finding yourself in a huge tunnel

“At last we embraced the gates (of the Temple in Jerusalem), and to my surprise found ourselves in a huge tunnel. I could barely see the beautiful decorations all around us. The prayers of the people echoed off the roof and the walls. I joined in the prayers, but mostly I just looked around myself, and felt the breath taken out of mine again, just as surely as when Eleazer had kicked me hard and I couldn’t breathe.” – Excerpt from Christ the LORD by Anne Rice in the person of Jesus age 7

Thinking of the immediate surroundings of a tunnel is very easy to fall into by focusing on the fact that you are surrounded by darkness. Maybe the bigger picture here is that a tunnel is a pathway, a gateway from one side to another. It is a location of transition as you move from one place to another. You enter one side but when you emerge on the other side the conditions and environment may have changed completely.

In the case of the tunnel at the gate of the Temple, the difference is when you enter the gate of the Temple, you are leaving the world and all its expectations and you are moving toward the Temple which in the early 1st century was considered the very dwelling place of the One True God of all things.

Did they move in and out of this location of transition – the tunnel of the gate of the Temple – with the idea that it was better to be “in” rather than out? Obviously the Jewish people thought it was good to be “in” because they would travel for days and risk their lives just to get there. Why did Yahweh bring these people to this ideal that it was good to be “in” the structure? When later on He would illustrate that people would enter “in” to a place of worship that was not built by the hands of men?

What did it mean to the Hebrew people when they sang the Psalm “The LORD shall preserve my going out and my coming in from this time forward, and even for evermore?”

Why did Jesus say things like I am the way, and I am the gate? What did that mean to the listeners of the first century? Surely that must have had an impact on them culturally because these were symbolic customs they had grown up with all their lives.

What does the tunnel of the Temple gate look like to day, if the Temple has become people of Yahweh?