Ark of the New Covenant

My church is having an art show (which might be one of the best sentences ever) about the book of Leviticus and its conjunction with Hebrews and the Gospel. Despite it's strangeness sometimes, it's themes are beautiful. Sacrifice, atonement, purity, cleanliness, and holiness are all major facets that transfer over to the New Testament with even greater vigor. There is an action of moving from God's presence in one tiny place to being dispersed among His billions of people. Symbols like the lambs, doves, and bulls overtake redemptive imagery. So naturally it was difficult to arrange both predetermined symbols and a progressive, historical action into one stagnant image.

One idea was to make a priest's ceremonial garb out of NT themed material. A thorny head covering, an ephod without stones but instead nails, sandals with Hebrew tefillin filled with bread and wine. These are still great I think, but I had neither resources nor time at the given moment. I may work on it at a later date. Also I thought of doing little sculptural sketches of every book in the Bible, more of as an exercise.

What I landed on, though, was the image of the Ark of the Covenant. It's twin poles could be taken out and turned into a cross, but that simplistic in thought and sight. I saw a work by my internship-boss, Tylur French that had a carved wood flame coming out of a rock. The multimedia connection was awesome, so I started there, thinking first of the Ark as a heavy, dense block of stone. Eventually everything came together and the poles instead became steel nails that were being driven into two cross beams by the weight of the Ark. The Law required a sacrifice, and it was given in Jesus.

It looks a little more wobbly-war-of-the-worlds-tripod than I wanted it to, but I think it still retains the visual weight I was after. I turned it in with Jezreel IV and both got accepted!

Here's a sermon by Drew Haltom on purity in Leviticus.

Here's a song by Katherine Kramer on Leviticus.

Here's an epic video about holiness by The Bible Project.