Sacrifice

Scripture: The Fifth Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Why did Jesus Christ have to die?

I think this is a pretty important question to address, given that we spend all of Lent preparing for Holy Week, during which we remember and relive our Lord’s Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. The dying and rising of Jesus Christ are the central drama of our faith, so we should probably establish up front why it had to happen like this in the first place.

I’m afraid that if we were to go by the latest spiritual self-help bestseller, or by Sunday morning televangelists, we would be told that God demanded a sacrifice for sin. Man had rebelled against God’s sovereignty, and so God’s perfect justice necessitated a perfect sacrifice—someone to pay our unpayable debt. And so Jesus, the only sinless human being, eternal Son of the Father, was nailed to a stick and offered up as bloody sacrifice to quench the fires of God’s righteous indignation. Here we have a God hungry for human flesh, and so we offer up the tastiest morsel we can find so that He won’t eat the rest of us.

Is that how it works? Is God like the legendary volcano spirits of ancient Hawaii, who would threaten to erupt unless an innocent virgin were tossed into the caldera? Is our God just a pagan god writ large, who demands human sacrifice, but is sated with a single, perfect offering? Please tell me that none of us think of God like that. That sort of God couldn’t make a friend, let alone a world.

Jesus Christ came into the world to save the world. We call His mission the Atonement, the “at-one-ment,” because He heals the chasm caused by our sin that separates human beings from God and from one another. He makes us one in Him. But how does He do this? Does Jesus accomplish this only by dying in a contractual, legalistic way—like paying a ransom?

No. There is much more to the mystery of the Atonement than the Cross alone. Eastern Christians especially emphasize that the division between God and Man was bridged the moment that Jesus Christ became human. Jesus is both fully God and fully Man; He Himself is the connection; His very life makes us one. And so the Church in the East has always insisted that the Atonement began not on the Cross but in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The moment that God took on flesh, the moment that He became Immanuel, “God-With-Us,” the healing began.

But wait, some have said. It can’t be that simple. You cannot satisfy the needs of justice without recompense, without the shedding of blood. And perhaps this is true. But others have pointed out that when the baby Jesus was but eight days old, He was circumcised in accordance with the Old Covenant. Now, if you’ve ever seen a proper circumcision, you’ll know that there is but a single drop of blood shed. It doesn’t seem like much. But the Blood of Jesus—which is to say, the Blood of God—is of infinite value. If blood must be paid to reconcile God with Man, it was paid in that drop on that day, the Eighth Day of Christmas.

At the age of 30 Jesus began His public ministry, revealing to all those who had ears to hear that He was Himself the Messiah promised of old, fulfilling all the promises of God, arising at the precise time predicted by the Prophet Daniel. And the truly shocking thing about Jesus’ ministry is not that He worked miracles but that He forgave sins. In the Bible, only God can forgive sins. Yet here comes Jesus, forgiving sins willy-nilly, healing not just the body but the soul. Who does this guy think He is? Who died and made Him God?

Keep in mind that this is what ends up getting Him killed—going around forgiving sins, acting like God on earth—which of course He was. But He was forgiving sins long before the Cross, long before the tomb. How then could the Cross be necessary for Jesus to atone for our sins, when He was already declaring our sins atoned for during His ministry?

This has led some Christians to conclude that the Crucifixion was not, in and of itself, necessary for our salvation; that it was just a sad happenstance, the tragic working of external forces. Jesus accomplished the Atonement by His life and teachings. In this line of thinking, the Cross is but a sad afterthought, an unnecessary and senseless end to our Lord’s life.

But that doesn’t fly. The Bible makes it clear from the beginning that Jesus is God’s plan for saving humankind, and that Jesus’ death is the culmination of that plan. Genesis prophesies that Christ will crush Satan even as Satan lethally strikes Christ. Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and Moses lifting up the bronze serpent, are both understood as pointing to Jesus’ death. Isaiah proclaims that the Messiah will suffer unjustly for our sins, will die horribly in order to heal us, and then will rise triumphant from the grave—all of this clearly stated hundreds, even thousands of years before Jesus’ birth.

