Sacrificial Lamb | Wayfarer

On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Where do you want us to make preparations for you to eat the Passover?”
Matthew 26:17 (NIV)

On our kitchen island downstairs is a stack of graduation announcements and corresponding cards that are waiting for me. It is the annual celebration of young people’s rite of passage known as commencement. It’s a celebration of academic completion, but it is more than that. Whether going on for more school or going off into the world to start working, it typically marks a departure from home and the beginning of a young person’s independent life journey.

Immediately before starting this chapter-a-day trek through Matthew’s version of Jesus’ story in March, we had just completed a journey through the ancient Hebrew priestly manual of Leviticus. Several times in that series I made reference to God’s leading the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and starting something new. It was a new way of living together in community with God, who placed Himself in a tent at the center of the Hebrew camp. Leviticus gave instructions for a series of festivals, none bigger than Passover, an annual celebration of God miraculously and graciously delivering the Hebrews from their slavery in Egypt. An event that had just happened when Leviticus was given through Moses.

It is no coincidence that the events of Jesus crucifixion and resurrection occur during the festival of Passover. It is no coincidence that Jesus establishes the sacrament of Communion during the annual Passover meal know as the Seder.

The two events connect.

Many times in the journey through Leviticus I mentioned that God was relating to humanity in the toddler stages of development. Just as God was doing something new with the establishment of Passover in the book of Leviticus, God is starting something new during this Passover celebration. Humanity has developed since Leviticus. A whole bunch of life has happened from wilderness wanderings to conquest, a period of judges, the establishment of an earthly kingdom for God’s twelve tribes that ended in divorce and civil war. Then there was a period of strife and exile followed by a period of return and restoration. It’s been a tumultuous childhood.

I think of Jesus’ death and resurrection much like graduation in our culture. For humanity, it was a rite of passage out of spiritual childhood and into spiritual adulthood. The black-and-white rules a parent lays down with a toddler don’t work with a high school senior. We have graduated from very explicit rules about not having sex animals or family members to Jesus’ teaching spiritual principles like making God’s kingdom your priority knowing that God will take care of your daily needs. The old lessons remain, the principles that lie within them are still relevant, but now the emerging adult must willfully choose to apply those principles for themselves in spiritually mature ways as they navigate life in the world on their own.

Jesus will leave His children 40 days after the resurrection. He will ascend to heaven and they will begin life on earth without His physical presence, though His spiritual presence will be readily available through Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, God is doing something new. It is a rite of passage. This Passover meal is a spiritual commencement. The bread, wine, and sacrificial lamb of the Passover Seder are transformed into the body and blood of the Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world. Death will be defeated once and for all. Jesus Himself says it is a “new covenant.”

Everything is connected.

In the quiet this morning, I’m thinking about those young people whose graduation cards sit down in the kitchen. Oh, the places they’ll go in life.

I’m also thinking about a message I’m giving on Sunday in which I’m going to contrast “life-giving freedom” Jesus prescribes for His disciples and the “human legalism.” It is not uncommon for we humans to cling to toddler-like systems. Children never spiritually (and sometimes physically) leave. Elders continue to rule with black-and-white fundamentals and control the system through shame and fear. But that was never Jesus’ paradigm. He launched His disciples despite the fact that in today’s chapter it would seem they weren’t really ready for the task.

I don’t want to be a spiritual toddler my entire life. I want to be a healthy and productive spiritual grown up.

[cue: Pomp and Circumstance]

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He is then to take some of the bull’s blood, bring it into the Tent of Meeting, dip his finger in the blood, and sprinkle some of it seven times before God, before the curtain of the Sanctuary. He is to smear some of the blood on the horns of the Altar of Fragrant Incense before God which is in the Tent of Meeting. He is to pour the rest of the bull’s blood out at the base of the Altar of Whole-Burnt-Offering at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. Leviticus 4:5-7 (MSG)

Let’s face it, reading through all of the prescribed sacrifices in the book of Leviticus is a very bloody affair. I have to keep in mind that in all of this blood-letting there is a core spiritual teaching that is central to understanding who Jesus is, why Jesus came, and what Jesus did.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, God’s message tells us that sin entered the world. Every one of us, at one time or another, has willfully chosen to do what we knew was wrong. That’s sin. As we learned the other day, that willful disobedience is like yeast which taints the whole loaf. We may be good much of the time, but the fact that we sin at all (sometimes even without knowing it) seperates us from God, who is holy.

How do we, divorced from relationship with God by our own sin, get back into relationship with God? That is the ultimate question, and the ultimate story God authors in the Bible from beginning to end.

God’s message tells us that the penalty of sin is death. Therefore, the penalty must be paid in order for relationship between human beings and God to be reunited. Without the shedding of blood, there is no payment for sin. What we are reading in Leviticus is a methodical (and very burdensome) prescription for payment. The sacrificial lamb atones for the sins of the person sacrificing it. It is a brutal and bloody affair designed to address an eternally serious matter.

When Jesus came, He came on a mission. He was God’s son, sent to be the lamb without defect sacrificed for the sins of the entire human race. His death on a cross was a brutal, bloody affair designed to pay the ultimate penalty for sin once and for all:

The old plan was only a hint of the good things in the new plan. Since that old “law plan” wasn’t complete in itself, it couldn’t complete those who followed it. No matter how many sacrifices were offered year after year, they never added up to a complete solution. If they had, the worshipers would have gone merrily on their way, no longer dragged down by their sins. But instead of removing awareness of sin, when those animal sacrifices were repeated over and over they actually heightened awareness and guilt. The plain fact is that bull and goat blood can’t get rid of sin. That is what is meant by this prophecy, put in the mouth of Christ: You don’t want sacrifices and offerings year after year; you’ve prepared a body for me for a sacrifice. It’s not fragrance and smoke from the altar that whet your appetite. So I said, “I’m here to do it your way, O God, the way it’s described in your Book.” When he said, “You don’t want sacrifices and offerings,” he was referring to practices according to the old plan. When he added, “I’m here to do it your way,” he set aside the first in order to enact the new plan—God’s way—by which we are made fit for God by the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. Hebrews 10:1-10 (MSG)

All of these bloody sacrifices accomplish two things. First, they reminded us of how impossible it was, and is, to completely atone for sin by ourselves. Nothing we do, in and of ourselves, can atone for sin and please God. I can’t imagine trying to manage this web of offerings and sacrifices on an on going basis. Second, the sacrifices of Leviticus foreshadow the ultimate plan, which was for God to make the ultimate sacrifice for sin on our behalf.

Understanding the sacrificial system of Leviticus, I gain a much greater appreciation of what we celebrate on Good Friday.

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and joshuamellin