Passion Sunday '23
The final two weeks of Lent are known as Passiontide, a season during which the penitential aspects of Lent are intensified, and the remaining festive elements of our liturgies become more muted. We veil the holy images in the church; we remove the hymn ‘gloria patri’ from the Mass and the Offices. Passion Sunday alerts us to the imminent arrival of Holy Week, which brings us to Good Friday before the Feast of Easter begins the following night. As we approach the final days of Lent, Passion Sunday draws our attention back to what has been the point of the whole season of Lent: to prepare us to walk with Jesus to the Cross as He offers Himself sacrificially for the life of the world, and to make us ready to receive the grace of that sacrifice.
For most of human history, there would have been no notion of worship without sacrifice. To offer worship to one’s god would have been understood to go hand in hand with giving something worthy of the greatness of the god, something proportional to the gravity of the petition. Unfortunately, to know whether one was meeting these conditions was often disconcertingly uncertain. As we see in the sacrifices of Abel and Cain, God was pleased with Abel’s offering of a lamb and displeased with Cain’s offering of produce, calling on him to imitate the sacrifice of His brother. That blood was required in a sacrifice was nothing novel to the ancient near-eastern world. Cain’s subsequent murder of Abel, though, can be seen as a corrupted caricature of Abel’s sacrifice–a horrific exaggeration to cover the shame of offense. Oh, you want a sheep? Well how about the shepherd? If you want blood, you will have it. But Abel’s blood cries out to God for justice, revealing God’s hatred for the murder of an innocent. Abel’s blood was not Cain’s to shed; and Abel’s blood was not the blood God meant to shed.
And yet this precedent is precisely what makes so perplexing the moment when Abraham is called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mt. Moria. There, on the mountain to which the Lord led them, Abraham is brought to the point of shedding the innocent blood, of repeating Cain’s sin, when he is suddenly stopped. The Lord, quietly watching, provided for Himself the sacrifice to Himself. As we read in Genesis: “And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.” And it is of that event on that day that Jesus says in our Gospel Lesson: “Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad.” Jesus speaks of this as a firsthand witness to that joy, the joy of a father who was given back his son by the substitution of the ram.
That the Lord later gave to the ancient people of Israel the Law to define their sacrifice was a great gift: it took out the guess-work of the offering, and particularly the haunting prospect of being called like Abraham to offer up a child. Unlike other peoples, whose gods were less communicative and cruel enough to require the blood of children, the Israelites did not have to fear that they were accidentally offering the wrong thing. In perhaps the most significant of these prescribed offerings, the ancient Day of Atonement was a time set apart as holy in the lives of the Israelites; everything was required to stop so that they could attend to this one thing: the high priest would go behind the veil into the holy place of the Temple with a blood offering, a collective sacrifice that would atone for their sins committed in that year, to make peace and cover them from God’s wrath against sin. It was a yearly reminder of the blood-guilt of Cain; it was a yearly reminder of God’s severe mercy in the provision of the sacrifice to take the place of all those sons of Abraham.
Our Epistle Lesson points to how Jesus Christ fulfills the thousands of annual sacrifices on all of the Days of Atonement in a single offering of Himself. The blood of the God-Man alone would suffice; this after all else, was the blood God meant to shed: His own. As the author of Hebrews writes: “Christ came as High Priest of the good things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.” This means that all of the sacrifices required of the Israelites were signs pointing to the great sacrifice of Christ. Innocent, like Abel, of the blood-guilt Himself, Christ would redeem His murderers. A true son of Abraham, Christ the Lord would provide Himself as the sacrifice in place of His brethren there again on Mt. Moria, at this point known by its new name: Jerusalem. All the sacrifices of that old world had led to this: the willing self-offering of Christ the victim and the priest, in the Spirit once for all before the eternal Father.
Even though we are reminded every week that purpose of Christ’s mission all along has been to come into the world to save sinners, we still resist this truth and shy away from it. One of the characteristic heresies of our time is that we have suppressed the sacrificial character of worship and love. In the secular sphere, religion is regarded as another brand of self-help. We do not really want to believe that there is actual sin for which an actual redeemer needs to pay a price to buy us back. So instead sin has to be the artifact of a morally anxious past, a way of describing repressed psychological experiences, or the abstracted woes of various systems in need of some elbow grease and that beloved substitute word for ‘salvation’ we call ‘progress.’ That a savior comes to save us at a high cost would mean we cannot save ourselves and that the danger, the captivity from which He comes to save us is much worse than we want to imagine. The sight of Christ going to the sacrifice means we are helpless of ourselves to help ourselves, it makes us small and dependant again to await help from someone greater than us. And finally, perhaps most difficult to bear: it means that the God whose existence we wish to deny or whose character we wish to denounce has come among us, is for us, and wills to suffer for love’s sake. It means that the awful brokenness of this world is not His doing but ours. In our hearts is a sickness we cannot cure, we cannot even approach. And that is where He wishes to go to bring healing.
In the modern Christian sphere, worship is now treated all too similarly: as a fixture to adorn and validate a curated life. Even the artifacts of sacrifice can be absorbed into this self-guiding journey of pious transformation–disciplines, penitence, and the hard-won wisdom of saints can become empty status objects by which we try to cultivate our Christian brand. We can start to think that because of Jesus’ sacrifice, sacrifice is no longer a part of worship. But this is a mistake. Jesus Christ’s sacrifice did not render sacrifice unnecessary; His sacrifice made the sacrifice of worship and love possible and meaningful. Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross fulfilled all the sacrifices of the Temple, but then it stamped the cosmos with the eternal character of the sacrifice worthy of God the Trinity by those made in His likeness: deny ourselves, to take up our cross, and to follow Him. There is no such thing as a cross-less Christianity. The savior bore His Cross to make it possible for us to bear ours. There is only one sacrifice that pleases God and it is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; but through our incorporation into Him through baptism and by faith, we are all called upon to offer it in Him as well. And that sacrifice means to be conformed to Christ crucified in the willing offering of ourselves in love, soul and body, through which we are redeemed and made partakers and participants in His redeeming work. It means to become those people so shaped in love that we too will lay down our lives for our friends and even our enemies.
The call of Passion Sunday is to fix our eyes on Christ the Savior and not to look away. We may think this is easy, but we will find ourselves in the next two weeks wanting to do anything but this. It is hard to bear the sight of how costly our salvation really is. But we must look at it, because in the vision of Christ-crucified we are also instructed in the sacrifice that makes meaningful any claim to love God and neighbor as we are commanded. We cannot be the followers of Jesus in denying ourselves, taking up our crosses, and following Him unless we are willing to first take the time and bear the light sorrow of shame and humility of watching these things take place. He now enters behind the veil to make the great Atonement. Like Abraham, we must await the Lord’s redemption and rejoice to see His day. For, as we read in Hebrews 9: “once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself...To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.”
