Calvin Synod Herald, 1988 (88. évfolyam, 1-5. szám)
1988 / 1. szám
CALVIN SYNOD HERALD 3-REFORMATUSOK LAPJA USHERS - Doorkeepers in the House of God Holy week could give ushers a bad name. According to John’s Gospel, our Lord’s arrest happened when Judas led a detachment of Roman soldiers to find him. Those Romans were not alone, however; they were accompanied by a group of the temple guards (John 18:3) - and these were none other than ushers! When we examine the Old Testament situation, we discover that King David and Samuel the prophet established this "office of trust’’(l.Chr. 9) using as their model the ancient time of the wilderness wanderings when Moses had set certain people "in charge of the camp of the Lord, keepers of the entrance.’’ They organized these gatekeepers to serve throughout the year in turns. They watched over the house of God, some even living nearby, and they opened it for worship every morning. They guarded the gates of the house of the Lord; their ministry also included caring for the furniture and the "utensils of service”, being in charge of the flour and oil and spices used in worship, and preparing the incense and the offering wafers and the Bread of the Presence. These doorkeepers collected money from the people as they came into God’s house to worship, in addition to their other responsibilities. A most interesting example is King Josiah’s decree to pay for renovating the temple with that “money which has been brought into the house of the Lord, which the keepers of the threshold have collected from the peoples.”(1I Kings 22) When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and the people carried off to exile, they nonetheless remembered the worship ministries established by King David, and they reorganized them all - including the office of gatekeeper when Nehemiah and Ezra revived the city and renewed the service of God in the temple. This, then, is the office of usher as it evolved through the Old Testament period. In the New Testament age the office was terribly illused, when some of the temple guards were sent to help the Roman soldiers to arrest Jesus. There is a lesson here for all ushers: Do not allow yourselves in any way whatsoever, to "arrest" the Gospel of Jesus and to imprison it, to curtail its freedom to change lives, by how you accomlish your work as a "keeper of the threshold” of grace. Instead our ushers should strive to be like those other temple guards who on being sent to arrest Jesus, came back empty handed, but with hearts wonder-full; No one ever spoke like this man! And the authorities were convinced by that testimony of awe that Jesus indeed has started to work in their lives (Jn.7:32) It is that wonder which ushers in genuine worship. Very early in its life the Christian church adopted this ministry of the usher. The duty of all believers and especially the work of the ushers was: "Welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you." In the third century ushers were constituted as an ordained office of doorkeepers. They welcomed worshipers, guarded the door against hostile intruders, and maintained dignity during the service. Their tasks as stated in the ordination were "to ring the bells, to open the church and to open the book for the preacher.” This continued until modern times. Ushers, therefore, have an honorable heritage, stretching back through the ages firmly rooted in the practices ot the ancient peope of God. Whenever you are asked to be an usher, accept it gladly; it is a great privilege D.R.Black Bethsaida Archeologists say they have settled a centuries-old debate over the location of Bethsaida, a fishing village where the apostle Peter was born and where Jesus was said to have worked miracles. “There is no doubt now that this is Bethsaida," said archaeologist Rami Arav, who headed the excavation of the site last April. A complete kitchen from the time of Jesus with many of its vessels intact plus boxes of pottery have been unearthed at Et Tell, one of the two sites long believed by scholars to be the biblical city. Arav said in an interview that the second site, pinpointed by biblical experts in the mid-19th century, was a nearby ruin called El-Araj, on the shores of the sea of Galilee. "To end the debate once and for all, we conducted test digs at the two sites to see if we could find a layer from the time when Jesus lived. The shafts yielded the layer we sought only at Et Tell,” Arav said. Rocky terrain and clashes that culminated in Israel seizing the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 have long made theories about the location of Bethsaida hard to prove. Even today access is difficult. Et Tell, a small mound just north of where the Jordan River empties into the Sea of Galilee, is situated among abandoned Syrian bunkers and exploded 52mm mortar shells in an area that until recently was suspected of being a mine field. Bethsaida was the site where Jesus was said to have restored a blind man’s sight (Mark 8:22) and healed Peter's mother of a fever (Matthew 8:14). He also began his famous walk on water from the shores of Bethsaida (Mark 6:45), and chose a site nearby to multiply two fish and five loaves of bread into enough food to feed 5,000 followers (Luke 9:10). Bethsaida, which means ‘house of fishing' in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, was also the birthplace of Peter, his brother Andrew and the apostle Phillip (John 1:44). Paul Hirschhorn/AP
