Today Your Heart Becomes Mount Sinai

The Christian faith is bathed in blood. There is no sugarcoating this. Holy Week takes us up to Golgotha. And on Golgotha is a bloody sacrifice—a human sacrifice, no less. “This is the blood of the covenant,” says Hebrews 9. “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” says Jesus in Luke 22. It is blood—the blood of sacrifice—that turns this week into a holy week. Our covenant with God is grounded in a bloody sacrifice.

The purpose of the blood is clear: It unites man with God. The word atonement means at-one-ment. Blood atones for sin. “I have given [the blood] to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (Lev. 17:11). Blood unites the world with God.

The phrase “blood of the covenant” takes us back to Exodus. God gives the Ten Commandments. He gives, as well, a list of other laws. And then the ceremony starts (Exod. 24). The people stand around Mount Sinai, watching a devouring fire at the top. There, God’s glory dwells. They may not go up, for if they do and see the Lord, they will surely die (19:21). Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, with seventy of the elders, may go up. But they see God only from below, “under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness” (24:10). Moses and Joshua may go higher yet, “up into the mount of God” (24:13). Finally, Moses alone reaches the highest peak. He enters the midst of the cloud and stays there forty days and forty nights.

But before anyone climbs up, Moses arranges God’s covenant with Israel. Animals are piled upon the altar as burnt offerings and peace offerings. Moses tosses half their blood against the altar, to make it pure; then he throws the rest upon the people, so they too are pure. He then proclaims, “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you” (24:8). “The blood of the covenant.” Here we have it—the phrase of the Epistle (Heb. 9) and the Gospel (Luke 22). It is the phrase also of the words of consecration in the Eucharist. The blood makes the covenant. The blood unites. The blood makes atonement, at-one-ment.

“Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). This is what God told Moses, and this is why Mount Sinai is divided into levels. People at the bottom; Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders up a way; Joshua higher yet; and only Moses entering the cloud. Sinai’s levels are levels of purity, levels of blessedness. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). Moses must be pure in heart, for he sees God inside the glory of the cloud.

The modern mind does not conceive of reality as mountainous. All it sees is flat, horizontal, wide-open fields because it perceives only the surface level—superficies in Latin. But Scripture opens our eyes to the mountains around us, and mountains denote hierarchy. Because we do not think of hierarchy, we also do not think of purity. You need purity to get to God; you need purity to climb the mountain. Hierarchy is about purity, and purity is about hierarchy. The two go hand in hand.

Note what the blood does: It gives purity. It purifies both altar and people. The blood unites man with God. The blood lets God come down and dwell among us. But “the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: Or what is the place of my rest?” (Acts 7:48–49). The tabernacle or temple is nothing but a copy or “shadow of heavenly things” (Heb. 8:5). God showed Moses the tabernacle’s blueprint by taking him inside the glory-cloud: God’s real, transcendent dwelling place became the tabernacle’s pattern (Exod. 25:40).

The glory-cloud—the heavenly tabernacle, God’s own transcendent home—is the place we long for. We want to be where Moses was. But only the pure in heart will see God. Only the pure in heart will reach the mountaintop. So, here is the goodness of the Lord. He takes the road to Golgotha. He offers up his life as sacrifice. And then he takes his blood up to the tabernacle at the top (Heb. 9). “It was therefore necessary,” says this chapter, “that the symbols (or copies) of things in the heavens should be purified with these rites” (Heb. 9:23). That is, the earthly tabernacle here below, as a copy of the heavenly dwelling, is purified with blood. We know about this also apart from Hebrews, for Moses had done exactly this with covenant blood before he climbed the mountain. He made the symbol pure. But note how the Hebrews passage continues: “But the heavenly things themselves [are purified] with better sacrifices.”

This is a puzzling statement. It makes sense for the earthly tabernacle to have blood splashed all over it, but “heavenly things”? Are they not super-pure already? Why do they need purifying? Think back to what St. Paul writes. He asks, in Ephesians, that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith (Eph. 3:17). We are temples of God; the Spirit of God dwells in us (1 Cor. 3:16). Heavenly things are not only at the top of Mount Sinai, where Moses peered into the heavenly realm. Heavenly things are also in our hearts. Our life goal is for the heart to become a mountaintop, a place for God himself to dwell. Does God dwell inside my heart? Does my heart have the purity of Moses’s heart? Am I prepared to see the glory of the Most High God?

Today we celebrate Good Friday. Sacrificial blood flows. Jesus, not just victim but priest as well, will use the blood to purify “heavenly things”—the temples of our hearts. It is sometimes hard to think of our hearts as akin to the temple blueprint. We have made a mess of it; we have turned it into a den of robbers. But look at the priest and see him sprinkling his own blood upon our hearts.

So, take heed of the apostolic teaching from Hebrews: “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22). Once our hearts are sprinkled with covenant blood, they become the top of Mount Sinai—a place to meet the Lord in purity.

Appears in First Things