Conflict or Compromise
Picture a church (local or national) trying to pick itself up after years of turmoil, discussing Focal Points of Worship — buildings, clergy, liturgy, ceremonials, &c — committed on the one hand to beginning again and on the other to identifying the new with the old, partly to keep the traditionalists on board, partly to appeal to the revisers, and partly as a recognition that the community today is not what it was yesterday. Still in the wilderness they may be, but it is a different wilderness with people who have little or no recognition (never mind recollection) of what has gone before. This is the post-exilic community as they contemplate re-building the Temple.
In the intervening years there had been many changes. In the wilderness, for example, the focal point for the community was the Ark. By the tenth century it was a temple, often referred to as a ‘the tabernacle’, and with ‘the tent of meeting‘ to describe both. Different time, different culture, different structure, but fundamentally the same: ‘a meeting place with God’. This whole chapter breathes a different air but then some things must not change, as v 8 emphasises. Two questions arise.
One, what do you choose (long term), and how do you go about it (short term)? Two, to what extent do you try to put everything back as it was and by what criteria do you determine the new? Verse 8 suggests a victory for the traditionalists but then that raises a third question. Did it work out like that or was it only ever a pious hope?
The incident focuses well the ever-present dilemma for any church (or indeed any community) between dream (the past), reality (the present) and vision (the future). The dream was fine, the vision laudable, but the reality was to achieve it in a way that was practical and meaningful. Did it work? We have no means of knowing but the rest of the chapter leaves us wondering to what extent they are fulfilling the dream; or are they avoiding the issue by simply putting the two side by side with a certain amount of incongruity?