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I’m sure many of you have horror stories of when you were a child and had a chest cold and sore throat and it was likely your grandmother who whipped up a mess of boiled potatoes mushed up with mustard and onions and a few other stinky goodies; an old family recipe. She then smeared it all over your chest and throat and it smelled so bad that you didn’t want to breathe, but it worked. I was lucky. My mom just rubbed Mentholatum all over me.
Since the onset of pharmaceutical solutions to colds, aches, and infections we don’t see too many people going the route of treating such things with a stinky poultice. A poultice is a form of treatment where you apply a cooked up paste of stinky goodies to an infected area to absorb the infection into itself and relieve the inflammation in the area. There are all kinds of recipes for poultices and as many of them work as don’t. Regardless, the idea is that they will draw out the infection in the affected area and relieve the pain of inflammation.
There is a theological term for this process of drawing out infection and relieving inflammation. The term is expiation. If you must know, it comes from the Latin word expiatio. Piatio means devout, pious, or simply clean. Ex means “Out of”. The dirtiness or disease is taken “out of” thus leaving the person clean. Theologically speaking, expiation refers to removing the disease of sin and its ill-effects from a person leaving the person clean or devout or pious.
In the Old Testament some of the sacrifices they had were for the purpose of expiation, for drawing out the feelings of shame and guilt that people felt when they realized they had sinned against God and against others and they realized the hurt they caused and needed the relationship with God and others restored. These sacrifices were for unintentional transgressing. God gave no means of expiation for intentional transgressing. You had to find some way to live with the shame and guilt of intentionally wronging another and making reparations. The expiating poultice for intentional hurting comes with Jesus and his death and the work of the Holy Spirit. I also won’t mention that the penalty in most cases for an intentional sin was usually death.
Just a little bit about how this sacrifice stuff worked. Humanity is sick with a disease of the mind in that we are self-willed rather than God-willed to the extent that we will intentionally and unintentionally hurt others and ourselves especially the people we love and vulnerable people. It is so twisted that even when we think we are doing good it can be bad and bad can be good. The only way out of sin is death. When you discover you’ve hurt another unintentionally or intentionally depending on the severity of the hurt it does not feel good and you may wish you were dead.
To be free of the shame and guilt incurred with hurting God, others, and self, one must die either literally or “to self” in humility and following God’s way to relationship reparation. Life must pass through death to be cleansed and freed of this disease called sin and its harmful effects of shame and guilt and a whole myriad of others bad feelings. With sacrifices of expiation, people offered them not to appease an angry God. That’s propitiation. But rather so that the life of an animal to whom they had transferred their sin could pass through death for them and reunite a person with God.
How does life pass through death? Leviticus 17:11 and 14 tell us that the life of the animal is in the blood. When the priest sacrificed an animal and took its blood for ritual use, that was in essence life that had passed through death. The priests then did interesting things with the blood of the sacrificed animal to expiate the guilt and shame that an Israelite incurred.
In ancient Israel they had three sacrifices or offerings for expiation. The first two were simply the sin offering and guilt offering that they did when they knew they had sinned and wanted forgiveness. They had also to make reparations with those they had sinned against. The sacrifice was to heal things with God by getting the bad stuff out. For the sin offering they would take an animal to a priest. They would lay their hand on it. The priest would then slaughter it and take some of the blood and sprinkle it on the ground before the curtain outside the room where the Ark of the Covenant was kept and where God was supposed to be. What was happening with the laying on of the hand was that they were symbolically transferring their sinful self’s mired in shame and guilt to the animal, who then was put to death in their place in order to put all that bad stuff to death. The priest then took the blood and symbolically presented that person’s life that had passed through death and was thus clean to God and God forgave and fellowship with God was restored. They did the same thing for the guilt offering but with that one the priest would also put some blood on the person’s earlobe. Applying this blood, this life that had passed through death, to the person’s earlobe was meant to heal the ear so that the person could hear the commandments of God better and keep it.
