Yesterday in church, I heard a sermon on the epistle for the day: Hebrews 7, verses 23-28. The passage draws out similarities (and important differences) between the Jewish high priests of the Old Covenant and Jesus Christ as the single eternal high priest of the New Covenant. Like much of this epistle, it is Platonic in tone, treating the earlier rituals and holy objects as types pointing to a superior heavenly archetype.
The preacher also incorporated into his sermon a famous passage from Psalm 51 which, in modern English, runs roughly as follows:
You are not pleased with sacrifices or I would offer them. You take no delight in burnt offerings.
The sacrifice of the Lord is a contrite spirit. A contrite and a broken heart You will not despise.
Which is beautiful and very moving but unfortunately incomplete and therefore misleading. It is a passage wrenched out of its context, and not just by this particular preacher either. Our previous vicar used to print out in the monthly news sheet a very useful prayer calendar incorporating the lectionary readings for each day, and I noticed that this psalm (often known by its Latin name of Miserere) was frequently recommended as a reading during lent, but again always in this truncated form.
The psalm actually goes on as follows:
Do good to Zion and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
Then You will be pleased with our sacrifices and burnt offerings.
Then they will offer bullocks on Your altar.
This completely changes the meaning of what has gone before. The writer, it seems, is not claiming that God does not want animal sacrifices, only that He does not want sacrifices made in the wrong place. Apparently in the absence of a functioning temple, animals could not be sacrificed in a way that was pleasing to God, so the best thing that could be offered in the circumstances was a contrite heart. But the writer anticipates that when the temple has been rebuilt, God will be pleased with burnt offerings again and indeed will expect them.
This is a mode of thought very alien to modern people and I am not suggesting that we need to imitate it. But recognising that it was the way many biblical writers thought and felt is essential if we wish to understand their words. It is one thing to take a passage out of its original context once in order to empasise some special point, but it is quite another to censor out the context permanently because we are simply not prepared to make the imaginative effort that is required to understand it.
In fact a large chunk of the Old Testament is taken up with animal sacrifice. This is even more true of the Torah, the five books of Moses which form the oldest (and for Jews the holiest) part of the work. And a lot of New Testament teaching about Christ and salvation also uses this kind of language and assumes that readers will understand it. First century readers, whether Jews or former pagans, would have done so easily enough. If we in the 21st century cannot do the same, then clearly we have a problem.
Nowadays those of us who are not farmers deal directly with animals only in two ways: either they are pets or they are meat. And meat is packaged and displayed in our supermarkets in such a way as to conceal as far as possible that it consists of parts of dead animals. Indeed those who remind us of that fact usually do so in order to discourage us from eating it. It’s a standard vegetarian/vegan trope that meat is dead animals. Yuck! But for most of human history everybody knew that and nobody, in Western Eurasia at any rate, saw it as a good reason not to eat meat. On the contrary: if an animal had lost its life in order to give you this meat, it was considered a sin of ingratitude to turn up your nose and refuse to eat it.
For most of human history, animals were farmed for meat locally and on a small scale. The farmer knew all his animals, often by name. Jesus refers to shepherds calling their sheep by name. A form of unspoken covenant existed between a farmer and his beasts: it was his responsibility to feed them and house them well, to treat their wounds and diseases, and to protect them from predators, often at some risk to himself (as is shown in the parable of the Good Shepherd). In return for doing this, he gained the right to slaughter one from time to time and to eat or sell its meat. And every bit of the dead animal was used in one way or another. To waste it would be rank ingratitude. Perhaps those of us who have had to take a much-loved pet to the vet for the last time and hold it steady while it received the lethal injection can understand the mindset of those bronze age farmers better than most.
It was precisely because every animal was precious that animal sacrifice was so prevalent in the ancient world. Some of this of course was simple bribery. In a world where most judges took bribes and gods were presented as no better morally than their worshippers, it made sense to pay them to consider your prayers. But the ancient Jews always knew that their God was incorruptible and needed nothing that they could give him. Every morning unleavened bread was symbolically laid out on His ritual gold-topped table and every evening it was publicly removed by the priests as proof that He did not need what his people offered Him. Consequently Jewish sacrifices were not conceived of as bribes but as acts of communion with God, whether in thanksgiving or in penitent reconciliation.
