The Last Sacrifice--July 5, 2021
"For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did one for all when he offered himself." [Hebrews 7:26-28]
The trouble with Respectable Religious Professionals (a title which I fully admit applies to me as well) is that they're like everybody else on God's green earth: they're stinkers. They--or rather, we--are mess-ups and failures, we're ornery and selfish, we're fakers and hypocrites. The church's shorthand for all of that is to say we're sinners. You know, just like everybody else.
Plenty of famous preachers, priests, bishops, and pastors from movies and literature have taught us that, from the hypocritical Reverend Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter to Robert Duvall's well-meaning but periodically unhinged traveling church-planter in The Apostle to Frollo in the Disney retelling of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But you don't have to have read many books or seen many movies to know that religious leaders are just as broken as anybody else. Plenty of stories in the news remind us that pastors, priests, and other religious professionals can commit--and have committed--acts of abuse, embezzlement, deception, and harm, from accounts of sexual abuse of parishioners to misuse of church funds to the recent publicizing of unmarked graves from religious schools where indigenous children were taken from their families, never to see them again. The preachers you know personally may have less dramatic or well-publicized sins of their own, but they've got their own baggage, too.
And while there may be some level of comfort from hearing your own local pastor be able to tell you, "Hey, we're all sinners," when you are struggling through a time of dealing with your own issues, there's also something especially dangerous and disappointing about how easy it is for Respectable Religious Leaders to abuse their position, their power, and their piety to cover over their sins.
The writer of Hebrews saw another issue with the sins of religious leaders, in particular the priests of the former temple system: priests who are also sinners themselves have to worry about their own sins as well as the people for whom they are offering additional sacrifices. The whole logic of the Temple and its daily routine of sacrifices and burnt offerings was that people came bringing animals to be sacrificed as part of their sorrow and repentance for their sins. The role of the priests, as people who were supposed to be pure and holy, was to bring these sacrifices to God on behalf of sinful people. But the writer of Hebrews has caught the two glaring flaws in the system: for starters, the priests were sinners themselves, and really needed to be dealing with their own rottenness, and furthermore, this system seemed to be self-perpetuating, with constant need to keep slaughtering animals for the sins of people who kept doing new and different rotten things.
Those problems, according to the writer of Hebrews, are baked into that whole system--as long as you have priests who are sinners like the rest of us, there's always going to be a certain amount of their time and work that is really about them dealing with their own problems rather than offering sacrifices and prayers for their people. And as long as we believe we have to keep offering new goats, sheep, and bulls for our screw-ups, we're going to keep killing livestock for sins that never stop piling up. What if there were another way?
This, our author says, is what makes Jesus qualitatively different. Jesus doesn't have sins of his own to cover up or atone for, so he doesn't have to divide up his attention or energy between dealing with his own issues and helping you with yours. He never needs to plead for mercy for his own sins, and for that matter, he never has to cloak himself in pious hypocrisy to hide any sins to keep people from seeing them, because he just doesn't have any.
Even more radically, Jesus doesn't have to keep offering up innocent animals for other people's sins, because he has offered up himself, once and for all. No more sacrifices need to be offered by some other priest--Jesus is both the sacrifice and the priest who offers it at the same time. Jesus gives himself, bringing an end to any need for more lambs, goats, and bulls to die in the name of religiosity. Our author will have more to say in this book about whether those animal sacrifices really ever "did" anything anyhow, but for now, we can just note that because of Jesus, there is no need for them to continue.
Now, I realize this is all a strange thing for a Respectable Religious Leader like myself to call attention to--after all, it rather sounds like I'm writing myself out of a job, if I'm saying that Jesus has done all the sacrificing that ever needs to be done, and that preachers, pastors, and priests are all just as rotten stinkers as anybody else. And yes, that's what I'm saying. If we think the role of the local pastor in your congregation is to be the resident sinless person or someone who goes to God in a way that you can't because you're somehow too sinful, well, the writer of Hebrews has poked too many holes in that thinking for it to hold water anymore.
But if we see the role of your local pastor as someone who points you to what God has already done for us all in Jesus, and who then alongside you commits to sharing the struggle of telling the truth about our failures, starting over again, and seeking healing as we grow from the hurts of the past (both those we have endured and those we have inflicted), then there is a role for preachers like me, or like your own pastor. We are stinkers and sinners, so we sure ain't better than anybody else. But maybe we are people who can help remind folks of the love with which we have all been grasped--the Love that chose to give himself away rather than leave us to fend for ourselves. Maybe our common calling, both for professional preachers and folks whose vocations take other forms, is to be people who point to that Love, as imperfectly as we surely will, and to let Love do all the work.
Lord Jesus, thank you. Thank you for offering yourself for us. Enable us simply to point to you.
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