The third sacrifice and the most important happened on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement which was the national day of very solemn repentance. On Yom Kippur the High Priest sacrificed three animals: a bull and two rams. The High Priest slaughtered the bull as a sin offering on behalf of himself and the priests who represented the people to God and God to the people. But in this case, he sprinkled the blood on the priests and then he actually took the blood further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled it on the Ark itself. They believed that the lid of the Ark was the throne of God here on earth and was called the mercy seat. They also believed God was seated there unseen, shrouded in a cloud of smoke that was created by a big incense burn that represented the prayers of the people. Thus, this sprinkling of blood from the same animal on both God and the priests actually united them in this life that had passed through death. Then in representation of all the people, the High Priest took one of the rams, placed his hands on it and slaughtered it as a sin offering on behalf of the people. He took this life that had passed through death and also sprinkled some of that blood on the Ark thus uniting the people with God in this life that had passed through death. He then also sprinkled this blood all over the temple and its furniture to cleanse it of the stain of sin incurred by contact with humans. All this sprinkling of blood symbolized the work of the Holy Spirit who unites us to God and cleanses us of guilt and shame and unions us to God and one another with life that has passed through death, the life of Jesus.
The High Priest then took the second goat and whispered the sins of the people into its ear making the goat bear the sins of the people. This goat, thus laden with the sins of the people, was then led out into the wilderness where it and the sins it bore would be destroyed by the beasties out in the wilderness. This goat took away, bore away, carried away the sins of the people into death and there they perished forever along with the goat. So also, Jesus, God the Son became human and in so doing took the Sin of humanity upon himself by becoming one of us and he removed Sin from us by his death on the cross. When God raised him, he became the life of humanity that passed through death and who by the gift of the Holy Spirit to indwell us unites us to God himself. Jesus is humanity’s expiation of sin, once and for all. Jesus gives us this new humanity, this new human life by the gift of the Holy Spirit who lives in us each and bonds us together as a new humanity. We need to come to him for the healing.
I haven’t said anything about our passage yet so just allow me a couple of more minutes. This Pharisee was a devout, Law-abiding man and indeed more than a bit pompous. Because of his efforts to abide by the Law of Moses he feels he has the right to stand before God, toot his horn, and look down on “sinners”. “Sinner” was a derogatory term, as offensive as some of the racial slurs that get thrown around today. We find him looking with condemnation on this tax collector who is standing far off in the temple quite afflicted by the brutal fact that he had hurt a lot people in so many ways. He is so full of shame and guilt that he wishes he was dead. When somebody beats their own breast they are symbolically driving a knife into their heart.
Tax collectors were Jews who collected taxes for the Romans and were considered to be traitors. They always inflated the amount of tax owed so the could skim off the top to the detriment of many poor people. They would also have poor Israelites beaten and imprisoned for not paying up. They got very wealthy and were very hated. They were indeed “sinners”.
The tax collector is standing far of, staring at the ground, beating his breast, and desperately praying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” He is so full of shame and guilt over what he has intentionally done to God’s people to get rich. He is sick to death with himself and he has got no way to get the shame and guilt out of his system because the expiation sacrifices were only for unintentional sins. I don’t know if you’ve ever been sick of yourself for the shit you’ve done (sorry to use that word but it’s fitting) and felt the helplessness of there being no way to make right for what you’ve done. I’ve been there. All you can do is hope God can heal things. This broken man certainly was there.
The tax collector’s prayer is interesting. In our translation it seems he’s begging for mercy, or forgiveness from a judge. But, the word in Greek isn’t the word they would have used for mercy. It is the word they used for a sacrifice of expiation. Literally, he is prayerfully begging, “God, be the sacrifice of expiation for me, a sinner.” And…that is what God himself did in, through, and as Jesus by his death and resurrection and has applied it to us with the gift of his very self.
If you have ever been or are mired in the shame and guilt of the shit you have done intentionally or unintentionally, there is healing for that. Come as you are into the midst of the people of God where dwells God in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and start crying, start letting it out. God will come to you and bear it away. God will let you know you are His beloved child, beloved and forgiven. And we the people of God won’t judge you. We will hold you just as you are in the arms of the unconditional love of our Father in heaven to reinforce the love he has for you. Just come. Amen.
