Fall has arrived here in northeast Ohio, marked most significantly at my house by leaves: the brilliant orange, red, and yellow hues as they stop producing chlorophyll, the massive piles we’ve raked already, and the quantities that still linger both on the ground and as yet unfallen on the trees. The air has not yet lost most of its warmth as the temperatures have remained reasonably high during the day, perhaps even unseasonably so. And the daylight, of course, has decreased; I leave in the dark of morning before the sun tops the ridge, and the shadows are lengthening as I drive up the winding road through the woods to my home.
Those shadows have captured my attention recently. They’re curious things, really. Two-dimensional distortions of reality, they convey limited information to be sure, and what they do convey depends so much on angles, position, and the light source that creates them. Their shape, size, and contours often bear little resemblance to reality, and detail is virtually nonexistent. An oft-read poem from my childhood begins “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me / And what can be the use of him is more than I can see”, and indeed we may be tempted to think that shadows are of limited use. (I suspect, however, they’re not entirely useless; I would guess that shadows play a severely underestimated role in such helpful things as depth perception than most of us may realize or notice on any average day.)
One passage that has fascinated me for some time is in Hebrews 8-10, where aspects of life on earth, and worship in particular, are compared with shadows. The temple and tabernacle, the ritual sacrifices, the high priest, and the law itself are said to be copies and shadows of what is to come. Copies and shadows: flawed reproductions, never quite exact and deviating in some way from the original, and shadows, the shapes and sizes of which we perceive differently based on our viewpoint, again deviating from the original. That could be a summary of the entire book of Hebrews: all that came before (in the Old Testament) points us forward to what lies ahead, fulfilled in their truest form in and through Jesus. Jesus, the true mediator and high priest, who endures forever and guarantees a better covenant than the one that came before. Jesus, who intercedes for us and provides access, not to the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies, but to the throne of grace, where God Himself sits. Jesus, the better sacrifice, who once for all made atonement for sin, not the shadowy sacrifice of bulls and goats that needed to be repeated. Perhaps most astounding of all, the temple – any of the ones that came before, including the tabernacle – points us ahead, not to a temple made with hands, however splendid, where the people of God travel to be where He is, but to the new Jerusalem, the city that does not have a temple because the Lord God Almighty is the temple, and there He dwells with His people.
It’s not the most obvious train of thought, to start with the long shadows in autumn’s early evening, and end up with God dwelling among His people permanently. But it’s the path I’ve taken for the last few days as I drive home. Thanks for taking the trip with me tonight.