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.

Dorm Room Monasticism

So a few things have changed in the last two months. Most notably, I accepted an offer to become chaplain for one year at the University of Indianapolis. Since this is only a one year position I am trying to learn as much as I can in a short period of time.

Here is what I have learned so far:

College life is about as close to the monastic life that most of us will ever be. One student that I met this week is having a problem sleeping because of a problem with her roommate. She went three days without sleeping. When I met this student, a young woman of no more than 19, she shared how she really liked her roommate. She said this woman was quite nice and knew about the problem. But she still had not been able to sleep. Amazingly, she had not one bad word to say about her roommate even after a very difficult first week at college.

Another student had to endure the pain of broken relationship in the opening days after arriving on campus for the year. Though she admitted that it had been a very difficult week, she couldn't help but talk about how supportive her friends had been and how much they loved her.

And then there was a group of young women, mostly from small rural towns where they had little experience with people different than them, who were seriously distraught because an international student was eating alone as he had done every day that week. They said one day he was willing to join them, but on the whole he had been unresponsive to their offers. They didn't let their feelings be hurt. They devised ways so that he would accept their offer in the future so that he wouldn't be alone anymore.

Most of our lives we have little reason to step outside of our needs and the needs of our immediate family. We don't have to encounter people in all of the ugliness of their life and call them friend. Living together in physical community, as these students are doing, causes you to engage people in whole new ways. I dare say that this young woman who responded with such maturity to the roommate who had caused her such frustration will be far better prepared for the challenges of a young marriage than most are. Covenanting to live together, whether for a lifetime with someone you love or for a year with a complete stranger in a single room, causes you to be willing to give up something of yourself. Selfishness cannot have its reign in that place.

This is really what monastic life was intended to do. The early church determined that the best way to become a disciple of Jesus Christ was in covenant community. For some that meant marriage. But the early monks became very suspicious of marriage. On the other hand, they knew that simply going out in the desert without human contact (which some did) lacked accountability. So they began to cloister together and submit themselves to the more mature members of the community. And working together to prepare meals, do work, and worship God meant that they had to encounter whatever pride and selfishness that was left in the other. I think that in some sense these undergraduates have cloistered together for a similar kind of life, at least the ones that take their Christian discipleship seriously have.

Anyone who has married knows that much of the early days and years of marriage are about discerning what is the best brand of toothpaste and who's bank is really the better one to keep the checking account. These answers are never completely resolved. But one does learn how to give up their own desires for the sake of the one they have covenanted to live with. This is part of what true community is about.

It isn't all negative of course, which is why we all do it so willingly. There is great joy in friendship, especially when we see that our friends are willing to be there for us in the most difficult of times. When a friend holds your hand as you grieve loss or goes out of their way to make sure that you aren't alone on THAT night (you know which one I am talking about!), something changes about those difficult times. Somehow they become holy too. We usually don't see them as holy in the moment. Looking back years later we begin to see that those were the days when we really became Christian disciples. We also can look back on those days and realize that we never knew closer companionship and never took so much joy in it.

Those are the kinds of things I have seen in just one week of watching college students learn to live together. Lifelong friendships have formed in just 10 days or so. They don't know they are lifelong, of course, but they are.

I don''t want to overstate what I am saying here.

Many of the relationships on a college campus are superficial and destructive. Not every undergraduate is interested in living like St. Benedict.

But a few of them are. They are serious about becoming disciples of Jesus. And I have the pleasure of learning from them.

"May this be only the beginning, Lord."