Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

“Then called I upon the name of the LORD; O LORD, I beseech thee, deliver my soul.” — Psalm 116:4

The Curtain Everyone Remembers

On August 25, 1939, The Wizard of Oz premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. The film had nearly bankrupted MGM. It cycled through four directors, dozens of script rewrites, and a production budget that ballooned past two million dollars during the Great Depression. Studio executives worried they had a disaster on their hands. But when the lights went down and the audience watched Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion finally reach the Emerald City, something happened that the studio had been counting on: the crowd was captivated by the spectacle.

And then Toto pulled back the curtain.

Behind all the smoke, the amplified voice, and the floating green head was a small, ordinary man pulling levers. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” he shouted. But it was too late. Everyone had already seen.

That scene has lived in the American imagination for nearly ninety years because it names something we all recognize: the fear that the thing we trusted might be smaller than it appeared. The great and powerful Oz turned out to be a fraud. The curtain was hiding a disappointment.

The Bible tells a story where the curtain hides the opposite.

For centuries, a thick veil hung in the Jerusalem temple, separating the Holy of Holies from everyone outside it. Only the high priest, once a year, on the Day of Atonement, could pass through. The curtain kept people out because the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity could only meet on God’s terms.

And then, on a Friday afternoon outside the city walls, Jesus of Nazareth died on a cross. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record what happened next: the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. God pulled the curtain back himself. And behind it was everything the human race had been looking for: full access to the Creator of the universe, purchased at the cost of his Son’s blood.

The Wizard of Oz says, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”. The gospel says to come, look closely. It cost the Man behind this curtain everything to pull it down. And this week’s readings walk us through what it looks like when we see what was always there.

Psalm 116:1–4, 12–19: The Man Who Can See the Gift but Cannot Name the Giver

The psalmist stands on the far side of rescue. Death had surrounded him. The “pains of hell” had gripped him (v. 3). He cried out to the LORD, and the LORD delivered him. The rest of the psalm is a response of gratitude: “What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward me?” (v. 12). He lifts the cup of salvation. He offers the sacrifice of thanksgiving. He pays his vows in the presence of all God’s people.

This is a man who knows he has been saved. He can describe the experience. He can feel the weight of the debt he owes. But something is missing from his testimony. He knows that God rescued him, and he knows the rescue deserves everything he has in response. But the psalm leaves the mechanism of deliverance unnamed. The cup of salvation is in his hand, and he lifts it with genuine worship, but he has yet to see who filled it. The curtain, so to speak, is still hanging. The psalmist worships on the near side of it, and his worship is real. But the full picture of what God has done and how God has done it waits behind the veil.

Luke 24:13–35: The Stranger Who Pulls the Curtain Back

Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem on Easter Sunday, and they are grieving. They had believed Jesus was the one who would redeem Israel (v. 21). His crucifixion ended that belief. They have heard reports of an empty tomb and a vision of angels, but the reports have only confused them further. They are people who have all the pieces of the puzzle and yet see only fragments.

Jesus joins them on the road. Their eyes are “holden” so they cannot recognize him (v. 16). And here is the critical move: Jesus could have revealed himself immediately. He could have shown his hands and feet right there on the road. Instead, he opens the Scriptures. “Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). He pulls the curtain back on the entire Old Testament. Every promise, every sacrifice, every psalm of deliverance, every suffering servant passage: all of it was pointing to him. The psalmist’s cup of salvation, David’s path of life, Isaiah’s lamb led to the slaughter — Jesus walks them through the whole story and shows them who has been behind the curtain the entire time.

And then, at the table, he takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. Their eyes open (v. 31). They recognize him. And he vanishes. They are left with burning hearts and opened Scriptures, and they run back to Jerusalem to tell the others.

The Emmaus road is what happens when the curtain comes down. The Scripture and the broken bread work together, and suddenly everything that was hidden becomes visible. The Man behind the curtain has been there all along.

Acts 2:14a, 36–41: Peter Tells the Crowd to Look

Peter’s Pentecost sermon reaches its conclusion with a single declarative sentence: “God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ” (v. 36). This is the public version of what happened on the Emmaus road. Jesus opened the Scriptures privately for two disciples walking to a village; now Peter opens them publicly for a crowd in Jerusalem. The curtain has been pulled back, and Peter is standing in front of thousands of people saying: Look. See who has been behind this the whole time.

