Burnt Offering
Propers: The Seventh
Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2017 A
Homily:
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
On the 40th day after His
Resurrection, Jesus Christ Ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand
of the Father. He is there to this day, serving as our great High Priest in
that Temple not made with hands, praying for us, interceding for us, that we
might all be made one in Him to the glory of God the Father Almighty.
When we as Christians speak of Jesus’
sacrifice, we usually limit ourselves to the Cross: He died for our sins. The
Resurrection and Ascension, then, are sort of the aftereffects, the victory
lap. Jesus returns to Heaven because His work is done. But this is to
misunderstand the Atonement. The Ascension, Christ’s returning to the Father,
is not only part and parcel of His sacrifice; it is in fact the most important
part, the culmination of His work.
Sacrifice is a big deal in the Old
Testament. The very heart of Israelite religion for a thousand years was the
great Temple in Jerusalem, the House of God on earth. And there smoke went up
continually from the animal sacrifices offered day and night upon the altar of
the Lord. The sacrifice of an animal represents the giving of oneself. Animals
are valuable, life-giving. It costs us, in more ways than one, to sacrifice a
living creature. And so the animal would
be offered on our behalf, and the fire would transform it and carry it up to
God, who would accept the sacrifice and claim it as His own.
The heart of sacrifice, in the Bible,
is that we offer to God our lives and ourselves, and God in turn accepts us,
transforms us, and claims us for His own.
Now, it would be remiss if I didn’t
point out that in the Old Testament God does not require from His people much in the way of animal sacrifice until after they’ve rebelled against Him at Sinai, when they made for
themselves a golden calf. The majority of sacrificial law appears to be God’s
response to this apostasy, as though He knew that the Israelites throughout
their generations would need constant and visceral reminders that faith is
grounded not in our own prosperity and livestock but in the true God who alone
is faithful and keeps His promises.
As the Psalmist and Prophets make
clear, God does not require the blood of bulls or flesh of goats. Rather, He
requires of us that we love our God with all we have, and live out this love in
showing justice and compassion to our neighbor in his need. This is not pagan
sacrifice to a hungry god. Rather, my act of offering myself to you, in a real
and visceral way, and you then accepting and elevating me in return, is the clear
embodiment of a reciprocal relationship of love.
That’s what the Temple is all about—not
scapegoating violence, but embodying, making manifest, the sure and constant bond
of love between God and His people. And so this bond is not some wispy ideal
but a real thing of fire and smoke and blood.
Of course, when Jesus comes to earth,
He flips the whole system of Temple sacrifice on its head. Jesus, we know, is
God in the flesh, God come down to heal us, to teach us, to sweat and laugh and
cry with us. He goes about willy-nilly, speaking truth to power, lifting up the
lowly, raising the dead! And in response to this astounding, unmerited grace—we
kill Him.
The Crucifixion is not humanity
offering up a perfect sacrifice to an angry God. It’s not an act of vicarious
punishment that must satisfy divine justice in order for the world to be
forgiven. No: first Jesus forgives, and then we kill Him for it. The Cross does
not offer an innocent Man up to the violence of God, but instead it is God who
offers Himself up on the Cross to the violence of humanity. And when we murder
Him—when we slaughter Him as the Passover Lamb whose Blood sets us free—even
then He speaks the words of our forgiveness from the very wood of the Cross,
and pours out His life for love of the world.
But that’s not the end of it. For in
His Resurrection, in His Rising body and soul from the dead, Jesus is
transfigured, transformed and glorified! He is now so fully alive that at first
even His closest friends can no longer recognize Him. He has been transformed body
and soul by the fire of the Holy Spirit within His flesh, just as the animals
slaughtered in the Temple were transformed by sacrificial fire.
And just as with those sacrifices in
the Temple, so now must Jesus’ own humanity be lifted up into Heaven, claimed
by the Father, accepted as His own. And so the sacrifice is complete! In Jesus,
humanity itself has been perfected, offered up, transformed, accepted, and
claimed as God’s own! This was the plan all along! God the Son came down to
earth, became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and was made Man, so that He could
then Ascend back up into Heaven, returning to the Father with all of humanity
brought into union with God’s eternal Being. That’s what Heaven really is: it’s
perfect union with God.
Eternal life doesn’t mean that we
just get to go to a nice place after we die. Eternal life is nothing less than to
live in perfect relationship, perfect union with God in Christ Jesus—that we
may all be one, just as He and the Father are One. And this starts now! Not
later, not in another world. We are forgiven and accepted and claimed by God,
brought into relationship and union with God, here and now. The same fire that
transformed Jesus’ humanity, the fire of the Holy Spirit, burns now inside of
us.
That’s why St Paul calls our bodies
Temples of God’s Spirit, and calls God a consuming fire, and why he says some
will be saved “as through fire.” We are called to live lives of love and
self-sacrifice—which are really the same thing—forever offering ourselves to
God, that God may transform us, accept us, glorify and exalt us, claiming us as
His own. And this is a lifelong process.
When the Bible talks about God “testing”
us, always testing, it doesn’t mean that God is issuing some cosmic standardized
exam that some will pass and others fail. Rather, it means that we are tested as
silver in the furnace, as metal in the fire, burning away our dross, being
transformed by the fire, so that we may daily offer ourselves to God and that
God—in the mysterious workings of His providence and mercy—may make us
stronger, purer, brighter, hotter, liberating us from our slag and shaping us into
who and what we were meant to be all along.
And yeah, that hurts. Growth always
does. To love is to give of oneself, to suffer for the beloved, just as Jesus
did and continues to do for us every moment of every day. Life is suffering, yet
it always surprises us. What is most amazing to me is that we chose to make God
suffer, and in response God chose to suffer for us. If that’s not sacrifice,
then I don’t know what is.
When we suffer, when we grieve, when
we despair—when we are afflicted by disease or loss or the specter of untimely
death—know, my brothers and sisters, that you are not alone. God is not blind
to your sufferings, but shares in them along with you. In Jesus, God knows what
it is to suffer unjustly, to be persecuted and afflicted and to perish all
alone. And He will not abandon us to the same. Eternal life is not just some
hope beyond the horizon; eternal life is to know the fiery love of God and to be
drawn into ever deeper union with Him through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Offer to Him your sufferings, offer
them as sacrifice, and He will take them all upon Himself. He will accept them,
transform them, and claim them for His own. He does not cause your sufferings,
He does not will your sufferings, but by the fires of His grace He can transform
them into something strange and terribly wondrous: He can make your wounds the
means by which He pours out His life into you.
In the Name of the Father and of the
+Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Credit to whom credit is due: the above interpretation of the Ascension, placing emphasis on the sacrificial fire of the Holy Spirit, comes from Fr Patrick Henry Reardon of the Antiochean Orthodox Church, in his reflections on Ascension Thursday from the St James Daily Devotional Guide. The understanding of sacrificial law as penance for the apostasy of the golden calf is to be found in the writings of several Church Fathers, compiled by Dr Scott Hahn in the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Exodus.
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