The High Priest and the Highest Sacrifice

I was reading Hebrews today and I was struck by the imagery which is central to that book.  Jesus is not only the High Priest which represents the people of God to God.  He is also that sacrifice which he himself gave over to God to make atonement for the sins of the whole world.

Some of my more left-leaning friends have a real problem with this imagery.  Is God just a blood thirsty warlord desiring violence and vengeance upon God's people?  Doesn't God have another, less bloody, way?

I suppose that God has any way open that God desires.  While I really like Anselm's "Why God became man," I'm not convinced that this is the only way that God could bring freedom and love to the whole world.  God could have done it another way.  God is a creative and powerful God.  I suppose that God's choice to do it this way and not some other is even more profound than Anselm's proposal. (Anselm, for a little refresher, said that God had to become incarnate because humanity owed honor to God that only humanity could pay [i.e. the wages of sin are death], but only God could afford.  Only God was righteous enough to be the holy debt payer. Thus, the incarnation.)

If God could have brought hope, healing, and restoration in some other way, why this one?

I think it is because God had indeed chosen to bless all of creation through this one people, the Jews (Genesis 12).  God blesses Abraham to be a blessing.  So when God's patience with human sin and disobedience grew to the fullness of time, God acts decisively in Jesus of Nazareth.  God becomes incarnate to take on the consequences of the truly righteous life.  While the previous sacrifices bore the weight of sin in a kind of ad hoc way, death at an altar, this sacrifice bore the actual weight of actual sin.  People could not bear the conviction which comes from perceiving the truly righteous One.  So when sinful people enter the very presence of the Holy, they kill Him.  The Jewish people needed to see God's love poured out in a language which they could understand.  The language of sacrifice made sense to them.  They could understand the unblemished being given for the sake of the blemished.  It was a picture of grace.  And so God moved in that way and not some other.

God could have given some other way, but why would God move in some other way when the Way was established by the history of a people to go this way.  Ironically, the theology of St. Anselm was also this kind of contextual explanation of faith.  Anselm used categories of justice and honor that were particularly persuasive in his medieval feudal context.  That doesn't make them bad theology, it just means they are a new contextualization of God's saving action. 

What would a 21st century contextualization of Jesus' work look like?  What does it mean that Jesus is our High Priest and Highest Sacrifice? 

Our contemporary society sees the collective sin of nations and ecclesial bodies and longs for a group which will not primarily look inward.  We see the sacrificial action of a generation led by rock stars to do justice in AIDS-ridden Africa and we are inspired.  Why?  Because so much of our experience tells us that people can simply not be relied upon to choose the other.  Darwinism and Nietzsche have, in their own ways, told us that the most healthy thing a person can do is look out for themselves and get the most that they can for themselves and possibly their clan.  These pervasive ideologies have turned the Christian doctrine of sin on it head (which is explicit in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality).

The royal priesthood and holy nation which Jesus gathered around himself were not priests in the sense of killing animals for the sake of the community in the temple.  This priestly community, like Jesus himself, gave of themselves for the sake of others.  One of the things that is saving about Jesus in the 21st century is the calling he placed on the community who followed him to give themselves in love and service to others. He gave a community a vision of the future which did not bind them to the success of their ability to reproduce or their initiating the "will to power."  This community follows Jesus' model of self-giving, knowing that the rewards of secular striving will not endure as the new heaven and new earth will.  God will have the final word, as the resurrection proves.  We are called to be both priests and sacrifices, just as Jesus was.

I dare say that this kind of community will speak to a 21st century Western world what Hebrews spoke to a first century Jewish one or Anselm spoke to an 11th century Medieval one.  God's work as High Priest and Savior is not limited to a paradigm of any particular period.  If Jesus truly saves universally, then he will save us from our current sin and trappings as he did first century Jews from theirs. 

He is a Good Savior. He is our High Priest.  He gave himself as the Highest Sacrifice.

We are called to be Good.  We are called to be priests.  We are called to give ourselves as sacrifices.

What does a "just" war mean?

