Tearing of the Veil

At the moment Christ died, the veil of the Temple — which walled off the Holy of Holies from the rest of the sanctuary — was torn in two from top to bottom. It is one of the most-quoted signs in the Gospels, and one of the most commonly over-read: it does not mean God was closed off before and is now simply "accessible." It means humanity has been brought into a new and unprecedented communion with Him.

For Inquirers

Picture the innermost room of the grandest building you know — a room so sacred that only one person on earth was ever allowed inside, and even he only once a year, trembling, carrying blood, terrified he might not come out again. That was the Holy of Holies, the heart of the Jewish Temple, and a heavy curtain — the veil — sealed it off from everyone else, all the time.

At the exact moment Jesus died on the Cross, that curtain tore. Not cut from below by human hands, but torn from the top, the way only something enormous could tear it. Three Gospels record it happening at that instant, and the Church has always read it as a message written in the fabric of the building itself: something has changed, right now, at the death of this man.

Here is where it is easy to tell the story too simply, and worth slowing down for. The natural way to finish the sentence is: "...and now, at last, we can get to God." That is not quite wrong, but it is not quite right either, and the difference matters enormously. It makes it sound as if God had been locked in a room the whole time, and Jesus merely picked the lock. But the God of Israel was never a stranger behind a door — He had already been walking with Abraham, wrestling with Jacob, speaking to Moses from the fire, guiding Israel through the wilderness. Something real was reserved behind that curtain, but it was not "any contact with God at all." What tore open that day was not a door to a distant God. It was the ceiling on how close God and humanity could be — because in Christ, God had not sent a message through the curtain; He had joined Himself to the very people the curtain kept out.

Overview

As Jesus died, "the veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom" (Matthew 27.51; also Mark 15.38) — an act done to the Temple, not by it, since the tear ran downward from the top. Luke 23.45 records the same event without that specific detail.
The veil sealed off the Holy of Holies, which "the high priest alone" could enter, "once in the year, not without blood" (Hebrews 9.7) — the single most restricted space in Israel's worship.
The tearing does not mean God was simply unreachable before and is now reachable; Israel already knew and was addressed by God, not least through the pre-incarnate Word Himself (see Christology). What changes is the kind of nearness now opened — full, personal union with God in Christ, not merely permission to approach Him.
The Letter to the Hebrews reads the veil itself as Christ's own flesh: through His death is opened "a new and living way… through the veil, that is to say, his flesh" (Hebrews 10.20).

Summary

The tearing of the veil is one of the most quoted signs in the Gospels, and one of the most commonly flattened into a slogan. The instinctive gloss — "the veil tore, so now we have direct access to God" — is true as far as it goes, but it can smuggle in a mistaken picture of what the Old Covenant actually was: as though Israel's whole problem had been a locked door, and God had simply been waiting on the other side of it for someone to turn the handle. That is not how Scripture presents the Old Testament. The God who dwelt beyond the veil was the same God who appeared to Moses in the burning bush — "the Lord called him out of the bush… I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraam" (Exodus 3.4-6) — and who spoke to Abraham through the Angel who could say, in the first person, "for now I know that thou fearest God, and for my sake thou hast not spared thy beloved son" (Genesis 22.12). Israel already had a real and living relationship with God; the veil marked a restriction within that relationship, not the absence of one.

What Hebrews actually says the veil restricted is more precise than "access" in the abstract. Only "the high priest alone" could go beyond it, and only "once in the year, not without blood" (Hebrews 9.7); the author adds that "the way into the Holy Place wasn't yet revealed while the first tabernacle was still standing" (Hebrews 9.8). Something real remained hidden and unrevealed — not God's existence or His willingness to speak, but the full and permanent way into His presence, open to everyone, at every time, without a mediating sacrifice repeated year after year. That is what tore open at the Cross: not a first contact, but the final and complete one.

This is why Hebrews identifies the veil itself with Christ's own body: believers now have "boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh" (Hebrews 10.19-20). The veil does not merely come down; it is replaced by something that can be entered rather than merely passed. Christ's flesh — assumed, crucified, and risen — is now itself the entrance, because in it God and man are united in a single Person (see The Incarnation, Hypostasis). The Temple's whole system of separation — one room, one priest, one day a year — pointed toward this: Christ "having come as a high priest of the coming good things, through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands… entered in once for all into the Holy Place" (Hebrews 9.11-12). God has not opened a door to be visited; He has joined our nature to His own.

Read this way, the torn veil supports something larger than "we can now talk to God." Athanasius's account of the goal of the Incarnation makes the stakes explicit: "He was made man that we might be made God"[^athdeif] — not that we might be granted an audience with a God who was previously withholding one. Because the Son is the same one "no one has seen… at any time," yet who "has declared" the Father (John 1.18) — the same Word who "was in the beginning with God" (John 1.1-2) — the Incarnation does not introduce a mediator where none existed; it unites humanity, once and for all, to the Mediator who had already been revealing the Father since before the Law was given — the argument worked out fully under Priesthood.

See also Christology, The Incarnation, Eucharist, and Theosis.

Sources

[^athdeif]: St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, §54 — "For He was made man that we might be made God.".