Jesus Was Not a Sacrifice

We are approaching Advent, the Christian season of waiting and preparing for the birth of Jesus.  It is a time when it is appropriate for us to do some seriously discernment of who Jesus is for us. Yet that discernment is complicated by the dominance of one particular view of who Jesus is, one that has essentially swallowed Christianity whole.  It is the image of Jesus as a once for all sacrifice for human sin.  I, and a great many other Christian theologians today, have rejected the notion that Jesus was a sacrifice for human sin.  Jesus himself rejected the whole notion that sacrifice is what God wants.  One place where se see that Jesus himself rejected that notion, but one that most of us miss most of the time, is the passage that begins at Mark 12:38 and continues to Mark 13:2.  I preached on that passage today.  Here's the sermon I gave.  I am convinced that what I say there is worth thinking about.

Who Are We Waiting For?

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 18, 2012

Scripture:  Hebrews 9:24-28 and Mark: 12-38-13:2

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

I may be jumping the gun a bit here.  Actually, I am jumping the gun a bit here.  Advent, the time of waiting and preparing for the birth of Jesus, doesn’t start for two more weeks.  But some of the lectionary texts for last Sunday and today have got me thinking about just who it is that we are waiting for.  How are we to understand the one whose birth we soon will be eagerly awaiting?  The texts we read this morning from Hebrews and Mark, which come from the lectionary readings for this week and last, raise that question for me.  Or rather, they raise the reciprocal of that question, namely, who are we not waiting for.  They raise that question in the context of the concept sacrifice, and that is what I want to discuss with you this morning, even if it is a bit out of season

The text we heard from Hebrews certainly gives one answer to that question of who we are waiting for.  It says we are waiting for someone who will offer himself as a once for all sacrifice for the forgiveness of human sin.  It says that Jesus Christ “has appeared once for all…to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself;” and it refers to Jesus Christ has “having been offered once to bear the sins of many….”  “Offered” in that statement means sacrificed.  Certainly the notion that Jesus suffered and died as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of human sin is one that we’re all familiar with.  Jesus as a sacrifice became the dominant way that Christianity has understood him and what he did for us.  Jesus as a sacrifice for human sin didn’t actually become the primary way that Christians understand him until the twelfth century CE, but never mind.  It is the primary way that Christians have understood him in our time.

But here’s the thing.  You are of course free to do your own discernment about who Jesus is, and I encourage you to do so.  If the image of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin works for you, OK.  However, I am convinced that someone who will suffer and die as a sacrifice for human sin is most certainly not who we are waiting for in Advent as we wait for the birth of Jesus.  A once for all sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin is not who Jesus was and is, at least not for me.  Indeed, I believe, along with many other Christian theologians today, that when it turned Jesus into a sacrifice, which Hebrews does more clearly than any other New Testament book, Christianity did nothing less than betray Jesus.  And we can see how Christianity making Jesus into a sacrifice is a betrayal, or at least a denial, of Jesus in the passage we heard from Mark.  That probably isn’t obvious, so let me explain.

Mark 12:38 to 13:2 is a brilliantly constructed literary creation by the author of Mark.  It’s individual parts may well go back to Jesus and indeed probably do, but the author of Mark has put them together in a brilliant way to make a very specific and important point.  That construction goes like this:  First, at Mark 12:38-40, Jesus denounces the scribes.  The scribes were temple officials.  The temple was where they worked, and they worked to facilitate the operation of the temple.  In this passage the scribes stand for all of the temple officials—priests, Levites, and scribes.  They stand for the temple itself.  Jesus condemns them, and his condemnation includes the charge that they “devour widows’ houses.”  Remember that phrase, they “devour widow’s houses.”  The word “house” here isn’t just a place where a widow lives.  The word refers to everything a person has, so when Jesus says that the temple officials destroy widows’ houses he means that they take everything a widow has.