In the New Testament, John the Baptist proclaims Jesus the Lamb of God. Think about what that means. The lambs born in Bethlehem, and killed at the Temple to celebrate the Passover, were the sacrifices that cemented the Old Covenant. Lambs born in Bethlehem are born to die in Jerusalem so that God’s people may be set free. The Cross is not a tragic addendum to Jesus’ life. It is the very arc and purpose of Jesus’ life, the climax of the entire history of salvation. From the time of His Nativity, wise men brought myrrh to Him to prepare Him for death.

The New Testament is quite explicit that Jesus is our Passover offering, our sacrificial Lamb. His Blood inaugurates the New Covenant. His Body broken grants to us eternal life. Jesus prayed in Gethsemane that His Father’s will be done. And His Father’s will was the Cross. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Death is part of being human now. And if Jesus is to be fully and truly human, then He must fully and truly die.

So now we’re right back to where we began: with Jesus’ death as sacrifice. But that word ought to mean something different to us by now. We’ve seen that the Cross can neither be written off as an accident, nor isolated as the entire story. Jesus was forgiving sins while He was yet in the womb! The Atonement started the day that Mary told the angel Gabriel, “Yes.”

Jesus’ sacrifice was not a pagan sacrifice, not a propitiatory sacrifice in the legalistic sense. It was certainly not an angry God demanding a scapegoat for humankind. Rather, it was a selfless sacrifice, laying down His life for His friends—an act of true love. Jesus’ entire life, His eternal existence, is an act of love. And the Cross was the climax of that. This goes to our very understanding of Who God is.

We as Christians believe that God is love. And love, true love, is so much more than just emotion. True love pours itself out for the beloved, sacrifices itself for the beloved. And that is how God lives in Trinity throughout all eternity. Within God’s very Being, God the Father eternally begets God the Son, eternally pouring Himself out for His beloved only Child. And God the Son, in return, eternally pours Himself back out for the Father in a never-ending cycle of love. The Father is always loving, always sacrificing, for the Son; and the Son is always loving, always sacrificing, for the Father. This is the life, the dance, of Trinity.

In Jesus Christ, the dance of the Trinity is opened up for all of humankind. We are welcomed into the cycle of self-sacrificing love that makes up the very life and Being of Almighty God. Thus are we made one in Him, now and forever. It began on day one. Jesus emptied Himself, put aside all His power and glory, to pour Himself out into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And He did that for us. He sacrificed Heaven for us, in order to become one of us—because He loves us, and He is Love itself.

Jesus’ entire life, all His sufferings, His temptations, His tears, His anguish, His laughter, His joys—watching His father die, watching His cousin be murdered, watching His beloved apostle run off to betray Him—all of that was His sacrifice. Not the sacrifice of a scapegoat to an angry God, but the self-sacrifice of a loving Son to His Father, the self-sacrifice of a loving God to humankind.

And then came the Cross, that terrible Cross, the Cross that we demanded He mount. He knew that it was coming. In His eternity God could foresee just how Jesus Christ would die from the very beginning of Creation. We are predictable creatures. But foreknowledge is not foreordination. Just because Jesus could foresee that we would stick Him to a Cross does not mean that it was His idea to die in this way. Yet it was the will of the Father that this come to pass in order to show us the very nature of love. Real love is always a sacrifice. And He gave everything to us.

On that Cross, the Son poured out all that He has and all that He is back to the Father. But He also poured it out for us, sacrificed Himself to us. He forgave us even as we were murdering Him. He claimed us even as we nailed Him to a piece of wood. “I still love you,” He said. “I still forgive you. I still die for you.” That’s what a real sacrifice is. It isn’t a ransom. It isn’t a scapegoat. It isn’t blood money. Real sacrifice is love, and real love is sacrifice.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.