
Are those “ancient doors” a dark generational corridor of physical or sexual abuse? Are those gates the rusted habits of alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, gluttony? Are those huge iron clad barriers the judgment you allow from others, the unmovable weight of depression, the constant defeat of anxiety? Is the path of life to mount Zion barricaded by the worship of other gods of success, money, prestige, or fame? Or is there simply no power to the command against these gates, because you do everything on your own. You remain powerless because you are alone. You remain emotionally safe because it is too difficult to risk the failure of being a bad servant—never fully joining the uncomfortable procession of God’s people?
The gates of “hell” that Jesus Christ tramples down are not only the gates of death. They are the sins that lead to death. And they are not just your sins. All of humanity has prevented you from walking through the lifted gates—the “epigenetic” accretion of cruelty, selfishness, narcissism, boredom, plague, famine, disease, accident, or simply bizarre unexplainable “bad luck.”
Glory is not the American-style trophy of winning. Jesus is not a spiritual Rocky Balboa. Glory is the brilliant, bright Presence of God that existed on the throne of the ark surrounded by angels. You walk through lifted gates not because you are strong and mighty in the name of the LORD; but because He is strong and mighty and you have placed yourself mercifully under that shelter. You enter into Jerusalem as a child running with palm leaves alongside the King of Glory. The King does not lift these gates in a private royal showdown. God’s glory rides on the seat of the material ark. Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem is on the “foal of an ass.” Christ’s triumph over death rides on the flesh of humanity. The private gates that damn us are burst through with the inertia of the living, moving, Spirit-filled—and sometimes “uncomfortable”—Church. And this force is not just the immediate friends and family of your congregation. All the living and those departed this life bear not only witness, but immense furious weight, “30,000 people x 70 x 7,” that carries you individually forward by a “strong and mighty” force not your own. In fact, all of creation, crowned by God’s glory, is bearing down on the gates that hold you and I back. The Creator of all of creation compels us by the gravity of grace through these ancient doors—as a child being born into the citizenship of eternal peace.
The psalmist reminds us of this cosmic gravity at the very beginning of Psalm 24: “The earth is the LORD’s and all its fullness, the world and those that dwell within.” In the Orthodox Church, this same
Psalm 24 is chanted over the grave of the newly departed as dirt is lifted up from the ground and thrown, scattered in the shape of a cross above the deceased. Adam is lifted, released through the Theotokos, and lands in Christ. We will rise through a cross. Psalm 24 takes our gates of death and opens up a passage of delivery to eternal rest.
This short, seemingly simple psalm collapses into infinite gravity—it ends in an ecstatic, triumphant repetitious crescendo of all of creation: “Who is the King of Glory? … Who is the King of Glory? … The LORD of hosts, He is the King of glory!” May Psalm 24 become our prayer of holy procession that lifts our “gates” and moves us forward to stand upon the holy mountain of God with Adam, Eve, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, and Christ, the Victor over death and the King of Glory. Amen.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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