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worship or profound religious reverence because of divine origin or character, or connection with God or divinity." Where can one draw the line between "veneration" (sacred) and "worship" (holy), or between "association with divinity" (sacred) and "divine origin or character" (holy)? The distinctions are so slight that we are not surprised to find sacred listed as one of the synonyms of holy, and holy listed as a synonym of sacred. It should be obvious that current dictionaries encourage the use of the two interchangeably, a quite customary practice.

Substantial distinctions, however, appear when we consider the nouns with which the two adjectives may be used. Customary speech would seldom use sacred to modify the following nouns: Savior, Redeemer, Father, Trinity, God. God is holy, not sacred. So, too, there are nouns with which we hesitate to use the adjective holy: music, art, literature, customs, buildings. Music may be sacred but it is not holy. These contrasts in English usage are more significant than the dictionary definitions lead us to expect; so we ask what may be learned about the two adjectives from their association with different nouns.

It is religion that provides the origin, context, and limits for using the adjective sacred; it is God's activity that provides the origin, context, and limits of the adjective holy. Sacredness points to human activity oriented toward God; holiness to God's activity oriented toward people. Sacredness is indigenous to the realm of human or institutional practice; holiness is indigenous to the realm of divine or spiritual authority. The sacred is found wherever religion is found; the holy wherever God is present. Accordingly, it is quite possible to consider many things as sacred but nothing as holy, or equally possible to treat many things as holy but nothing as sacred. Everything depends on the concept of God. Of the two terms, theistic religions view the holy as primary, the sacred as secondary.

To carry the contrast further, it may be observed that contact with the two realms often evokes quite different human reactions. Contacts with the sacred may provoke such varied feelings as reverence, veneration, superstitious awe, boredom, or even revulsion. Contacts with the holy are more likely to elicit bewilderment, unbelief, inner turmoil, a sense of unworthiness, "fear and trembling," panic-stricken flight, or even violent hostility.

Whether we consider the nouns with which the two adjectives are used or the emotions elicited by those adjectives, we find that English usage recognizes a greater distance between these synonyms than the dictionary allows. And when we ask for the historical source of that distance, we are led to the Christian ingredient in Western culture. In both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, a key command of God is "Be holy, for I am holy" (Lev. 11:44; 1 Peter 1: 16). Holiness refers to the primary relationship that God has initiated with his people. In that command, to change the word holy to sacred would be bizarre indeed. The command implies that the term holy is more aptly applied to persons, the term

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sacred to things. So, now it is time to look for other distinctions in biblical thought.

II

Without doubt, the thought of holiness dominates the speech of prophets and apostles in the New Testament. In these writings, five words are derived from the same root. The adjective holy (hagios) appears some 250 times; when it appears in the plural, it is usually translated the saints (those persons who have been made holy). The verb to make holy (hagiadzo) appears 28 times, and is often translated to sanctify or to consecrate (both of these verbs have attracted misleading and even false connotations). Three nouns indicate the holiness resulting from God's action (hagiasmos, 10 times; hagiosune, 3 times; hagiotes, 2 times). For these, English translators choose various equivalents, such as sanctification and consecration. With so many texts available, it is possible to analyze the patterns of speaking and, behind those patterns, the characteristic ways of thinking. Our objective now is to observe strategic accents in those ways of thinking.

All such thinking makes God the central reference. As Father, the name is hallowed (declared holy) by all his children (Matt. 6:9; Lk. 11:2). To God as Creator, the quartet of living creatures continually sing their Trisagion ("thrice-holy," Rev. 4:8). To God as their holy Lord, martyrs give their testimony (Rev. 6: 10). God is the source of holiness among the faithful (I Thess. 4:8). Consider, for example, the use of the verb to make holy (hagiadzo). When it is used in the active voice, the reference is to the action of God or Christ. When it is used in the passive voice, faithful persons are being made holy by one of those two persons. So, in John, Jesus prays to God: "Sanctify them (make them holy) in the truth…. For their sakes I sanctify myself (make myself holy), so that they also may be sanctified (made holy) in the truth" (Jn. 17:17-19). From God through Jesus to the apostles to all believers-that constitutes the flow-chart. So, too, in the Epistle to the Hebrews: "The one who sanctifies (makes holy) and those who are sanctified (made holy) all have one Father" (Heb. 2:11). He is the holy Father of Jesus (Jn. 17:11) who has made Jesus holy by sending him to disclose that fatherhood (Jn. 10:36). This central purpose is conveyed by the birth of saints (holy children, I Thess. 4:3-7).

