A Satisfied God--July 21, 2021

A Satisfied God--July 21, 2021

"For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!" [Hebrews 9:13-14]

It comes down to this: God isn't hungry.  And God certainly isn't bloodthirsty.

The writer of Hebrews refutes what, to be honest, I think a lot of Respectable Religious Folk (ourselves included, to be fair) kind of quietly assume without saying explicitly.  I think  at some level, we do think that God is hungry--that God needs to be fueled or powered or appeased by our offering... something.  That's often how we implicitly interpret what all those centuries of animal sacrifices in Israel's distant memory were about: that a hungry deity demanded sacrifices, and that God must be fed (or again, maybe we think we are being more refined by saying "appeased") by killing animals and offering their blood up to heaven.  Sometimes the thinking goes, "Our sins demand satisfaction, and goat blood is like the minimum payment on your credit card bill--if you can't pay the debt you owe in full, at least you can pay the minimum due to keep things in right standing with the folks at MasterCard or Visa." It all assumes that God is primarily interested in getting what is due to God and thus exacting payment from us when we sin.  It assumes that God is less interested in loving or saving or restoring relationship with us, and more interested in the getting paid.

But the New Testament writers, including our friend here writing Hebrews, takes the imagery of the ancient sacrificial system and breaks it open.  These writers understood how important the regular offering of sacrifices was to the religious life of Israel, especially for those whose lives were in orbit around the city of Jerusalem and its Temple where those sacrifices were offered.  But they also knew that there was a minority report in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves about those sacrifices.  There are voices within what we call the Old Testament, usually prophets or poets, who tell the people, "Wait, wait, wait--let's not pretend that God can be bought off with our ritual killing of animals, or the grain from our fields, or even the offer of our children.   You can't bribe or influence God.  And God isn't hungry!"  The prophets remind the people that God had saved them and rescued them from enslavement in Egypt long before they had a temple and before they had priests offering up lambs and goats and the like.  And those same prophets often remind the people that they can't cheat or hate or harm their neighbors, distort justice, or scorn showing mercy on one day and then think they can settle up with God with a few extra sheaves of wheat on the altar.  God doesn't need their offerings, and God isn't fed by their sacrifices.  And God most certainly will not permit a quid-pro-quo transaction where humans are given permission to be rotten to each other as long as they feed God with the blood of animals.

So as we read these verses today, let's avoid the temptation to turn this into some kind of argument that enlightened Christians came and "fixed" the bad theology of ancient Judaism, as if Judaism had ever really taught that you could pay for your sins with sacrifices of animals like feeding a parking meter you have allowed to expire.  The voices from within Judaism itself understood that God didn't need to be fed with sacrifices, and they kept reminding their own people that God was not thirsty for blood.

Let's also be done, once and for all, with pretending that we Christians have stopped thinking in those transactional terms.  Just yesterday, a pastor of a congregation hundreds of miles away shared on social media that he had jokingly posted a message saying something like, "Now that I've had my coffee for the morning, I'm ready to pray--thanks for waiting for me, Jesus."  And some stranger oh-so-piously appointed themselves the judge of this posting, insisting back something like, "It is sinful to keep the Lord waiting.  Jesus will be upset with you for not completing your ritual of morning prayer before you make your coffee."  And sure, there's no animal sacrifice there, but there's still the underlying impulse of, "You have to give God what God needs or wants from you--in this case proper attention or respect or priority--or else, you'll lose approval (and points?) from God."  It's all still the same terrible transactional thinking that the prophets and poets have been speaking up against for millennia.

We still struggle, in other words, with thinking that there's some substance--if not goats or lambs, then recited prayers, or hours spent in church, or money donated, or candles lit--that we need to offer in order to power up God's engines.  We still operate, even if we don't say it out loud, like God is hungry.

The writer of Hebrews, however, has been laying out a case that God not only isn't hungry and in need of our goats and bulls and their blood, but also that God has brought an end to the whole sacrificial system in Jesus, who doesn't offer something else to die, but offers his own life and his own blood, ending any notion of needing someone else's.  So for whatever else Jesus' death means or does, it cannot be said to give God something God did not already have.  Jesus' death doesn't fuel a divine motor that runs on blood.  The cross does not satisfy some need of God to inflict a certain amount of suffering in order to settle accounts.  And the sacrifice of Jesus' life isn't about satisfying a bloodthirsty deity who is hungry for souls.  Jesus ends the system of sacrifice as the one who is himself the last offering and the last priest, in line with all the ancient poets and prophets of Israel's memory who had told the people God didn't need to be fed and couldn't be bribed with animal sacrifices anyway.

When we let that sink in, it will transform our faith.  It will mean we are done with transactional thinking ("If I pray more times a day, then God will give me what I wish for" or "If you give me the job I want, God, I promise I'll give you extra money from my paycheck," and the like).  And instead, we will see that God has provided all that was needed to restore our relationship.  

And we'll discover the freedom of knowing that God was never hungry in the first place.  God is already, in a word, satisfied.

Lord God, let us live in the freedom of knowing we cannot bribe you or buy access to your power, but rather that you have freely given us yourself already in Jesus.