I have heard some pretty positive comments come back from Obama's speech in Oslo at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.  I don't disagree that it is basically a good speech.  But there are two important things that need to be said.  First, nothing he said there should surprise anyone.  Second,  he did not address the most difficult concerns with his own proposal.

Now I think that my Christian identity calls me to a different kind of life that precludes supporting war under nearly any circumstance including threats to me and my own family and country.  On the other hand, I don't know that I could ever truly live up to what God has called me to in the midst of the most striking challenges to this ideology.  Pacifism is, by all means, more difficult than responding with war and takes more courage.  I'm just never sure that I can do it.  Something that goes deep down inside of me, placed there by God when God spoke life into creation, is a desire for justice and the will to fight for it. But this post is not about me.

I don't think that a nation can ever live by this Christian calling, though I would hope that ours could entertain it at the very least.  Nations are formed on the basis of protecting their people.  As Obama says in his speech, Ghandi and King may be great thinkers but their peaceful protests would not have stopped the advancing Nazi armies.  Darfur. Rwanda. Congo.  I don't think peaceful protest will be effective at stopping these atrocities, even if my Christian faith tells me that peaceful protest is the right thing to do.  Nations must protect from these injustices. 

The rules for engagement are and always have been the rules of "just war."  Obama's speech should not surprise us because all he did in the first half of his speech is reinforce the principles of just war: proportional response, just cause, combatant distinction, last resort, legitimate authority (which Obama aludes to by referring to leadership being tempered by not being a lone ranger). 

Now those may surprise us now because they are talked about rarely.  But they have been implicit in all but the most recent American war.  (Danger must be imminent.  Bush presumably thought there were WMD's which would POTENTIALLY constitute imminent danger.  I happen to think that even the presence of WMD's would not have legitimate a preemptive war according to just war criteria, but that is debatable.)  Obama is simply calling us back to adherence to these criteria.  No politician present at his speech would have missed what he was doing. 

Now, the weird thing that we heard from the media here is that this was some kind of defense of just war.  I know PhD students are not supposed to be simple-minded but the only answer I can come up with is "Duh".  Every nation worth it's salt would make a defense of just war, because that is the best alternative that can include war of any kind (thanks for the inspiration Switzerland).  Defending just war is not a shift in government policy.  In fact, just war criteria being followed will mean that we are in less wars, not more.

Now the problem is that just war doesn't work in the postmodern environment.  He doesn't really address this at all except to say that we will need to rearticulate it.  Well, to Mr. Obama I say, "Duh".  It is recognized among just war scholars that the criteria are outdated in the contemporary setting. 

How do you have legitimate authority when your opponent is a terrorist cell?  How do you have combatant distinction when your enemy is primarily civilians or dressed like civilians or using civilians as shields as in most urban warfare?  Terrorism is, by definition, founded on ALWAYS placing the notion of imminent attack at the fore.  Yet, you can never identify when a real threat is imminent (except in periodic CIA type operations but never in war operations). 

One of the key proposals which Obama suggests for a "just peace" falls prey to a similar problem.  How does he plan to sanction these types of cell groups?  Can you starve out the small number of people with enough ammunition to steal the food they need and no concern for the health of their neighbor?  I doubt it.  

Obama's proposal is not a total bust.  The just war proposals and the peaceable solutions he advocate may actually work with North Korea and Iran.  Let's hope so.  These are the kinds of cases that the rules were made to address. 

I do think that just war is a viable dialog in the era of postmodern war.  I don't know what that would look like.  I do know that Obama has not gotten to the heart of the concerns.  I also know that the church is called to help politicians think through these issues.  For generations she would have been looked to for help.  Those days are no more.  And this is one of the times when I can only be dissatisfied with pacifist friends (am I a pacifist?).  That cannot help the government think through just war when government needs them the most.  Maybe they will weigh in with a word about how or if they imagine themselves serving the government with guidance.  Of course, she is always called to prophetically speak peace and justice.  But can she also share wisdom on war?  If she is Catholic or Lutheran I suppose she can.  If she is Mennonite then I doubt she can.