John 20:12 is a rather curious verse:<\/p>\n
[Mary] seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.<\/em><\/p>\n What’s odd here is the image created in the mind of the reader–an angel at the foot of Jesus’ body and another at the head–when in fact that isn’t exactly what Mary sees. Jesus’ body, of course, is gone. The angels are sitting (a present tense verb) in the place where the body had lain (imperfect verb). The image is something of a fiction but, as we shall see, an interesting one.<\/p>\n The angel at the head and at the foot is reminiscent of the ark of the covenant (see Exodus 25), which is covered in the golden mercy seat (Exodus 25:21) and has one cherubim on each end (Exodus 25:19). What’s the point of the mercy seat?<\/p>\n And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark; and in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee. And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.” (Exodus 25:21-22)<\/em><\/p>\n When the tabernacle is built, the Ark of the Covenant will be the only item in the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest, only on one day per year, would enter that most sacred of spaces and pre-enact the atonement via animal sacrifice (see Leviticus 16).<\/p>\n The incorporation of this idea into John 20:12 is striking: the very place where the Lord should appear . . . is the very place where he isn’t<\/em> . . . because he has been resurrected. If I were one of those lit types (paging Rosalynde Welch . . . paging Rosalynde Welch), I’d say something really clever here about use of negative space. <\/p>\n What’s even more interesting in the NT use of this OT motif is that the role of the high priest (i.e., the one person permitted to enter the Holy of Holies and see the place where the Lord appears) is performed by Mary. She’s the one seeing the angels\/cherubim\/mercy seat in the sacred space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John 20:12 is a rather curious verse:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}