From an early moment in his ministry, Jesus was recognized (at least by demons) as "the holy one" who had been sent from God (Mk. 1:24; Lk. 4:34). That mission-to bring God's holiness to Israel-was marked by holiness from the beginning (baptism in the Holy Spirit) to the end, when he baptized apostles in the same Spirit. The same mission, of course, was violently opposed by those who could see in it no evidence of holiness. To them, Jesus' claims represented the work of the devil. Result: crucifixion. To believers, Jesus "suffered outside the gate in order to make his people holy" (Heb. 13:12). They were made holy by "the blood of the covenant" (Heb. 10:29). The church was composed of

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those whom Jesus through his death had made holy (I Cor. 1:2; 6:11; Eph. 5:26); accordingly, they recognized that their holiness was not their own, but his (I Cor. 1:30). For execution by crucifixion to become the criterion of holiness, and of God's holiness at that, became the supreme scandal. It created havoc (and still does) with all other ideas of wisdom, power, salvation, God-and thereby of holiness.

How could such havoc be overcome? It is easy enough to accept, in theory, the idea of God as the sole source and criterion of holiness; but it is anything but easy when such holiness is defined by the awful dereliction on Golgotha. Likewise, it has proved easy in retrospect to accept the idea of Jesus' holiness; but, in the first instance, it was anything but easy when that holiness was measured by his execution as a traitor to Israel. And what should be said of the holiness of his followers (the saints) when they were tested by their readiness to share that scandal? How can anyone come to accept the cruciform shape of such sanctity? The extent of this difficulty is symbolically reflected in the three days' blindness of Paul (Acts 9:8,9) and in the trauma of the prophet John at his vision of the Son of Man (Rev. 1: 17). We seldom ask how early Christians could have bridged the distance between their previous religious ideas and this disclosure of the holiness of God, of the crucified Son, and of the martyred followers of that Son, whom he claimed as his brothers and sisters. They could bridge that distance only by recognizing the presence of the Holy Spirit in each link of this chain of life-through-death, which reached from the will of God to the heart of believers. The importance of this bridge is measured by the frequency with which in the New Testament the adjective "holy" modifies the noun "spirit" (more than 95 times).

When we fathom the awesome dimensions of the difficulty, we can understand why the apostle declared that no one could say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit, and why Jesus said that no one knows this Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. As God baptized his Son with the Holy Spirit, a baptism only completed in his death (Mk. 10:35-45), so the crucified Son baptized his apostles with the same Spirit (Matt. 28:19; Jn. 20:19-22). Through those apostles, believers received the same gift, so that the love of God in their hearts became a token of this gift that enabled them to transmute their own sufferings into hope (Rom. 5:1-5). Their mortal bodies became a temple of the Holy Spirit (I Cor. 6:19), and it was this Spirit that conveyed holiness to their offerings (Rom. 15:16). The Spirit that bound them to the dying of Jesus could be simply defined as life (Rom. 8: 10); conversely, to lie to that Spirit meant death (Acts 5:3). The Spirit, with its holiness, was no pious moral trait, to be admired by outsiders, but a bond linking persons together in a single cruciform mission. The Spirit was present in the Cross of Jesus, disclosing the power and wisdom of God. The same Spirit was present when his followers, on trial for a capital offense, allowed the Spirit to speak through their confessions (Matt. 10:20). To say "Holy Spirit" was to point to the bond between

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Father and Son that became visible in the Son's testimony under fire, and then to the bond between the Son and his followers when they came under fire. It was the holiness of this Spirit that both explained the havoc caused by God's approval of such messengers and indicated how that havoc was overcome in such apostles as Peter and Paul. The cruciform mission had a steady direction, from heaven to earth, from the invisible to the visible, from God through the Spirit through the Messiah through the apostles into a new creation of life and holiness.

