Canter Bridge

If audacity drives the human side of temple-building, a kind of fiction shapes the divine response. The biblical texts of temple-building know this and work expertly with the multiple points of view that must be sustained if building a house for god is to be anything more than pious nonsense.

Solomon and YHWH understand that the temple is a concession. ‘The God of heaven and earth’, as YHWH seems to have become known both to Israel and to her neighbors in their moments of disposition cannot in fact live in a hewn-stone, cedar-embellished Levantine shrine. Yet the reality of God being present with his people in that modest construction is no less genuine for this impasse of transcendence and concreteness.

He is not really there. Yet he is really there.

The text negotiates this paradox by making Solomon’s temple a place towards which and in which people pray to YHWH. In response, this graciously attentive God turns his eyes and ears toward the temple and hears the people’s prayer. A kind of spiritual relay station, the temple—in Solomon’s and the text’s judgment—effectively connects a praying people with a listening God who has covenanted to be present with them in palpable manner. Indeed, Solomon’s desire is that other nations also might pray in and towards his shrine so that they too might experience and then narrate the incomparable attentiveness of Israel’s god.

In such a complex interchange of promissory notes and human claims, YHWH permits himself a dangerous anthropomorphism. His eyes and hearts will be in this temple.

How is one to understand the focus of the divine senses upon a building erected by human hands? The axis upon which this complex conversation revolves is no doubt the temple’s role as a microcosm of heaven. In this walled space and—particularly—in the worship that is offered there, the Lord will become present as he is naturally present in heaven. Worship, in the deep structure of Israelite thinking, is a linking of heaven and earth, a kind of perpetual Jacob’s ladder. More than that, it is the reversal of the separation between Creator and creation, Redeemer and redeemed, the One who lives in thick darkness and those who see best by light that has been the human experience from history’s inception. Or, as the Primeval History invites us to understand, since Adam’s banishment from Eden, yet another incarnation of heaven where God strolls about in the cool of the evening.

It is possible for a reader to find this picture of divine-human interaction misleading, deceptive, even counterproductive when placed against the urgencies of activity here and now for all manner of betterment. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss it as primitive. Only seldom do modern psychologies and their more corporate sister sciences approach this level of sophistication.

And yet all Solomon really wanted—Israel would learn to desire it even more—was a God who listens and sees.