NOTES for Exo 19:5-6

What is the purpose of the existence of God's people? God Himself answers this question quite unambiguously: to be "a kingdom of priests and a consecrated ("holy") nation." Sometimes these words were understood literally, historically. Thus, the priestly version of the history of God's people reflected in the Books of Chronicles assumed that the chief meaning of the Jewish people's existence was the creation of their own state, and the chief meaning of the state and its rulers was the construction, and then the maintenance, of the Jerusalem Temple and the priestly corporation connected with it. But is that all there is to it? Of course, the existence of the Temple, especially after it remained the only place on earth where Yahwistic sacrifices were possible, was extremely important.

But is that what God is speaking about when He calls His people "a kingdom of priests"? And what, in that case, does "a consecrated nation" mean? A people who come to the Temple to perform the prescribed sacrifices in order to be consecrated? And what about the rest? Those who, in the Second Temple period, for example, lived in diaspora communities and had no opportunity to visit Jerusalem even once a year? Did all these people really stop being part of God's people only because they had no physical possibility of reaching the Temple?

Of course not. In those days the Synagogue already understood that the whole Jewish people, as God's people, formed one spiritual whole, consecrated through the Temple and preserving that consecration through the Torah. And from God's people the rest of the world is also consecrated: this is why one people consecrated by God exists in the world, so that the whole world may be consecrated through it. That is how the question of the consecration of God's people and of the rest of the world was resolved in pre-Christian times. With the coming of Christ, however, a new people of God appears, whose boundaries only partly coincide with the boundaries of the former, pre-Christian people, because this new people is consecrated by the Messiah Himself, who opens to it the Kingdom that He brought into the world.

The former people, however, of course does not disappear: the covenant has been made; what has been consecrated is consecrated. And how to unite the two peoples into one is known, surely, only to the One who consecrated them both. We, in all probability, will learn this only at the end of time, when the world is transformed completely and the Kingdom is revealed in all its fullness.