03/01/2026
She writes beautiful imagined Biblically-based first-person accounts of events in the Bible.
I served in the temple. Not as high priest. Not as anyone whose name would make it into the records you read. I was one of many. We rotated duties. We trimmed lamps. We burned incense. We kept order. The temple ran on routine and reverence, and I was very good at both.
You need to understand the curtain.
It was not decorative. It was not symbolic in the casual way people use symbols. It was massive. Thick. Woven with intention. It separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place, the place where only the high priest entered, and only once a year. It was a boundary that said clearly, this far and no farther. God is holy. You are not. Distance is necessary.
We treated it with gravity.
That day had already felt strange. Rumors were swirling about a teacher being crucified outside the city. That was not our concern. Rome handled executions. We handled sacrifice. We stayed in our lanes.
And then the light changed.
Word reached us that darkness had fallen over the land. Matthew 27:45 says, âNow from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.â It was midday, and yet the temple felt like twilight. The lamps flickered against stone walls. The air felt heavy. Priests who were normally composed began exchanging glances that said more than their mouths would.
We continued our duties because that is what you do when you do not know what else to do. You keep trimming lamps. You keep reciting prayers. You keep moving.
And then it happened.
Matthew 27:51 says, âAnd behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.â Not frayed. Not tugged loose. Torn. From top to bottom.
Do you know what that means? It did not start at the floor where human hands could reach. It started at the top. As if something above us had taken hold and pulled.
The sound alone was enough to freeze a room. Fabric that thick does not tear quietly. It split with a violence that did not belong inside sacred walls. Threads that had held for years gave way in a moment. The barrier that had defined our understanding of holiness simply opened.
And beyond it was the space we had been taught to fear.
I remember standing there, heart pounding, staring into a place I had never seen. We had been told that entering improperly meant death. We had built an entire system around careful access. Sacrifice. Cleansing. Intercession. Layers of separation to protect us from the weight of glory.
And now the separation was gone.
At roughly the same time, we later learned, the man outside the city cried out and died. Luke 23:46 records His words, âFather, into your hands I commit my spirit!â And having said this he breathed his last.
It does not take a scholar to connect those moments. We had spent our lives guarding access to God and at the moment of His death, the barrier was removed.
Lent has a way of bringing you into that temple and making you stare at the torn fabric. We like structure. We like systems. We like knowing where the line is and how close we are allowed to stand. We prefer distance because distance feels safe.
But that tear declared something unsettling and beautiful at the same time: the holiness we feared was not pushing us away.
It was making a way in.
I had spent years serving beside that curtain, convinced that separation was permanent. That day I learned that what we thought was a wall was, in fact, temporary.
The veil tore...and not from bottom to top.
It tore from top to bottom.
And suddenly access was no longer restricted to one man once a year.
It was open.
