LUTHER SEMINARY CHAPEL
OCTOBER 13, 2005 (YOM KIPPUR ON THE JEWISH CALENDAR)
TEXT: HEBREWS 9:11-14, 18-22
NO BLOOD, NO FORGIVENESS?
Today, in the Jewish calendar, is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We, too, gather this morning for confession and absolution, not to copy or usurp the Jewish festival, but simply because we, too, need confession and forgiveness.
The Day of Atonement, as practiced
in biblical
Odd for us moderns, off-putting even—blood sacrifice, cultic ritual, piling sins on goats. Or not so odd? We certainly know how to shed blood; we ritually rush to temples of sport or to the grand opening of the Roseville Super Target; and we know how to scapegoat all too well. Whether we do any of this in acknowledgment of our sin may be another matter.
Maybe we need a sermon on this. And the book of Hebrews gives us one, preaching directly on the ritual of Lev 16. Listen to part of that sermon from Heb 9:
11 But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things
that have come, then through the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands,
that is, not of this creation), 12
he entered once for all into the
18 Hence not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. 19 For when every commandment had been told to all the people by Moses in accordance with the law, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the scroll itself and all the people, 20 saying, "This is the blood of the covenant that God has ordained for you." 21 And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. 22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
Traditional talk here—or odd talk that has become traditional: Jesus as the blood sacrifice for sin to purify us, just as the goat of old purified Israel, for, after all, as Hebrews writes, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” But, oh, that last line is a killer—all too often, literally so—justifying crusades and holy wars and countless acts of vengeance and retribution. Atonement—making things right—requires blood. The Bible says so. And better yours than mine.
The trouble with this reading, I think, is not only its misplaced object—that is, that sin requires your death rather than my own—but also the implication that, even for God, there is some kind of deep magic that requires death. Some equation of death that could be satisfied, even for God, only by the death of God’s firstborn. Hebrews might be read this way, but if we make death a principle or an idea we will never be through dying and, worse, never be through killing. Perhaps we need to hear more loudly than we have heard the “once for all” of Hebrews’ sermon. Once for all, Jesus entered the terrible temple of death; once for all, Jesus gave his life for sin; once for all, death met its match. Once for all—and yet, the dying continues, as does the killing, so a Day of Atonement seems warranted.
No blood, no forgiveness? I remember
trying to convince an agnostic would-be girlfriend in college why Jesus had to die, but it didn’t work then, nor
did it work for me later in seminary when I actually read Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo and decided, as a budding
form critic, that it sounded more like my calculus book than a love letter.
Fact is, God did find other ways of reconciliation in the Bible and in the
history of God’s people—though, to be sure, none of them were cheap, and all
meant that in some way God took our sin upon God’s own self. Still, David
recognized that no sacrifice could atone for his high-handed adultery and
murder, so he prayed in Ps 51 for a new heart, a new beginning, creation out of
nothing, just as on Day One. God can do that, it seems. And
But no blood, no forgiveness, says Hebrews. What does this mean? Perhaps Hebrews proclaims what God has done, not what God must do. Through the animal sacrifices of the temple and, more important, through the crushing death of Jesus, atonement has been won through blood. But to say that it must be so would tame Jesus’ death by making it fit some predetermined pattern, turning surprising love into predictable tragedy. Yet, it was so, says Hebrews—no small matter—reminding us of the enormity of the gift and the great cost of forgiveness. Yes, animals died, and so did Jesus. Indeed, sin and forgiveness are always a matter of life and death. But not to appease an angry God, not to satisfy an equation. The sacrificial system was God’s free gift, by which God demonstrated both the enormity of sin’s power and the unexpected possibility of new beginning. Jesus gave himself freely to the consequences that came from doing God in the midst of a broken world. No formula; rather, when the chips are down, the free acceptance of death for the sake of the other. God can do that, too, it seems. It may be true that to do the God thing in a sinful world will inevitably bring death. It may be true that the very sanctity with which God holds life finally needs to redeem death by entering it and transforming it. God can do that—God has done that, in Christ, once for all. And we are brought here today by that death and by that transformation.
We might learn from our Jewish
sisters and brothers that the primary grammar for the Day of Atonement is “we”
rather than “I.” This is a day for corporate examination as much as for
personal examination. What have “we” done to separate ourselves from the clear
will of God, who desires the well-being of all and especially of the least of
our brothers and sisters? The “we” is harder, of course, for now things quickly
become political and divisive. I’m happy to confess the corporate sins of your
way of viewing the world, less happy to do so for mine. But confess we must, in
and with and for all the communities we call home: our families and neighborhoods
and congregations and church bodies, as well as our political parties and
nation states. We live in subcultures of race and age and gender and ethnicity
and geography and sexual orientation and education and privilege. Demographers
can divide us and subdivide us in a thousand different ways. But for
For such a day of atonement, our confession will begin not with how you must repent and what “they” have done to “us,” but with what I have done and what “we” have done—however we define “we”—that falls short of loving God with all our hearts and all our souls and loving our neighbors as ourselves. Sincere confession allows no name calling, no finger pointing, and, on this day, ironically, no scapegoating—for those are all ways toward death that dishonor the once-for-all-ness of Jesus’ death. Enough today to look to ourselves, individually and corporately, not to the other, and to resolve to enter into whatever kind of fast it takes to move toward reconciliation. I can’t write that prayer for you or for your group, but I can work on my own, and you can work on your own, based on your own pained conscience and the law that God has graciously written on our hearts to mark the new covenant. The seal of that new covenant is the blood of Christ that assures us—once for all—that God responds to repentance with forgiveness and reconciliation.
Christ has died—once for all—and with him death itself. Well, almost. One more death must inevitably come. My own. And another. Yours. Which realization, too, must give us pause about taking death lightly or regarding it as some kind of sanctified transaction or meting it out in righteous retribution or elevating it to some noble cause. Death is just death. It hurts and it stinks. So, we hold on for dear life, we hold on in earnest hope, we hold on in loving gratitude, to the once-for-all death of Jesus and the wonder of God’s reversal that brings life now and promises life beyond the grave—and we confess our sins that contribute to the various big and little deaths around us and within us. The need is urgent, for sin kills. Jesus and the old hymn remind us to work for the night is coming; similarly our Jewish neighbors speak of the closing of the gates of prayer at the close of Yom Kippur. But they and we trust that God’s grace never ceases, and so we pray with them in urgent confidence:
Lord, we pour our hearts to Thee;
Rend the sins that rend us.
Now when heaven’s gates are closing,
Let thy grace defend us.[1]
AMEN
[1]From a poem by Moses ibn Ezra, used in the Sephardic ritual for Yom Kippur; cited in Theodor H. Gaster, Festivals of the Jewish Year (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1953) 180.