Because the saints were bound to God by this holy mission, they could be called a holy race, without reference to biological ties, a holy priesthood, without reference to ecclesiastical office, and a holy city, without reference to geographical location (I Peter 2:9). They inhabited a new symbolic universe where everything had become new (II Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:14). They saw signs of the invasion of God's kingdom for which prophets had long dreamed. Language, no less than life, was changed. It could hardly be otherwise after Jesus' crucifixion had produced such radical reversals in previous ideas of shame and glory, weakness and power, sin and righteousness, death and life. Now every action of faith pointed in the direction not of self-interest and self affirmation but of self-transcendence and self-denial. The holy became something not to possess, but to be possessed by and to convey to others.

These new perceptions of the holy, however, were limited to the outlook of a tiny, persecuted minority. What they saw as new creation was treason when seen by their persecutors. The religious majority in Israel rejected that outlook as violently as they had rejected Jesus, negative evidence that proved that the holiness of Christian martyrs, like Peter, Stephen, and Paul, derived from the holiness of their crucified master. According to the New Testament, this rejection was spearheaded by the leaders of synagogues and temple, and it ranged over many aspects of religious observance: the insistence on racial and religious identity, the necessity of circumcision, respect for the Sabbath and the festivals, obedience to kosher and sanitary rules, acceptance of the authority of scribes and priests. Just as these leaders had demanded the execution of "the Holy One of God" as a blasphemer and enemy of Israel, so they now persecuted those who traced their holiness to that Messiah. The conflict between perceptions of the holy (the holy temple, holy city, holy land, holy people) proved to be non-negotiable because of the deep loyalty of these leaders to scripture and tradition. The depth of that loyalty should enable Christians first to understand and then to share the emotional revulsion. It is doubtful if modern Christians can understand the apostolic thought-world until they have first shared the initial revulsion to and rejection of the radically new perceptions of holiness.

Scripture helped the first Christians grasp the reasons why Jesus and his apostles aroused such hostility. Israel's prophets from the beginning had fought against popular blindness, deafness, and hardness of heart (Matt. 13:14,15, etc.). So the apostles had frequent recourse to the

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exclamatory idou, often translated "behold" or "lo." To counter blindness, the call idou was to look for God's invisible power being displayed in a surprising way. To counter deafness to God's inaudible voice, the call idou was to listen. To counter smug complacency, the warning was to beware. The paralyzed had to be helped to walk, the lepers to be cleansed, the demon-possessed to be freed. Wherever healing took place, there believers discerned the power of the holy God and the holy Spirit, in fulfillment of such prophecies as Isa. 35:5-10.

But the appeal could seldom dispel the bitterness of the conflict. The bitterness cannot be explained by unilateral blame. On Jesus' part was an attack on many things that his adversaries regarded as holy, an attack supported by the claim that such an attack was demanded by his heavenly Father. In response, his adversaries attacked Jesus' attitudes toward the holy, certain that their attack was demanded by the God who had revealed his will in the Torah and the Prophets. Both sides recognized the claims of the first commandment and were ready to make whatever sacrifices were required by that claim. The great divide between them was formed by opposing views of God and his holiness.

Readers of the New Testament find there various stories of how certain individuals crossed from one side of the divide to the other. Few of these stories are more dramatic than Luke's account of how Peter was induced to alter his deep convictions about clean and unclean food. The Holy Spirit persuaded him no longer to call unclean what God had cleansed (Acts 10:14,15). And this miracle was confirmed when "the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word," forever erasing the distinction between clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile (10:44-47). Rules of holiness designed for the old creation were no longer valid for the new.

