When Jesus died on the cross, there was an earthquake. Rocks were split. The centurion and his soldiers who had carried out the crucifixion orders were afraid.

In the heart of the temple, in the "holy of holies", in the very heart of Jerusalem, the sacred veil tore, from top to bottom.

The veil, "rent in twain"...

The veils in the tabernacle and later in the temple were important. They're described in great detail in Exodus and in 1 Kings. In Arcana Coelestia 2576, it says that, "Rational truths are a kind of veil or clothing to spiritual truths.... The veil represented the nearest and inmost appearances of rational good and truth....

And now, as Jesus dies on the cross, the veil tears. What does this mean?

Here's how Swedenborg describes the symbolism of this:

"...that once all appearances had been dispelled, the Lord entered into the Divine Itself, and at the same time He opened a means of access to the Divine Itself through His Human that had been made Divine." (Arcana Coelestia 2576)

Think about four watershed spiritual events:

1) The creation of the physical universe. (Current best guess: 13.8 billion years ago). Genesis 1:1-10

2) The beginning of life. (On earth, between 3.5 and 4.5 billion years ago.) Genesis 1:11-25

3) The beginning of spiritually conscious human beings. (Reasonable guess: 100,000 years ago). Genesis 1:26-31

4) The incarnation and resurrection of the Lord God Jesus Christ (2000 years ago).

God's love and wisdom have been flowing into the universe for a long time. Where you might expect entropy, instead we see a universe that seems to favor life and intelligence. Think what a fulfilling moment it must have been when God could tell that human minds were now responding to Him, after all that outpouring.

But the free response-ability has tragedy baked in, because we can also choose not to respond, and to go the opposite way.

As we humans grew more "sophisticated", God used new channels to reach us, notably prophets and spiritual leaders, and later the written word. And in those channels, from the earliest times, there are already prophecies that the Lord would one day come into the world in human form.

Why did He need to do that? He must have foreseen that people would need to have that human level of connection, in order for enough good and truth to exist for us to make the decisions that open us to salvation.

Let's go back to Swedenborg's description:

"... once all appearances had been dispelled the Lord entered into the Divine Itself..."

Throughout the Lord's life on earth, there was the appearance that he was a man, like us. He had a human body. He could be tired and hungry. He could be tempted (though unlike us, he always won). In his spiritual life, there were times when he felt keenly the appearance of his human separate from his Divine essence. At other times, that appearance thinned, and he felt his divinity more powerfully. As he grew up, and was baptized, and began his ministry, he must have been growing more and more fully aware of what was going on inside him -- the glorification of the human part of him. With the death of his body on the cross, the bodily human-ness was no longer in the way. That appearance was dispelled. A new connection was fully forged between the Divine and the human.

And then, there's the second part of Swedenborg's statement:

"at the same time He opened a means of access to the Divine Itself through His Human that had been made Divine."

The veil was torn. The old religion, which had placed ritual above real good, and where God was invisible, separated from human knowledge by a veil -- was torn. New light could reach people, through the new teachings of the Lord. We could respond to a God who, in His Divine Human, we now could understand and approach and love more deeply.

4653. The spirits who correspond to hearing, that is, those who constitute the province of the ear, are ones who lead lives of simple obedience; that is to say, they do not use reason to establish whether a thing is true but believe it to be so because others say it is. They may therefore be called 'obediences'. The reason why they are as they are is that the relationship of hearing to speech is like what is passive to what is active, and so like a person who hears and acquiesces in what another says. This also explains why in everyday speech hearing someone may mean being obedient to him, and to hearken to his voice to obey him. For the deeper meanings which human utterances possess have their origin for the most part in correspondence, the reason being that man's spirit exists among spirits in the next life, and exercises its power of thought there, though man himself has no knowledge at all of this and one interested solely in the body has no wish to know it.

[4653a] There are many different kinds of spirits who correspond to the ear, that is, to its functions and duties. There are those who correlate with the specific parts of that organ - those who correlate with the outer ear; those who do so with the membrane there which is called the ear-drum, the interior membranes termed fenestrae; and those who correlate with the malleus, the stapes, the incus, the cylinders, and the cochlea. There are also those who correlate with parts more interior still, including those immaterial or insubstantial parts that are closer to the spirit. Lastly there are those spirits, within the spirit itself, who are linked ultimately - at the most internal point - to spirits belonging to internal sight, from whom they differ in that they themselves are not so discerning, yet, like those who are passively obedient, support them.