Not Like Paying Taxes

The picture comes from Exodus 29, where instructions are given for the ordination of Aaron and other priests. After sacrifices were prepared, Aaron was to be dressed in the priestly vestments. Then this direction is given: “You shall take the anointing oil, and pour it on his head and anoint him . . . . Thus you shall ordain Aaron and his sons” (Ex 29:7, 9 RSV).

Oil, throughout Scripture, is a sign of God’s presence, a symbol of the Spirit of God. Oil glistens, picks up the warmth of sunlight, softens the skin, perfumes the person. (Gerard Manley Hopkins, extolling God’s grandeur in creation, uses a similar image in his line “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.”)3 There is a quality of warmth and ease in God^’s community which contrasts with the icy coldness and hard surfaces of people who jostle each other in mobs and crowds.

But more particularly here the oil is an anointing oil, marking the person as a priest. Living together means seeing the oil flow over the head, down the face, through the beard, onto the shoulders of the other—and when I see that I know that my brother, my sister, is my priest. When we see the other as God^’s anointed, our relationships are profoundly affected.

No one has realized this more perceptively in our time than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote, “Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.”4 And what Christ has done is anoint us with his Spirit. We are set apart for service to one another. We mediate to one another the mysteries of God. We represent to one another the address of God. We are priests who speak God’s Word and share Christ’s sacrifice.

The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.5

In the second image, the community is “like the dew on Mount Hermon flowing down the slopes of Zion.” Hermon, the highest mountain in that part of the world, rises to a height of over nine thousand feet in the Lebanon range, north of Israel. Anyone who has slept overnight in high alpine regions knows how heavy the dew is at such altitudes. When you wake in the morning, you are drenched. This heavy dew, which was characteristic of each new dawn on the high slopes of Hermon, is extended by the imagination to the hills of Zion—a copious dew, fresh and nurturing in the drier, barren Judean country. The alpine dew communicates a sense of morning freshness, a feeling of fertility, a clean anticipation of growth.

Important in any community of faith is an ever-renewed expectation in what God is doing with our brothers and sisters in the faith. We refuse to label the others as one thing or another. We refuse to predict our brother’s behavior, our sister^’s growth. Each person in the community is unique; each is specially loved and particularly led by the Spirit of God. How can I presume to make conclusions about anyone? How can I pretend to know your worth or your place? Margaret Mead, who made learned and passionate protests against the ways modern culture flattens out and demoralizes people, wrote, “No recorded cultural system has ever had enough different expectations to match all the children who were born within it.”6

A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, in that one. When we are in a community with those Christ loves and redeems, we are constantly finding out new things about them. They are new persons each morning, endless in their possibilities. We explore the fascinating depths of their friendship, share the secrets of their quest. It is impossible to be bored in such a community, impossible to feel alienated among such people.

The oil flowing down Aaron’s beard communicates warm, priestly relationship. The dew descending down Hermon’s slopes communicates fresh and expectant newness. Oil and dew. The two things that make life together delightful.

The last line of the psalm concludes that the good and delightful life together is where “GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life.”

Christians are always attempting and never quite succeed at getting a picture of the life everlasting. When we try to imagine it, we only banalize it. And then, having scrawled an uninteresting and amateurish sketch using the paint pots of an impoverished faith, we announce that we are not so sure we want to spend eternity in a place like that. Maybe we would prefer the rousing good fellowship of hell. Psalm 133 throws out just a hint of heaven (a hint that is expanded into a grand vision in Revelation 4—5), turning that on its head: the rousing good fellowship is in heaven.

Where relationships are warm and expectancies fresh, we are already beginning to enjoy the life together that will be completed in our life everlasting. Which means that heaven is like nothing quite so much as a good party. Assemble in your imagination all the friends you enjoy being with most, the companions who evoke the deepest joy, your most stimulating relationships, the most delightful of shared experiences, the people with whom you feel completely alive—that is a hint at heaven, “for there GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life.”

One of the best, maybe the best, book written in the twentieth century on the meaning of living together as a family of faith is Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The book begins with the words of the psalm: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to live together in unity!” (NKJV). The text was with Bonhoeffer all his life. His first publication, a doctoral dissertation at age twenty-one, was titled “The Communion of the Saints.” His book The Cost of Discipleship has been a handbook to a vast company of Christians on pilgrimage. During the Nazi years he led a fugitive community of seminarians, living with them in a daily quest to discover for themselves the meaning of being a family of faith in Christ and training them in the pastoral ministries that would lead others into that fellowship of a common life. It was during this period that he wrote Life Together.

During the last years of the Third Reich he was imprisoned by Adolf Hitler. But even then prison walls did not separate him from his brothers and sisters in Christ. He prayed for them and wrote letters to them, deepening the experience of community in Christ. And then he was killed. Even as his life had been an exploration of the first line of Psalm 133, his death was an exposition of the last line: “GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life.”

The time was April 9th, 1945. The prison doctor at Flossenburg wrote this report: “On the morning of the day, some time between five and six o’clock the prisoners . . . were led out of their cells and the verdicts read to them. Through the half-open door of a room in one of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, still in his prison clothes, kneeling in fervent prayer to the Lord his God. The devotion and evident conviction of being heard that I saw in the prayer of this intensely captivating man, moved me to the depths.” So the morning came. Now the prisoners were ordered to strip. They were led down a little flight of steps under the trees to the secluded place of execution. There was a pause . . . . Naked under the scaffold in the sweet spring woods, Bonhoeffer knelt for the last time to pray. Five minutes later, his life was ended. . . . Three weeks later Hitler committed suicide. In another month the Third Reich had fallen. All Germany was in chaos and communications were impossible. No one knew what had happened to Bonhoeffer. His family waited in anguished uncertainty in Berlin. The report of his death was first received in Geneva and then telegraphed to England. On July 27th his aged parents, as was their custom, turned on their radio to listen to the broadcast from London. A memorial service was in progress. The triumphant measures of Vaughan Williams’ “For All the Saints” rolled out loud and solemn from many hundred voices. Then a single German was speaking in English, “We are gathered here in the presence of God to make thankful remembrance of the life and work of his servant Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who gave his life in faith and obedience to His holy word.”7

In such a way one man showed in his life and death, even as we can in the communities we live in and lead, the rich and continuing truths of Psalm 133: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along . . . . That’s where GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life.”