But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), he entered once for all into the holy place, not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and 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!
For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, because a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant.
Christ’s sacrificial death puts an end to the old way of understanding sacrificial atonement. God’s no to that old system in the first covenant; God’s yes to the new covenant which finally takes care of the sins not only of those under the first covenant, but of the world, once for all.
There’s a tension in Scripture between the idea that God has to be appeased by sacrifice, by death, and the idea that God’s forgiveness comes from God’s love and is only a spoken word away in experiencing such. God makes it plain in the sacrifice of Christ, and in doing so, we could argue casts the old way of thinking about sacrifice as in appeasing God and God’s wrath, accepted in religions of old as appeasing the wrath of the gods, casting this way of thinking into oblivion.
It’s not that Christ’s blood and death doesn’t cleanse and free us once for all from our sins, because it does, and one might say from that, it’s the culmination of all sacrifice, what all the sacrifices in the Old Testament were prefiguring, looking forward to, and that’s true. But it also makes it clear that this old way of thinking never satisfied God, and as the writer of Hebrews says, could never take away sins. The adherents couldn’t get rid of their guilt and yearly atonement for all was required.
Christ’s death which we remember this Holy Week ends the false belief that God requires death for sin, for sinners. Sin results in death, figuratively in all kinds of ways and literally in that we are left to our mortal world and life. But in Christ through ironically what was done to him through the priesthood of Israel, not the Jews, as well as the empire of the known world at that time, it is clear that not only is this false notion of appeasing God overturned, but ingeniously, mortality ends up being overturned as well. In Christ’s death comes the end of the old, which in itself is crucial. And from that, the beginning of something entirely new, hinted at and pointed to in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, but appearing over the horizon towards the full light of Day in Christ.
Jesus community 