When God Tears Open Access and Calls You Through
Two passages converge around Christmas’s central mystery: the Hebrews text describes the Holy Spirit revealing that the way into the Most Holy Place had not yet been disclosed as long as the first tabernacle was still functioning (Hebrews 9:8), while Mark shows Jesus cursing a fig tree—the Temple’s own symbol—because it bore only leaves. Between them stands John’s prologue: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14). The Greek here is literally “tabernacled”—the Word pitched his tent in our neighborhood. What the old Temple system kept separate, Christmas unites. What religious structures made inaccessible, the Incarnation tears open. You are being invited into a reality that ancient priests could only glimpse once yearly, through blood and fear.
The Hebrews passage describes the old covenant’s necessary distance: gifts and sacrifices were being offered that could not perfect the conscience of the worshiper. They dealt only with food and drink and various washings—external regulations (Hebrews 9:9-10). Notice what couldn’t be touched: your conscience, your inner life, the place where you actually live. The system managed externals—what you ate, how you washed, which days you observed. It could make you ritually clean but couldn’t heal the part of you that knows you’re wounded. It separated clean from unclean, Jew from Gentile, priest from people, Holy of Holies from everyone except one man on one day. This wasn’t arbitrary cruelty but divine pedagogy—humanity needed time to learn that separation cannot save.
Then Christmas happens. The Word became flesh—not “appeared to be flesh” or “temporarily assumed flesh” but actually, bodily, became it. God doesn’t observe your humanity from safe distance. He enters it completely, taking on the “dark face” of creation—mortality, limitation, vulnerability to suffering. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote: “That which was not assumed is not healed; but that which is united to God is saved.” Christ assumes fallen humanity, the actual condition you experience, not some unfallen ideal you can never reach. He takes the entire human journey from conception through death, experiencing what you feel—joy, exhaustion, hunger, grief, the sweat of terror in Gethsemane, the crushing weight of abandonment on the cross.
This is kenotic love made visible. Within the Trinity, the Father eternally empties himself in begetting the Son; the Son receives everything as belonging to Father; the Spirit transforms mutual self-giving into glory. This divine pattern of love extends into creation at Christmas. Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:6-7). The stable is theology: God’s power works through vulnerability, not domination. Divine victory comes through descent, not distant decree.
Mark’s account immediately follows Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, where crowds waved branches and shouted hosannas—the fig tree bearing much foliage but no fruit becomes Israel’s Temple system, producing elaborate ritual but not transformation. Jesus went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany (Mark 11:11). That loaded phrase—”looked around at everything”—is judgment by observation. The next morning, seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs (Mark 11:13). The detail matters: not the season for figs, yet Jesus curses it anyway. He’s not being unreasonable about agricultural cycles. The fig tree represents the Temple itself, which claimed to bear the fruit of divine access but delivered only external performance—leaves without figs, ritual without transformation.
May no one ever eat fruit from you again (Mark 11:14). By next morning the tree has withered from the roots. This is the Second Temple system dying—not because God rejects Judaism but because the old wineskins cannot contain what Christmas inaugurates. Maximos the Confessor taught that the law was a schoolmaster leading to Christ, its types and shadows pointing toward the reality that Christmas embodies. Once you have the substance, the shadow’s work is complete. The Temple cultus based on separation, external purity codes, and animal sacrifice cannot facilitate what the Incarnation makes possible: direct union of human and divine natures, matter becoming transparent to glory, your body learning to pray.
The inner work here confronts whatever religious performance you’ve substituted for actual transformation. Where have you produced impressive foliage—spiritual vocabulary, correct beliefs recited, religious activities performed—while avoiding the fruit of real change? The Hebrews text says the old gifts and sacrifices could not perfect the conscience. Your conscience is where you actually live, where you know what you’re avoiding, where childhood wounds get triggered and you react from fear rather than respond from love. External religion cannot touch that place. Only the Word made flesh, entering your inner darkness just as he entered cosmic darkness, can heal what you cannot reach yourself.
This requires facing what you’ve denied. The Temple system allowed people to manage guilt through externals—sacrifice this animal, observe that washing, avoid those foods—without confronting the shadow within. But Jesus demonstrates a different pattern in Gethsemane: he doesn’t pray his terror away or perform calm courage. He sweats blood, begs for another way, admits his agony. On the cross he names the wound of abandonment: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Then, from that place of complete honesty, he chooses love. Not through gritted teeth but from a whole heart made whole by facing truth.
You are being invited to stop performing goodness and start choosing it from your actual condition. Bring the wounded child inside into the light. Feel the anger you’ve been swallowing. Recognize how childhood wounds shape adult reactions. Stop trying to be good enough through external compliance and let yourself be healed through honest encounter. Athanasius wrote: “God became human so that humans might become god”—but this theosis requires your participation. You cannot integrate what you refuse to acknowledge. The shadow brought into consciousness loses its power; denied, it only strengthens.
This personal work participates in cosmic transformation. He is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant (Hebrews 9:15). The phrase “new covenant” means renewed access to what the First Temple tradition taught: the Holy of Holies as participatory reality, not forbidden space. Before Josiah’s reform around 621 BCE, the Temple embodied mystical ascent—humans becoming angelic through transformation, Wisdom/Sophia present as Queen of Heaven, the Day of Atonement renewing cosmic unity. Deuteronomic reforms externalized everything, replacing encounter with rules, suppressing Sophia, making angels into guardians of separation rather than models of theosis.
Christ restores First Temple access. It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these (Hebrews 9:23). The earthly Temple was always meant as copy pointing toward reality—not the building but the Divine-human union it symbolized. Christmas is when copy encounters original. The Word tabernacling among us means the true Temple is now a body, is now accessible, is now united to your flesh. The veil tears at the crucifixion not to destroy the Temple but to reveal what it always pointed toward: unrestricted access to the Father through the Son in the Spirit.
