Mark 15:37-38

THE RENT VEIL

‘And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost. And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.’

Mark 15:37

As the rent rocks and open graves proclaimed Christ victorious in death, so may the rent veil have declared that He had won for Himself an access into heavenly places, there to perpetuate the work which had been wrought out on Calvary. It is possible also that the abolition of the Mosaic economy was hereby figuratively taught. Christ had come to destroy the law, but only that He might substitute for it a better covenant.

I. The rent veil signifies that through Christ alone we have access to the Father, and that supplies of heavenly things may be expected to descend. The privilege of prayer, the privilege of intercourse with our heavenly Father, has been procured for us exclusively by Christ.

II. The rent veil gives a title to a heavenly inheritance.—It is like an opening in the firmament through which the eye of faith may gaze on the diadem and the palm which are in store for the faithful. What was to occur after death and the resurrection? The rent veil gives the answer. As the opened graves published the great truth of the abolition of death, so did the rent veil publish that of our being begotten again to an ‘inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away.’

Rev. Canon Melvill.

Illustration

‘That some great catastrophe betokening the impending destruction of the Temple had occurred in the Sanctuary about this very time, is confirmed by not less than four mutually independent testimonies; those of Tacitus, of Josephus, of the Talmud, and of earliest Christian tradition. The most important of these are, of course, the Talmud and Josephus. The latter speaks of the mysterious extinction of the middle and chief light in the golden candlestick forty years before the destruction of the Temple; and both he and the Talmud refer to a supernatural opening by themselves of the great Temple gates that had been previously closed, which was regarded as a portent of the coming destruction of the Temple. We can scarcely doubt that some historical fact must underlie so peculiar and widespread a tradition, and we cannot help feeling that it may be a distorted version of the occurrence of the rending of the Temple veil (or of its report) at the crucifixion of Christ.’