Lift up your heads, O gates
And be lifted up, O Ancient doors
that the King of Glory may come in.
I have always understood this part of Psalm 24 as applying to us opening our hearts for Jesus to come and dwell in us, or perhaps opening the gates of Jerusalem for God to take inhabit his holy city. But it may be that the ancient doors are the Gates to Heaven itself.
This afternoon I read a small paragraph from a modern translation of a work written seventeen hundred years ago: On the Incarnation, by Saint Athanasius.
"Crucially, it was not Christ, the eternal Word and Lord of all, who needed the gates opened, because He, as Creator, was never barred from his own creation. No, it was we who needed access. So, Christ bore us in his body, which He first surrendered to death on our behalf and then, through it, carved for us a path to heaven."