Cyril of Alexandria taught that in Christ “we have all received a share in him, and we have him in ourselves through the Spirit.” This is not metaphor. Your transformation participates in the universe’s transformation. When you face your shadow and choose love from wholeness, you participate in death being destroyed, matter being united to divine life, creation groaning toward completion. Your specific healing matters cosmically because the resurrection proves that bodies—these bodies, your actual flesh—are being transfigured. The Eucharist demonstrates this: bread becomes Body while remaining bread, wine becomes Blood while remaining wine. Matter is not replaced but fulfilled, becoming transparent to glory while remaining itself.
Creation bears a dual countenance after the Fall. The radiant face still shines through—beauty that arrests you, love that breaks you open, moments when matter reveals its sophianic foundation and you glimpse the eternal “let there be” still resounding through all things. But the dark face is also real: suffering that cannot be explained away, death’s grip on everything you love, nature red in tooth and claw. Paul captures both: The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay (Romans 8:19-21). Creation groans together—including your body, your mortality, your experience of limitation and loss. These are not separate from cosmic labor but participation in it. Birth pangs, not death throes.
The fig tree’s withering and Christmas’s nativity are one mystery. What dies is the system that kept you from God through separation and external management. What is born is direct access through the Word made flesh. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:4-5). Notice the verb tense: present continuous. The light shines—still, now, in your life. Darkness has not and cannot overcome it, not because darkness isn’t real but because it’s parasitic, feeding on the good it distorts but having no substantive existence. Evil will, as Bulgakov writes, “languish and die” when separated from the good it requires.
When Jesus tells his disciples about the withered fig tree, he adds: Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them (Mark 11:22-23). Mountains were Temple imagery—the high places where heaven and earth met. Jesus is saying the entire topography has changed. You now have access that moves mountains, but it requires descent from head to heart. Does not doubt in their heart—the heart, not the analyzing mind, is where faith operates. You must move from performing belief to actually trusting, from white-knuckling goodness to choosing it from a whole made whole.
Gregory of Nyssa wrote: “Concepts create idols of God; only wonder grasps anything.” Christmas refuses your concepts and demands wonder. The infinite becomes infant. The Word who spoke galaxies into being learns language from his mother. Omnipotence becomes vulnerable. The creator of time submits to time’s slow pedagogy, experiencing growth, learning, development—not because God needed development but because creation needed a God who would honor rather than bypass its processes. Time is not prison but divine patience, teaching finite creatures to bear infinite divinity without being consumed.
The anagogical horizon stretches before you: this Christmas mystery inaugurates pantheosis, the complete penetration of creature by Wisdom. What begins in the Bethlehem stable completes when God shall be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28). Your present participation previews ultimate fulfillment. Every Eucharist is dress rehearsal for the Wedding Feast. Every moment of authentic self-giving participates in kenotic love that structures reality. Every choice to feel honestly and then love wholly contributes to death’s defeat and matter’s transfiguration. The veil already tore. The way into the Most Holy Place is already open. The question is whether you will pass through.
This requires something harder than external obedience: bringing your whole self—including the parts you’d rather reject—into divine light. The wounded child, the denied anger, the suppressed grief, the shadow you’ve refused to acknowledge. Christ assumed fallen humanity so you could bring yours into his. Irenaeus taught: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Not half-alive, performing while dying inside. Not managing symptoms through religious compliance. Fully alive—integrated, honest, capable of feeling deeply and choosing love from that depth.
The fig tree withers because leaves without fruit cannot survive exposure to the Word made flesh. Whatever in you is performance rather than reality will similarly wither under divine light—but this is mercy, not cruelty. What needs to die is what’s killing you: the false self built from others’ expectations, the exhausting performance of goodness you cannot sustain, the religious foliage covering inner barrenness. Let it die. The death is necessary so the true self—your sophianic foundation, the image of God that remains even when obscured—can emerge and bear actual fruit.
Christmas makes a radical claim: the separation is over. Not through your achievement but through God’s descent. From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace (John 1:16). Grace upon grace—not measured drops but waves, abundance, more than you can contain. The old system rationed access; the new overflows with it. Basil the Great wrote: “The Spirit is not measured out by God, but pours out in his fullness upon those worthy.” And Christmas reveals that worthiness is not your accomplishment but your humanity—the very flesh Christ assumes and unites to divinity.
What are you being called to receive? First, the truth that distance from God was never his preference but pedagogical necessity for creatures learning to bear glory. Second, that Christmas changes everything—the way is now open, the veil torn, access granted. Third, that this requires your participation: facing what you’ve denied, feeling what you’ve suppressed, bringing shadow into light, choosing love from wholeness rather than performing it from fragments. Fourth, that your personal transformation participates in cosmic transformation—you matter infinitely because matter itself is being transfigured. Fifth, that the goal is not escape from this world but its fulfillment, not death of the body but resurrection of it, not abandonment of creation but its revelation as temple.
The withered fig tree is whatever in you and in religious systems produces impressive externals while avoiding the inner work of transformation. Let it wither. The Word made flesh is the invitation to something beyond all external performance: union of human and divine, participation in Trinitarian life, your body learning to pray, your wounds being healed from within rather than managed from without, the slow beautiful terrifying work of becoming fully human, which is to say, becoming capable of bearing God.
Keywords: Christmas Incarnation, Temple access, fig tree symbolism, kenotic love, shadow integration, First Temple mysticism, divine-human union, sophianic transfiguration, theosis participation, conscience transformation
The Greater Horizon 