I am fascinated by two metaphors the apostle Paul used to help us understand the Kingdom of God and our relationship to Christ and to each other. One was used to tell the story to “insiders”, the Hebrews, and it followed the amazing list in Hebrews 11, recalling their history with God. These were people whose faith looked forward and for whom this risk of belief got them flogged, tortured, beheaded, and imprisoned. They died for a faith that was promised, unfinished, and unconfirmed. Their questions were addressed by phenomena of nature—floods where floods had never been, seas that parted leaving dry land, mountains that belched fire and ash, walls that fell because of sonic vibrations God told them to cause, pregnancies of an old woman and her old husband that resulted in a nation, and a man that walked off into eternity without dying. These God used to tell them in disturbing ways to let them know that He up to something that could not be explained by their human understanding.
For these “insiders” with this history, Paul used the symbol of a mountain, not a mountain of fire and ash, but a living mountain, the fulfillment of all their history had hoped for, believed in, and embraced in faith. This mountain, Paul says, is not one “that may be touched and that burned with fire, and to the blackness and darkness and tempest....But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God...to God the Judge of all, to the spirit of just men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant.”(Hebrews 12:8,22-24)
So what about us who consider ourselves insiders? What is this mountain we are to consider our destination--this Mount Zion? It is a mound, a heap, a tall, formidable thing that makes the smoking volcanic mountain of superstitious religion pale in its presence. Mount Zion is not a mound of decayed and acidified matter; it is a living thing--the towering and irresistible magnetic field of God Himself and the presence of His awesome reality; and it is the essential reality of all the saints who have ever made it through this life by faith in His power to make them perfect in Him. Now, in Him and perfect, they are the awesome draw of Mount Zion. We, too, are invited, not just to visit and stand in awe, but to become, to move in, to be a part of this living Mountain.
The second metaphor, Paul uses when speaking to those who do not have an “insiders” history with God, those who are new to this community of believers. For new believers he uses the metaphor of a building with Christ as the sure foundation and cornerstone, and the stones, of which the building is constructed, being alive! They function as individuals doing the individual tasks of a stone in a strong building, but they also interact as part of a great structure dependent on each other and remaining viable because of the certain foundation on which they are built. Are individuals important? Remove one of the stones about half-way up the building and see how important the individuals are to the strength of the building!
I like to think of a colony of living organisms in a tide pool, each living on its own, but not viable unless they live connected to each other in this fresh water, replenished each day by the ocean tides. Each separate cell is a pulsating, ingesting, eliminating individual, and the cells are connected to form a community that is also alive because of its living cells operating as one. When a predator attacks one of the individuals, the body corporate releases its defense mechanisms protecting the assailed member, too weak and simple in its makeup to defend itself. I think of children and abuse victims and the elderly when I read this—so defenseless and vulnerable. But God knows we are all weak and vulnerable in some way, and the truth is, we really do need each other. As a living community, we protect, nurture, and grow because as a whole, with Christ as the head, we are one body, one living colony, one building.
Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:19-22)