In the ritual of the sin offering, the sinner laid his hands on the head of the sacrificial animal, which in Old Testament times would have been one of his own precious stock, and recited his confession over it. This was believed to transfer the sin to the animal, which was then humanely slaughtered by cutting its throat. The meat was eaten exclusively by the priests and their families; the sinner who offered it was not allowed to benefit from the offering in any material way. In thanksgiving sacrifices however, the roasted meat was usually shared with friends and family in a eucharistic feast.
Did these sacrifices actually “work”? For those who are neither religious Jews nor Christians, the question is probably meaningless. But for Christians, it is more important than many of us realise. After all, sacrificial rituals take up a considerable part of the Old Testament, and sacrificial analogies are an important part of the New and pop up again every week in the Eucharist. That becomes a serious problem if the whole thing is based on a total misunderstanding.
One verse that is often quoted in this context is Heb 10, v.4: “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” If that is interpreted in the most comprehensive way, it means that animal sacrifice never worked and never could work. But in that case, perhaps we'd better throw away our bibles, because (as we’ve seen) the whole biblical concept of the relationship between God and man is soaked in sacrificial language and this is as true of the New Testament as of the Old. God is represented as creating and instituting these rituals to reconcile His rebellious children to Himself. Why would He bother if the whole project was based on a logical fallacy that an omniscient being should surely have been well aware of?
The matter becomes even odder when you consider that this verse occurs in the middle of a passage whose main purpose is to stress that the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant needed to be repeated over and over again as compared with Christ’s once-and-for-all atonement. But what on earth would be the point of endlessly repeating actions which had no effect and indeed could have none? You don’t go on taking the tablets if you know they can’t treat the disease! That’s not religion, it’s a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Let’s step aside for a moment and consider a parallel statement: “It is impossible for a piece of glass to start a fire”. That seems obvious enough. To start a fire, you need a source of concentrated heat. It could be a lighted match, sparks from flint and steel, the heat from a fire drill, but hardly a piece of cold glass. Yet every four years, in Olympia in Greece, a piece of glass is indeed used to light the Olympic Flame. It’s a very impressive sight. A young woman dressed in white holds an unlit torch to the focus of a large concave mirror and it spontaneously ignites. The magic ingredient of course is the sun. Yet that is not the whole story either, because by itself the sun can no more ignite fires than a piece of glass can. Its rays are too diffuse to do that. You need to put the two things together so that the glass can focus and concentrate the rays of the sun to kindle the flame.
If sacraments work at all in any objective way— if they are anything more than just props for memory — they must somehow focus Christ’s atoning death on our lives as a glass mirror or lens focuses the sun. In baptism and in the eucharist, faith shaped by memory plays the essential role of the lens or mirror, but memory requires knowledge that is only available after the event. This could not have worked for God’s people living centuries before the death of Jesus on the cross. They would have needed a different focussing mechanism.
As the anonymous author of Hebrews points out, the Old Testament sacrificial rituals are presented to the readers of all these texts as having been designed and carefully crafted by God to enable the sinners among His people to be cleansed of their sins. God tells them (repeatedly!) that if they do these things, their sins will be forgiven, and I don’t think it at all likely that this man (who was clearly of priestly stock, and a very devout Jew as well as a Christian) intended to accuse his God of lying or of talking nonsense. Since he believed that the blood of bulls and goats cannot by itself take away sins, the only reasonable explanation is that these blood sacrifices enabled worshippers to tap into and profit from the only sacrificial death which actually had the power do such a thing, even though this was a future event about which they could have no conscious knowledge. And, in a mystical completion of the circle, the Old Testament sacrificial rituals were described and written down so that they in turn could illustrate and make comprehensible the once and for all sacrifice of the Son of God, the royal High Priest, Scapegoat and Paschal Lamb.