Ekstasis MagazineOctober 16, 2020Comment

Tenting, Spiders, and the New Jerusalem

Ekstasis MagazineOctober 16, 2020Comment

Tenting, Spiders, and the New Jerusalem

By Amy Gabriel

Meditations for Sukkot 2020

I hadn’t been camping in a long time—long enough that I’d forgotten why one doesn’t go camping. But I remembered soon enough. If the hard ground was not sufficiently instructive, the monsoon of rain thundering down on our tent, accompanied by blazing flashes of light, was a sure reminder of the merits of home and bed. Weighed down by the oppressive darkness outside, the tent felt claustrophobic. I suppose it didn’t help that we ended up sharing the space with nine spiders (she counted), but then again, with everything else going on, arachnids were the least of our worries.

Yet as I lay there trying to figure out how my unimpressed body was going to hike on no sleep the next day, my tentmate was thanking the Lord that our tent was watertight. She had a point. Our fellow camper was not as lucky in his leaking tent.

Interestingly, God Himself wrote into the calendar of the people of Israel an annual tent-dwelling holiday called Sukkot, often known as the “Feast of Tabernacles.” The holiday looks back to the Israelites’ wilderness sojourn after God delivered them from Egypt:

“Live in temporary shelters for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in such shelters so your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in temporary shelters when I brought them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 23:42-43, NIV).

Why did God care so much about reminding His people that they dwelt in tents?

In the New Testament, the tent-maker apostle, Paul, draws upon the language of tenting to speak of the frailty of our mortal lives. “We are hard-pressed on every side,” he writes—evidentially remembering the tent which he failed to pad on the bottom—“but not crushed….We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor. 4:8,10). We are being inwardly renewed, Paul goes on to remind us, but equally true is the fact that our outward bodies perish. Our “tents”—these physical bodies—will one day be destroyed (2 Cor. 4:16-5:5).

The second night it didn’t rain, but a cold front moved in. So if it wasn’t a flood keeping me awake, it was the frozen Arctic habitat. We decided that in the heavenly New Jerusalem, it will be 22 degrees Celsius all year long.

As we rose that second morning, my just-turned-thirty tentmate commented in surprise on the pain in her knees, presumably ensuing from the previous day’s long hike over rough terrain. The other two of us addressed her knowingly: “Welcome to your thirties.”

I wonder if Jesus—also in His early thirties as He traveled through Israel with no place to lay His head—I wonder if He, too, after a long day of hiking, ever woke from a night on the cold, hard ground with stiff knees, feeling the frailty of the flesh with which He had clothed His immortality when He, the divine Word, became flesh and tented in our midst (John 1:14).

We do not like to think about our frailty. But this time of pandemic has reminded us of the lurking reality of death that waits to prey upon these earthy tents. Perhaps the reaction to the virus has also shown us humanity’s great fear of death and the latent impulse to secure some sort of eternal life. And perhaps it was partly over against this impulse that God staked into the Biblical calendar a yearly reminder of our frailty and mortality. We remember that “while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened” (2 Cor. 5:4). And not only humans face the pangs of decay. As the tent-maker apostle also wrote, “the whole creation has been groaning…up to the present time” (Rom. 8:22).

Yet somehow I find a strange encouragement in these words from Scripture. We should not be surprised or disconcerted when we face the pains of body and mind, or inhospitable weather, or even a virus spreading across the world. This is part of the story, not a sign that God has lost control. More than that, it is in the leakiness of our tents and the mortality of our bodies that the life of Christ is somehow shown: “For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor. 4:11). In our dying to self, the Spirit can live more fully through us. Further, God is revealed to the world through His Son who came not (simply) in strength but also in weakness. Christ, the Jewish God-Man who toiled the dusty roads of 1st century Judea, might have had sore knees in His thirties or the occasional stomach flu. The God of the universe whom we know and love is accessible to us only because He took on the frailty of human flesh. His skin was torn from his body, His hands were pierced with steel, His lungs gasped for air, and His life seeped away on a tree. We know God only because His body was broken for us, His blood shed for us. We come to God in strength only because He came to us in weakness, and our weakness in some way points to or even reflects Him.

The holiday of Sukkot reminds us of our weakness, the transitoriness of our bodily tents. But it also reminds us that the hard, cold ground is temporary. A day is coming when God Himself will dwell with us, even as He once already tented in our human flesh. And for those of us who have hoped in the resurrected Lord of life, the destruction of our earthly tents does not mean being left out in the rain. In the New Jerusalem, our mortality will be clothed with immortality (see 2 Cor. 5:4).

“Would you go camping again?” my friend asked.

“Maybe in two years,” I replied.

Sukkot invites us to find joy in the now and to look with hope toward what is to come. We had fun, camping, despite the nine spiders and the hard ground. But we need not live forever in that wilderness tent in the cold. The New Jerusalem awaits. There, it is always 22 degrees.

Amy Gabriel
Writer & Perpetual Student

Photography by Kai Bauer

Ekstasis Magazine