When we look for English words that accurately distinguish apostolic perceptions from the scribal, we can hardly improve upon the two terms we referred to in the beginning: the holy and the sacred. For the apostles, the revelation of their God's holiness in the Cross of Jesus conflicted with everything their adversaries, in loyalty to their God, considered sacred. Ever afterward, there has remained within the thinking of the church a potentially radical conflict between the holy and the sacred.

III

Ever since the Exodus of Israel from Egypt, thinkers have pondered God's purposes in that event. Later reflection has often quite distorted the original understanding. According to one ancient rabbi, God's actual purpose in the miraculous emancipation at the Red Sea had been to enable Israel, centuries later, to celebrate the Passover. Whether or not this rabbinic rationalization was officially approved, it surely would have been implicitly accepted by many celebrants. Certainly by Jesus' day, an event that had originally been non-liturgical had become fully homogenized into the annual festival. An action of God pointing earthward had become a human event pointing Godward. A new opening for Israel

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forward had become the commemoration of sacred memories backward. A story that hailed God's amazing control of things came under the supervision of scribes and priests. Result: the encouragement of the illusion that in the first instance the Exodus had been a liturgical happening. An annual sacred observance bad swallowed up a one-time holy event.

We can suppose that this was true for many Jews in the year when Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples, true even for the twelve Jews who gathered around the table with him. But, according to the Gospels, it was not true for Jesus. His understanding of that occasion was oriented toward the future, toward a non-liturgical event about to take place, in which God's hidden purposes would be revealed. Only afterwards did the apostles understand the kinds of liberation accomplished on Golgotha. They could then say with Paul, "Christ our Passover is sacrificed" (I Cor. 5:7) or with John, "Look! This is the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world" (Jn. 1:9). In Jesus, the annual Passover had become a non-religious event, a specific case of human suffering "once-for-all." But, of course, when these Christian Jews later commemorated the slaughter of this Lamb, non-Christian Jews discerned nothing that resembled the Passover. Their conceptions of sacredness could not tolerate such a definition of holiness.

The same liturgical habits of thinking could not long be excluded from Christian minds. As early as Paul's debates with the church in Corinth, the sacred had again begun to displace the holy (I Cor. 10-11). The regular proclamation of the Lord's death (11:26), the repeated participation in Christ's blood (10: 16), had become an occasion for provoking the Lord to jealousy (10:22), so that Paul could write, "It is not the Lord's supper that you eat" (11:20).

So, it cannot be denied that today the rabbi's interpretation of the Passover has been fully matched by current Christian interpretations of "Christ, our Passover." According to these implicit interpretations, God intended Jesus' death in order to enable Christians today to enjoy the saving benefits of the Mass, or the Eucharist, or the Lord's Supper. The more beautiful the sacred liturgy, the more successful it becomes in blinding the congregation to the profane character of the event being memorialized. Nothing happens to force the congregation to revise its basic ideas of holiness, ideas that belong to the old creation rather than the new. Reactions among the churches to Bernstein's Mass and Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ indicate the degree to which Jesus' death has become a sacred and not a secular (and holy!) event.

Current history illustrates the same conflict between the holy and the sacred that animates the pages of the Gospels. Insofar as the church's liturgies represent the sacred, they mark the wall between the sacred and the secular that the clergy are ordained to defend. Insofar as those liturgies celebrate the holy, as embodied in God's work of making all things new in Christ, they demolish the wall between the holy and the

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profane, with the clergy inheriting the calling of prophets and apostles to announce that demolition.

So, the minister is ordained to exercise a double function-to help a Christian congregation migrate from the secular world into a sacred space, and, once inside, to point to God's liberating destruction of all distinctions between the holy and the profane. The minister calls the congregation to worship, but in coming to the sacred altar, the congregation faces a holy Cross that issues its own declaration: "Jesus suffered outside the city gate in order to make his people holy through his own blood," and its own demand, "Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured" (Heb. 13:12,13).

Wherever that demand is heard, God's holiness is again being defined by the Cross, and that means that the primordial battle is again being joined. The sacred liturgy has no higher obligation than this: to proclaim that the death of Jesus has defined for all time the holiness of God and thereby the mission of the saints.