Then, at Mark 12:41-44 the scene shifts to inside the temple itself, and it gives us an example of the temple taking everything a poor widow has, of it devouring her “house.”  Jesus sees a poor widow put two small coins into the temple’s collection box.  He says to his disciples that she has, our of her poverty, given “everything she had, all she had to live on.”    Remember that phrase too, “everything she had, all she had to live on.”  You may have heard that part of this passage used in stewardship sermons.  It’s used that way all the time, holding the poor widow up as an example of good stewardship.  I can assure you, however, that the story of the widow’s mite as it is often called absolutely is not about stewardship.  It’s about exploitation.  It is an example of the temple and its officials destroying a poor widow.  It may look to us like the widow is making a free will donation.  She’s doing no such thing.  She’s paying what she can of the temple tax imposed on all Jews in Jesus’ time.  Why, if she’ so poor, would she give anything to the temple?  Because the scribes and other temple authorities have told her all her life that she must pay the temple tax in order to be right with God.  She has so very little left, but she gives it to the temple though it means she will soon die.  We must take Jesus’ words “everything she had, all she had to live on” quite literally here if we are going to understand what Mark is saying about Jesus.  This poor woman is now going to die because she has given all she had to live on to the temple.

Then comes the third part of this construction, at Mark 13:1-2.  Keep in mind that the chapter and verse numbers in the Bible are not in the original texts and have no significance for biblical interpretation, so the fact that this passage includes the first two verses of a new chapter has no meaning.  The temple officials devour widow’s houses, so Jesus says, correctly as it turned out, that their house, the temple, will itself be destroyed.  So to recap:  This three-part construct goes 1) the temple officials devours widows’ houses; 2) we see that happening to the poor widow in the temple; 3) the house of the temple officials, the temple itself, will be destroyed.

And it probably still isn’t clear what this has to do with sacrifice, the subject we began with.  Well, here’s what it has to do with sacrifice:  Animal sacrifice was the primary work of the temple.  Jewish worship in Jesus’ day included a lot of animal sacrifice.  Some of that sacrifice was for the forgiveness of sin, and the temple was the only place where effective sacrifice could be done.  Jews didn’t do it anywhere else but came to the temple in Jerusalem when they wanted or needed to perform a sacrifice.

In our verses from Mark Jesus rejects and condemns the temple and its officials.  In doing so he rejects what the temple does.  He rejects sacrifice as proper worship.  He says that what the temple does, sacrifice, is not what God wants from us.  What the temple doesn’t do, justice for the poor, is what God wants from us.  Jesus actually says that in other ways in other passages in the Gospels too, but he surely says it here.  God doesn’t want sacrifice, God wants justice.  In saying that Jesus was picking up a voice of ancient Israel that had gotten lost in his day, the voice of the prophets.  Just like the great prophets of the eighty century BCE—Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah—Jesus rejected sacrifice as what God wants and replaced it with justice.

Yet at least one Christian began to speak of Jesus as a sacrifice already in the New Testament.  We heard that voice in our passage from Hebrews, a book of the New Testament written at least a couple of decades after the Gospel of Mark.  The notion of Jesus as a sacrifice for sin eventually became dominant in western Christianity, so dominant that today if you ask people both in most churches and outside of Christianity what Christianity is they will probably say that it is the belief that God became human in Jesus for the purpose of dying as an atoning sacrifice for human sin.  And I believe that that view of Jesus Christ is at least a denial of who Jesus really was and for me is nothing less than a betrayal of Jesus.  He rejected the whole notion of sacrifice as what God wants and requires.  He called the people of his day, and ours, away from sacrifice and toward justice.

If the question that Advent raises for us is just who it is that we are waiting for (and I believe that is it) then we have to begin to find an answer to that question by setting aside answers to the question that are simply wrong, no matter how much most of Christianity might insist on them being right.  There are all kinds of theological problems with the answer that Jesus was an atoning sacrifice for sin.  If you want to read more about that read the chapter titled “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” in my book Liberating Christianity.  or now suffice it to say that Mark’s brilliant literary construct around the temple and the widow’s houses tells us unequivocally that Jesus rejected the whole notion of sacrifice.  Yet his followers turned him into a sacrifice.

We have all had the idea that Jesus is an atoning sacrifice tor sin so drummed into us that it may be difficult for us to understand him as anything else.  Yet I am convinced that Jesus simply wasn’t a sacrifice.  So as we discern who we are waiting for, let us clear the field for our discernment by disposing of this one idea that surely is not who Jesus is.  Jesus rejected the notion of sacrifice.  I invite you to reject the notion of Jesus as sacrifice too.  Maybe then we can move forward together as we seek to know who he really was.  I plan to have more to say about that in the sermons I will give in the upcoming Advent season. Stay tuned.  Amen.