Lenten Daily Reflection 2021-03-25
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Hebrews 10.4-10
For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘See, God, I have come to do your will, O God’ (in the scroll of the book it is written of me).” When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “See, I have come to do your will.” He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
The message in this passage is straightforward. Paul is making the point that the traditional Jewish practice, or law, of sacrificing animals is no longer enough to take away sins. Jesus has come and replaced this by offering his body, as is God’s will, as the final sacrifice to sanctify us. Paul uses Jesus’s own words to make his point.
Having grown up in the Christian church, the idea of animal sacrifices seems foreign and shocking. I can’t imagine going to a temple and either bringing an animal or buying one there, solely for the purpose of killing it to be absolved of some of my sins. I have many questions - would I be the one to actually kill the animal? How? Was the inside of the temple a bloody gruesome mess?
As we head through Lent we are getting closer to commemorating Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, I feel the need to have even more shock than I do about the animals. But this story is so familiar, as I have heard it every year since i can remember. I have become so used to the image of Jesus hanging from a cross.
So I need to step back and reexamine what I know, and then it is shocking. Jesus hangs there, dead. God had sent him as his son, a human, to be our teacher. Ultimately we turn on this teacher and kill him. Then God forgives us for this act, and I am forgiven of all of my sins, forever.
That is powerful. And, as I’m viewing the stations of the cross this year on Good Friday, I will try not to let the familiar dilute the awe and shock of what actually occurred.