The crowd responds the way people respond when they see something that changes that confronts their blinded hearts: “They were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?” (v. 37). The question echoes the psalmist’s cry in Psalm 116:12: “What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward me?” Both are asking the same thing — what is the right response to a God who saves? Peter answers: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (v. 38).

And then Peter says something that stretches the curtain’s opening across all of history: “The promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call” (v. 39). Three thousand people respond that day. The psalmist paid his vows “in the presence of all his people” in the courts of the temple. The church now pays its vows in the waters of baptism, in every city, across every generation.

1 Peter 1:17–23: The Plan That Was Always Behind the Curtain

Peter’s epistle gives us the theological backbone of the whole set of readings. He tells scattered believers across Asia Minor that they have been redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (v. 19). This is the answer to the question the psalm left open: How does God deliver his people from death? With the blood of the Lamb.

And then Peter says something that reframes the entire story: Christ “was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (v. 20). The plan was always there. Before Moses, before David, before the temple veil was ever woven, God had already determined how he would rescue his people. The curtain was always temporary. It was always going to come down. And the One behind it was always going to step through.

The result of this redemption is new life: “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (v. 23). And the evidence of that new life is community shaped by love: “See that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently” (v. 22). The redeemed do not walk away from the torn curtain unchanged. They walk toward one another.

The Curtain Is Open. Now What?

The trajectory across these four readings moves from experience to explanation to proclamation to transformation. The psalmist experienced deliverance and responded with gratitude (Psalm 116). Jesus opened the Scriptures and the bread to show two grieving disciples who had been behind the curtain all along (Luke 24). Peter stood in front of a crowd and announced the same revelation publicly, and three thousand entered the story through repentance and baptism (Acts 2). And the epistle tells the church that this was the plan from before the foundation of the world, and that it produces a community defined by fervent love (1 Peter 1).

The practical question for this week is direct: Are you living like the curtain is still closed?

Many of us worship on the near side of the veil, like the psalmist. We lift the cup of salvation. We feel gratitude for what God has done. But we treat the Scriptures as background material rather than as the place where Christ reveals himself. The Emmaus road teaches us that the Bible is where the curtain comes down. When you read the Old Testament, you are walking with Jesus on that road, and he is showing you what was always there.

So this week, read. Open the Scriptures expecting to meet Christ in them. Sit at the table on Sunday morning and ask the Holy Spirit to do for you what Jesus did for Cleopas and his companion: open your eyes. And when you see, do what those two disciples did. Get up from the table and go tell someone. Run back to Jerusalem. The curtain is open, the Man behind it has a name, and his name is Jesus.

Points to Ponder

The psalmist knew he had been delivered and responded with gratitude, but he could describe the experience of rescue more clearly than its cause. Where in your own worship do you express gratitude for what God has done while still having limited sight of how and why he did it?
Jesus chose to open the Scriptures before he revealed himself at the table. Why do you think the biblical explanation came before the moment of recognition? What does this suggest about the relationship between understanding Scripture and encountering the risen Christ?
The crowd at Pentecost asked, “What shall we do?” and Peter gave them a concrete answer: repent, be baptized, receive the Holy Spirit. When was the last time you heard the gospel and felt the weight of that question personally? What did you do with it?
Peter says Christ was “foreordained before the foundation of the world” but “manifest in these last times.” How does it change your understanding of the Old Testament to know that the redemption plan was always in place, waiting for the right moment to be revealed?
The Emmaus disciples recognized Jesus in the breaking of bread and immediately ran back to tell the others. How long do you typically sit with a spiritual insight before you share it with someone? What would it look like to shorten that distance?

A Prayer for the Week

Father, you kept your plan of redemption behind the veil for centuries, and in the fullness of time you pulled the curtain back through the death and resurrection of your Son. You tore the temple veil from top to bottom so that every barrier between us and you would fall.

Open our eyes the way you opened the eyes of those two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Meet us in the Scriptures this week. Show us what Moses and the prophets and the psalms have been saying about your Son all along. And when we sit at the table, let us recognize the One who breaks the bread and gives it to us.

Give us hearts like the Pentecost crowd, willing to be cut to the core by the truth. Give us feet like the Emmaus disciples, ready to get up from the table and run to tell others what we have seen. And give us the love that Peter calls for, the fervent love that marks a community of people who have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb foreordained before the world began.

We lift the cup of salvation and call upon your name.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, the Lamb without blemish and without spot, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

“And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” — Luke 24:27