“He has appeared once for all at the end of
the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself.”
Hebrews 9:26
Yesterday,
the government of Singapore hosted a historic meeting between Xi Jinping, the
president of Mainland China and Ma Ying-jeo, the president of Taiwan. Technically, China and Taiwan are still
engaged in a civil war, and it was the first meeting between the leaders of the
countries in sixty years. Many people
are hoping for reconciliation. China and
Taiwan share a common language, history and culture. Both are important economic powers, and there
would be advantages in trade and security cooperation.
But with a
bloody war and decades of hostile rhetoric behind them, it’s almost impossible
for the leaders to know how to speak with each other. They agreed not to call one another president,
because that would suggest that both lead legitimate governments. No flags can be displayed. Neither president has the freedom to promise
another meeting or to make substantial proposals for common action. The words they do use must be chosen with
extreme delicacy, because anything either leader says could call up old
associations and deeply offend the other, perhaps touching off internal
scandals that would only make things worse.
In its impotency, its nervous gesturing, what it most reveals is just
how far off the goal of normalized relations really lies.
I doubt that
any of us has juggled a conversation quite as stressful and momentous as the
one that took place yesterday in the Singapore hotel. But I’d bet that most of us have been in something
like it: a negotiation session at work, family court, a chance meeting with
someone who was a dear friend before that horrid betrayal that leaves you both
unable to look each other in the eye.
You try to find the words that couldn’t possibly offend, and to come up
empty. You stretch your arms across the
void trying to grasp some point of connection, but find no hold. You’ve seen things move in slow motion
towards that inevitable point of destruction.
It’s deeply frustrating, and we long for a different way, an alternative
to the futility of reopening fresh wounds, of hurting one another all over
again.
One of the basic assumptions of Christian
theology is that this is exactly how it is for us in our life with God. There is a great gulf fixed between God and
us, the gaping wound of our sin. There
are signs of promise in the long history of our dealings with Him, but over and
over again, we have failed God, and the story of the covenant is, on the whole,
a tale of repeated wounding. We can feel
deep within us that desire to reach across the great divide. We would be better people, pure in our
thoughts, consistent in our actions. We
would live together in justice and peace as God desires. We would sit still long enough to hear His
voice and then rise to gladly do His will.
Our common life would be marked by ready cooperation and joyful
worship. But every time, we come up
short. “The Lord looks down from heaven
upon us all,” says the Psalmist, “to see if there is any who is wise, if there
is one who seeks after God. Every one has proved faithless; all alike have turned bad;
there is none who does good; no, not one.”[1]
We would hope
that there could be just one exception, one truly pure saint, one perfectly
sublime act of worship, one project that was so well planned and so carefully
executed that it would open the heavens and pour out the long-desired favor of
God.
There is a candidate for this in the
religion of the Old Covenant, one high-level, carefully orchestrated meeting
between the hostile powers, God and humanity.
It’s called the Day of Atonement, the Yom Kippur, the holiest day of Jewish religious calendar. All the people would fast and confess their
sins. They would crowd around the temple.
The high priest would purify himself and dress in pure linen garments that
symbolized the holiest of intentions. He
would offer the purest and costliest of sacrifices, which God had set apart as
the chief way to open the gates of His mercy.
Under cover of thick clouds of incense, the high priest would enter
through the curtain, four inches thick, into the highest place, the Holiest of
Holies, treading on ground touched just once in the year. He would take the blood of the sacrifice and
place it on the mercy seat, the center of the shrine of the Covenant. It was a beautiful moment, and our Epistle
writer is sure that no other ceremony in whole history of human religious
aspiration that is higher, nobler and more endowed with potential for
stretching across the void to the God who would receive us so willingly if only
we could we could reach Him.
And yet, it fails. The failure of the Day of Atonement is a
major theme of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Today’s lesson mentions just a few of the failures. It must be conducted, the author notes, in a
place that is only a distant copy of the true throne room of God. The author doesn’t say it, but the temple is
also tainted by a long history of infidelity and greed, as Jesus shows in his
passing remarks about the Pharisees’ gifts in today’s Gospel lesson. The
high priest also must offer the blood of another. Blood, in the symbolism of the covenant,
represents life, life given over in true devotion. The high priest offers the life of an animal
because it is impossible for him to offer and be offered at the same time. And he must do it again and again. The Day of Atonement cannot ever be postponed
because this year the people have quit sinning.
Even the high priest can’t quit sinning.
He must always sacrifice two beasts, one for the people, and one for
himself, because since last year, he also has fallen away from God’s
intention. Even at its best, the author
judges, human religion is filled with artificiality, hypocrisy, and impotence.
Until the coming of
Christ. For there was one righteous man,
One sent into the world who knew the Father fully and was wholly obedient to
His will. There was 0ne among us who
rose up every day and ran the path before Him without stumbling, “who was
tempted in every way as we are, and yet did not sin.”[2] To fulfill the Father’s plan, Jesus mounted the Altar
himself, the wood of the Cross. And
there, he was both priest and sacrifice.
He was completely devoted. He was
the pure victim. And His blood, the
symbol of His life, was poured not for His own sake, but for the forgiveness of
the sins of the world.
When that hour drew near, and the
sky turned black because the whole frame of the world wept at such a sight,
remember what happened. ‘It is finished,”
He said.[3] And the veil of the temple, that thick
curtain that sealed off the holy place, it was torn in two from top to
bottom. It was at the ninth hour, one of
the Gospel writers remembered.[4] That’s the time of sacrifice, the little
daily reminder of the great Day of Atonement.
“It is finished,” He said. The
void has been bridged, humanity is reconciled to God. All human religion has been judged and found
wanting. He has offered the one
sacrifice that really matters, what the traditional Anglican Eucharistic
prayers call the
“one oblation of himself once offered,” “a full,
perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of
the whole world.”[5] He appeared once for all, our Epistle
proclaims, to remove sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And when He had risen up and ascended into
heaven, to appear before His Father in glory, He carried the tokens of His
sacrifice into the true holy place. There
He sat down to reign until He returns in glory to redeem us, who wait for
Him.
What that means for us is that we
don’t have to save the world, because He has already done it for us. It doesn’t all depend on us: to build the
perfect congregation, to nurture the perfect family, to offer flawless worship,
to solve the deep and intractable problems of the world. All our best efforts will always come up
short. They will always be a bit
hypocritical and impotent. But this is
fully within God’s plan. Because the
most profound thing we will ever experience, His life-giving mercy of God, doesn’t
come from something we do. It flows from
that which was done for us: once for all, on the Cross two thousand years
ago.
We are not responsible for carrying the burden of this
world’s ancient sorrows. If Jesus has
sat down on the throne of glory, then we don’t always have to be busy
either. If He can wait patiently until
the promised day of glory, we can be a bit more patient with ourselves and with
those other imperfect people that God puts in our lives. The heart of true religion, the best news at
the center of the Good News is that it doesn’t all depend on us. We are sinners but He is righteous. We have failed, but He has triumphed. By His Cross, he has set us free.
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