• "The Bible Teaches That The Impulse to Sacrifice is Right"
• Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent (Passion Sunday)
• March 28, 2004
• The Reverend Stephen C. Scarlett

"For if the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" (from the epistle, Hebrews 9:11-15 BCP).

In the ancient world, the universal assumption was that blood sacrifice was necessary to the right ordering of the interaction between God, or the gods, and man. The Bible teaches us that this impulse to sacrifice is right, even if the pagans got it wrong in significant ways. The revelation that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai gave the specific details of the right way. Israel was to build a temple according to the specific design given to Moses. The point was to erect on earth a copy of the genuine sanctuary of God in heaven.

The worshiper, entering the earthly temple and participating in her rituals, would learn how things were in heaven. Since sacrifice was required to approach God in the earthly temple, we know that sacrifice is required to approach God in heaven. As Hebrews says, "Without shedding of blood there is no remission [of sin]" (Hebrews 9:22, NKJV).

The climactic sacrificial ritual of the temple took place each year on Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement. On this day, and only on this day, the high priest went behind the veil into the Holy of Holies to present the blood of sacrifice to forgive the people's sins from the previous year. So, our epistle from Hebrews today tells us, Jesus took the sacrifice he offered on the cross and, through the Ascension, entered into the actual holy of holies in heaven to fulfill the Yom Kippur rite.

His sacrifice put an end to the need for the temple sacrifices commanded in the law of Moses. It is not without historical significance that the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed within a generation of Good Friday in accordance with the prophesy of Jesus. Jesus did away with the Old Testament sacrifices in that his sacrifice rendered them obsolete and also in that his judgment on the temple rendered them impossible.

The main distinction Hebrews makes between the Old Testament sacrifices and New Testament sacrifice of Jesus is this: The old sacrifices only provided an external purification, a "sanctifying of the flesh." They covered up the sins of the people. The new sacrifice of Jesus provides an internal cleansing. It washes sins away.

Yom Kippur, in particular, and the temple, in general, represented an interim arrangement pointing forward to the time when Jesus would offer himself as the full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice. The cross is, thus, the focus of genuine sacrificial worship. Old Testament sacrificial religion looked forward to the cross. Our sacrificial religion looks backward to it.

From the very beginning, the church viewed her eucharistic liturgy as the fulfillment and continuation of the temple liturgy. When Jesus took bread and wine and said, "This is my body" and "This is my blood" the church understood that these symbols of his sacrifice were the substance of a new rite, a perpetual memorial of the cross.

A memorial or a remembrance meant more to the ancient Hebrew than it commonly means in our culture. When the Jewish people celebrated a memorial feast, their idea was that, through the feast, the past event was brought into the present and experienced anew. The rabbis taught that when each generation of Jewish people celebrated the Passover, it was as if they themselves set their feet on the bottom of the Red Sea.

Jesus' command to "Do this in remembrance of me" can be understood only in this Jewish context. At the Last Supper, he instituted a means of bringing his sacrifice into the present so that its benefits can be experienced anew. When we celebrate the Eucharist, we do not merely think about or talk about the cross, we re-present the one sacrifice and receive its benefits in our lives today.

The historical symbolism of the church aids in this experience. The church has an altar upon which the memorial sacrifice is placed. The altar is located in a sanctuary that represents the Holy of Holies in heaven. The liturgy reenacts the way that God and man are reunited through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. As we celebrate the Eucharist, we learn how things really are in heaven.

The great weakness of much modern worship is the absence of this symbolic world. The iconoclasts have torn down the symbols and replaced the rite commanded by Jesus with other services. The problem is that when one destroys the symbols, one, in significant ways, cuts off access to that which the symbols represent.

The more churches get away from the rite Jesus commanded at the Last Supper and the church's historical tradition of celebrating it, the more churches get away from the genuine sacrificial religion of the Bible. Religion comes to be more oriented towards producing subjective feelings and less oriented towards the objective reality of what Christ has done.

Two essential things happen when we gather around the altar. First, as we place the memorial sacrifice on the altar, the liturgy reminds us that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. Sacrifice is necessary and the necessary sacrifice has been provided.

Second, the liturgy provides us a means of access to the benefits of the cross. Here we plead the merits of that sacrifice and receive forgiveness, cleansing and new life in Christ. "For if the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your consciences from dead works to serve the living God."