Atonement Through Sacrifice

There are any number of examples where God’s wrath is expressed in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, such as the Great Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, plagues, famines, droughts, and wars. Later there were the ten plagues against the Egyptians leading up to the Exodus. With the exception of the Great Flood none of the chastisements were universal and with the exception of Sodom and Gomorrah none were total. Instead, we see that the essence of God’s wrath is exclusion from His presence as exemplified by the unfaithful Hebrews during the Exodus: “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter into my rest.’ Take care, brothers, that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart, so as to forsake the living God” (Heb 3:10-11). After the Exodus, all those who rebelled against God in the desert were excluded from the covenant rest of entering into the Promised Land, even Moses, but if we are unfaithful, we will be excluded from heaven. This really does not fit well with the idea that Jesus had to be totally crushed and thoroughly obliterated in our place, that the essence of atonement lies primarily in having Jesus suffer in our stead. While Jesus certainly suffered for our sins, the essence of the cross was not simply Jesus taking our punishment on our behalf.

It has long been recognized that Jesus was both High Priest and Victim. Indeed, He came to fulfill the Old Covenant and in part He did so by offering Himself as a sacrifice in atonement for our sins. St Paul makes this point, “So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma” (Eph 5:1-2). Likewise, “Every high priest is taken from among men and made their representative before God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring, for he himself is beset by weakness and so, for this reason, must make sin offerings for himself as well as for the people” (Heb 5:1-3). Jesus is not like the high priests of old because He is not a descendant of Aaron nor is He even a Levite. This is why it is said of Jesus “In the same way, it was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest, but rather the one who said to him: ‘You are my son; this day I have begotten you’; just as he says in another place: ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek’” (Heb 5:5-6).

Additionally, Jesus differs from the high priests of old in that He was unburdened by any sin: “It was fitting that we should have such a high priest: holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, higher than the heavens. He has no need, as did the high priests, to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did that once for all when he offered himself” (Heb 7:26-27). Jesus is the pure sacrificial Lamb and the utterly holy Great High Priest who offers His one sacrifice to fulfill the Old Law, supplanting and superseding the Temple sacrifices, and to establish the New Covenant in His blood. Jesus is the ultimate Passover Lamb and the truly efficacious sacrifice offered by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kipur.

Jesus does not offer Himself merely in an earthbound temple, “For Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands, a copy of the true one, but heaven itself, that he might now appear before God on our behalf. Not that he might offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters each year into the sanctuary with blood that is not his own; if that were so, he would have had to suffer repeatedly from the foundation of the world. But now once for all he has appeared at the end of the ages to take away sin by his sacrifice” (Heb 9:24-26). Jesus is the only sacrifice that actually, literally, and truly ascends into heaven. No offering of a lamb, a goat, an ox, or whatever can do anything but remain in this world. The offering of an animal in sacrifice could only be an act of sorrow, but not an actual expiation of sin: “But in those sacrifices there is only a yearly remembrance of sins, for it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats take away sins” (Heb 10:3-4). It must always be remembered that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was nothing like pagan human sacrifices. No, He fulfilled the Law of Moses such that ineffectual animal sacrifices would cease and Jesus willingly offered Himself in a way that no other victim could, out of love for the Father and for mankind.

—Fr Booth