Rome mediated, and burned the men who handed out keys. Protestants gatekeep. For years I aimed the first charge at the second church, and I could not work out why it kept sliding off the people I most wanted it to land on.
Say no mediation to a Protestant and he agrees with you. He doesn’t squirm — he quotes 1 Timothy 2:5 back at you before you finish the sentence, and he means it. His tradition was founded on saying it out loud against Rome. I was walking into rooms and prosecuting a count the jury had returned five hundred years earlier. A charge that costs the hearer nothing isn’t a charge. It’s a compliment he has learned to receive politely.
So I went back to look at who Yeshua was hardest on — not corrected, not warned, but pronounced woe over. Read Matthew 23 and Luke 11 and notice who is standing there. It is not the priesthood. The kohanim ran the sacrificial system; they were the mediating class by definition. The scribes and Pharisees were the interpreters — the teaching class. And that is where the woes fall: you have taken away the key of knowledge (Luke 11:52); you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces (Matthew 23:13). Not you inserted yourselves between men and atonement. You took the key. You shut the door.
The episode works through:
A key is named for opening. Hebrew mafteach is built on patach, to open — the object named after the act. There is no Hebrew word for key meaning the thing that keeps you out. Greek splits the same root against itself: kleis in Luke, kleio, to shut, in Matthew. And the key was to gnosis — da’at underneath, the knowing of Hoshea 4:6 and the knowing Yirmeyahu 31:34 promised to everyone, least to greatest. They confiscated the key to the exact thing the covenant had just promised every child in the room.
Rome’s two crimes. It mediated, and it also gatekept — the loud way. The Vulgate in a Europe that didn’t speak Latin. Arundel’s Constitutions of 1408 making English Scripture a crime. Hus burned in 1415, Wycliffe’s bones dug up and burned in 1428, Tyndale strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536 for wanting a ploughboy to know more Scripture than the prelates. A gate that obvious trains your eye for locks and flames — and leaves you unequipped to see the second gate, which has neither.
What the Reformation kept. Mediation went. Sola scriptura, the priesthood of all believers, the book in the vernacular. The custody did not go. Tyndale’s heirs inherited what he bought: the ploughboy has the book, in his own language, on his nightstand — and still waits until Sunday to be told what it means.
The sanctuary is the gate. The sign says sanctuary — mikdash, chartered in one sentence: let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst (Shemot 25:8). Then look at what the room does with the middle. Chairs bolted one direction, a raised platform, one microphone among four hundred people, one name on the printed schedule — and the thing nobody wrote down: stand up mid-sermon and ask how did you get that out of the Hebrew, and it is not a question, it is an incident. The gate is not the opinion. It is the opinion plus the impossibility of testing it in the moment it is handed to you.
He could be interrupted. At twelve, in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions (Luke 2:46). Both verbs. Four men tearing a hole in a roof over His head, and no rebuke for the interruption. Luke’s verb for Sha’ul in the synagogues is dialegomai — argument running both directions — nine times in Acts. And 1 Corinthians 14:29-31, where the man speaking is ordered to stop so a seated man can speak, and the congregation is given a job: let the others weigh what is said. Prophecy was on the floor when he commanded it. Kal v’chomer — if the room must weigh a prophet, how much more a man explaining a passage.
The narrow exception. Five marks of a teacher this doesn’t describe, including the two that decide it: he teaches you how to dig without handing you the conclusion, and you can stop him on the spot without it being a scandal.
There is another key, and it is not in anybody’s pocket. He opens and no one shuts (Yeshayahu 22:22; Revelation 3:7-8). The actual key was never in the building, because it was never theirs to hold.
You were never locked out. You were told to wait in the lobby, and you believed it, because a good man told you gently and every chair in the room was pointed at him.
Shalom v’shalvah.
