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To understand Good Friday and the meaning of Jesus’ death we have to take a dive into the sacrificial system of ancient Israel and find our meaning for it there. Otherwise, we are left with Medieval Christianity’s over use of the metaphor of penal substitution, that we deserve the legal penalty of death for our sins but Jesus died in our place and appeased God the Father’s wrath earning us an acquittal. If you take a plunge into the Book of Leviticus and look at what was going on the Day of Atonement, the day that Ancient Israel dealt with its sin, you will find something there that is markedly different than a sacrifice to appease God’s wrath or what is known as a sacrifice of propitiation meaning going to a god to gain favour.
The Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur was a very solemn day. Everyone spent the day prayerfully reflecting on their walk with God and each other according to the Covenant. They fasted. No one worked. It was the day that the Temple, the Lord’s dwelling place, and the people were cleansed of iniquity. Iniquity basically means stain, the stain of sin. We feel it as the stain of shame, guilt, regret, betrayal, denial; the stuff that persists in broken relationships. It’s like if one person in a relationship has done something they wish to hide from the other, that person and that relationship is stained. Things become different and not in a good way. The ancient Israelites believed that iniquity, this stain was transferable to anything a stained person came in contact with and in the end, everybody is stained. It’s like if one person in a relationship stains a relationship it changes the way that person and the couple interact with other people.
The stain could even be brought into the temple into God’s presence by means of the priests who dealt with the people’s sins on a daily basis. It’s like germs. Everything the priests touched in the Temple became stained with the unseen but obvious stain of iniquity. They believed that if the iniquity of the people became too great God would not be able to continue among them and would vacate the Temple or just go nuclear so to speak. Therefore, the temple and the people needed to be cleansed from its contact with iniquity and the people’s iniquity was removed far from them.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was the day they did this in the way that God told them to do it. The sacrifices on Yom Kippur were sacrifices of expiation through which the LORD God drew forth, cleansed, and healed the people from their sin and its stain. It’s like if you take a warm moist tea bag and put it on an infected wound, it will draw out the infection. On the Day of Atonement, the Israelites were not trying to appease God’s anger and stop God from getting them. None of the sacrifices in ancient Israel were for that purpose. God gave them this Day as the means of extracting, of expiating, of drawing out the infection of sin and its stain to cleanse and heal them of it.
On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would take a bull and two goats from the people for this purpose. The bull was for expiating the iniquity of the priesthood, as they stood as representative of the whole people in dealing directly with matters in the temple. Their own sin-stained hands and lives and the iniquity they incurred from dealing with the sins of the people stained the temple, God’s abode, and themselves. The High Priest would slaughter the bull by slitting its throat. He would catch some of the blood in a bowl and then take it and some incense and go into the Holy of Holies, the room at the back of the Temple where the Ark of the Covenant was which was God’s throne on Earth. The lid of the Ark was called the Mercy Seat and it was there that they believed God sat enthroned on earth. In the Holy of Holies, the High Priest would light the incense and fill the room with smoke. This represented the prayers of the people and made it so that he could not directly see God. Then he would dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times on the Mercy Seat.
Then he would choose one of the two goats by lot. It represented the iniquity of the people. He slaughtered it in like manner as the bull and returned to the Holy of Holies to sprinkle the Mercy Seat with it as well. But on the way to the Holy of Holies, he also sprinkled some of this goat’s blood around the rest of the temple to cleanse it. When he came back out, he then took blood from both the bull and the goat and sprinkled each seven times upon horns of the altar upon which sacrifices were made and cleansed it of iniquity.
For this all to make sense, we need to know something about what the ancient Israelites believed about blood. Leviticus 17:11 says, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood.” The blood of the slaughtered bull and the goat represented life that had passed through death (Yes, just as Jesus has passed through death) and having passed through death it was free of sin. Being life that was free of sin, they believed it had the power to cleanse iniquity from whatever it came in contact with; and one more thing – it unites God and the people.
The High Priest who stood in representation of the people gets this blood, this life that has passed through death, on his hand and sprinkles it onto God sitting on the Mercy Seat. Thus, through contact with the blood – this life that has passed through death – the high priest, the people, and God are united. The relational bond between God and the people that had been stained with iniquity was cleansed and healed with this life that had passed through death. That’s what Atonement is (At-One-Ment).
I hope you see the foreshadowing here of Jesus and his death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit to us. By his death and resurrection Jesus’ human life passed through death and is given to us through the work of the Holy Spirit. When you hear all those metaphors about being washed in the blood of Jesus and so forth this is what it means. We are united to God by the Holy Spirit who gives us Jesus’ life which has passed through death.
We still have one more goat to go. The High Priest then took the second goat and placed both his hands upon its head and whispered the sins of the people into its ear. Then somebody simply led the goat out into the wilderness and set it free so that it could be utterly destroyed by whatever befell it. You have heard of the term scapegoat, when some innocent party takes the blame for somebody or usually somebodies else. This goat bears away the sins of the people to where these sins may be destroyed in death.
There is something significant we must note here as well. The Hebrew word for forgiveness does not mean a simple release of guilt. It is not a “legal” transaction where someone apologizes (or not) for a wrong done to someone else and that someone else decides not to punish them for it. The Hebrew word for forgiving is nasa. It means to bear, to pick up and carry. The Space Shuttle would be a good metaphor here. If you remember the story of the four men who carried a paralytic to Jesus to be healed and how they had to tear through the roof of the house to get him to Jesus because of the crowd outside. The Bible says that when Jesus saw their faith or rather their faithfulness towards their friend he said to the man “Son, your sins are forgiven.” These men for love of their paralytic friend whom others would have called cursed by God for some concealed sin and refused to touch him, they picked him up and carried him to Jesus who declared him forgiven. That act of love and their friendship with someone everyone would have called cursed is what forgiveness is.
Jesus, the Son of God become human, does the same thing for us as the Scapegoat goat did for Israel on Yom Kippur. He innocently shares our fallen humanity with us and bears it away into death removing it from us. This bearing away of our sin is what forgiveness is and it is cleansing. Just as you would put a tea bag on an infected wound to draw out the infection, so Jesus’ death draws out sin’s infection from humanity so God can heal it with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Looking at our reading from Hebrews Jesus has opened once and for all a new and living way to God. He has permanently cleansed the living temple of humanity and God the Holy Spirit now dwells in us and works to heal us from the inside out. God has written his covenant upon our hearts. And so as Paul writes in our passage from Hebrews: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.”
God has expiated our sin and iniquity by Jesus’ blood, his life that has passed through death. There is no longer any need for any sacrifice of expiation and certainly not propitiation. We are in union with the Trinity atoned by Jesus’ life-giving blood, his life that has passed through death. Moreover, he has scapegoated our sins away into death where they are utterly destroyed. The Trinity no longer counts anything against us. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. Amen.
