SYMBOLS OF GOD'S PRESENCE TO THE CHURCH

SYMBOLS OF GOD'S PRESENCE TO THE CHURCH Verbal and Nonverbal

At the beginning of the first millennium of the Christian era, synagogues were all-purpose buildings for assembly in village and town. Great numbers of them were to be found in Jerusalem and the larger cities of the diaspora. One of the purposes to which the buildings were put was weekly gathering for instruction in Torah, hence to this day the Yiddish term survives as shul. The people did not assemble in them for prayer but for learning. Prayer for the Jews was and is in the home and family. On the three great pilgrimage feasts and for Jerusalemites throughout the year, the common worship of sacrifice was in the Second Temple of Herod's construction on Holy Zion. The building was magnificent, as we know, "out-Solomoning" Solomon's Temple or the poor patch on it reconstructed after the return from exile. We have some hints of the brocaded vesture of the priests both from Ezra and Exodus, which contains dreams of how it must have been before the Chaldean onslaught brought the Temple down. The Psalms with their preliminary musical notations, largely undecipherable because the meaning of the terms is unknown, testify to musical renditions of schools of cantors of a high order. Yet, those brief hints do not tell us what we would dearly like to know: how the daily and festal ritual of sacrifice was carried out. We can only say, "It must have been magnificent." Surely the sights and sounds filled the worshiping crowds with an awe to match that inspired in Jesus' rural companions by the building itself. We know that the daily prayer book devised by the Rabbis much later (called the Siddur) tried to parallel the daily hours of Temple prayer.

Symbols of God's Presence to the Church

The early Palestinian believers in the crucified and risen Christ gathered in people's houses for prayer and study, in the synagogues to which they were admitted for more instruction, and in the Temple, while it stood, for public prayer in act. At the Temple's demolition, they and believers of the diaspora like them undoubtedly added the weekly worshipful meal, both parousia-expectant and memorial, to the study of their Scriptures that prophesied the one who proved to them on every page to be Jesus the Anointed One. We do not know what form the meal of blessing (berakah) and offering (gorbān) took. We can only be sure that it was ritualized from the beginning. Public prayer that was not ritual would be unthinkable to the Jew, Temple or no, as it would be to the pagan Greek. For a leader merely to have pronounced Jesus' words over bread and cup that changed ordinary food and drink, which was then consumed by the assembly, would not have occurred to Semitic believers. Worship was ritual behavior by definition, but what form the worship took we do not know.