Exodus 28:4-5, ‘They shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother and his sons to serve me as priests. They shall receive gold, blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and fine twined linen.’
The vestments of the priest are formed of the same materials as the tabernacle (Ex.26:1ff), which means that the high priest is a sort of living personification of the meeting place between God and man; a human tabernacle. Clothed in these robes of blue and purple and scarlet (Blue=heaven, God / Scarlet=blood, humanity / Purple=the meeting of the two in mediatorial union), the high priest became the representative of man to God, and the representative of God to man and—in himself—the place where the two met.
Now, these things were given as images and shadows of a truth that came before them and would come to fulfill them, namely, the incarnate, crucified, and risen Jesus Christ. John helps us see this when he tells us that the Word who becomes Flesh ‘dwelt’ (σκηνόω) or ‘tabernacled’ among us. By the illumination of the Spirit given to him, John recognizes the incarnate flesh of the eternal Word as the reality toward which the tabernacle (and so the vestments of the priest) was pointing. The flesh of the God-Man IS the true tabernacle, IS the true priestly vestment, and when the scarlet of His bleeding body is raised on the tree into the deep blue of the heavens, He becomes the one robed in the sacred purple of the True High Priest.
Yes, and as High Priest, He is the one who hangs before God as the representation of humanity (justly damned under punishment for sin), even as—and precisely as this vicariously condemned one—He hangs before humanity as the representation of God (bearing the sin and deserved damnation of His enemies in love). Lifted up on the cross in the sacred vestments of His flesh, Jesus Christ IS Tabernacle and High Priest. The breaking of His body is the rending of the heavens and the shattering of the earth and the tearing of the veil, such that YHWH might descend as our God and we might ascend as His people, all within the nexus of Divine and creaturely communion who is the anastasiform Jesus Christ.
