The Thread & The Eye of the Needle: the Lamb and the High Priest.

We sing a line at church as part of the usual Sunday liturgy. It's words are: "Lamb of God You take away the sins of the world." Each time I think of the meaning of these words I am blown away.

Anything that takes away the sins of the world is some serious shit.

When I think of just my sins by themselves, I am overwhelmed. By sins I mean my misdeeds, things I have regrets for, things that have fragmented and fractured my relationships with myself, my relationships with others and my relationship with God... When I think of these by themselves it is enough to scare me into hiding under the bed for a lifetime.

By some small miracle I have managed to not yet kill or maim anyone (so far, in my lifetime, though there is time yet). That is not to say there have not been times when I would have dearly loved to seriously hurt someone - so the sin in these instances is not the the killing, the maiming (the thing that did not get done), but the hatred, anger and malice that lay beneath my desire to hurt another. Sometimes that anger hides under the clever guise of vengeful thoughts "He'll realize the error of his ways when someone hurts him the same way", "One day she'll gain weight and then she'll be sorry she said that to me".

I guess maybe on a scale of bad people in the world I might not appear to be too bad "on paper"; no criminal record and all that. But in the place where intentions and desires of my heart have been written, in that place sins, bad thoughts, regrets, bad intentions flourish like a well watered garden of weeds. So when I think of a lamb to take away my sins I think it needs to be a pretty serious lamb; a pretty darn sturdy lamb!

Add to my sins the sins of some people whom we might collectively consider sinful. Maybe like an Adolf Hitler, an African slave trader, a soldier in the early post-colonial Canadian bush lands, forcefully removing children from the bosoms of their families to plunk them into unfamiliar schools where their very identity would be ripped away. Combine these folks with serial killers and rapists, paedophiles, human traffickers of today, the man who cheats on his wife, the woman who beats her children because she cannot get a handle on her own anger about her own life, the youth who takes a weapon to school and kills a bunch of innocent kids, the one who plants a bomb to kill and terrorize people ... Well sum all these sins, and imagine them on a long scroll of paper. How many times would that scroll of paper circle the world? How small would the font have to be in order to hold all human sins, past present and future? It boggles the mind.

Then imagine in your mind the lamb who would die for a list of sins such as these, a lamb who would die to save a bunch of people like this - often people who we might imagine as unforgiveable, unworthy of being helped. The kind of people we might like to imagine thrown into some dark place where they would rot, never to be thought of again. Imagine the lamb that washes all these people clean... This is the lamb of God we speak of when we sing "lamb of God you take away the sins of the world". I do feel, when I look into the inner reaches of my own heart, like I could use a whole lamb just for myself, but this particular lamb is a one-size-fits-all kind of a lamb.

This is some serious shit. This is one helluva a lamb we're talking about here.

The practice of the lamb, the sacrificial lamb who takes away sins goes back to ancient Israelite tradition (and I suspect is common in many other ancient traditions). People, individuals and families would bring animals (unblemished animals were preferred and recommended, unless one could not get an unblemished animal) to the priests. The priests were to maintain certain standards of personal cleanliness and holiness, and they were to be morality suited to one who would have the job of offering a sacrifice.

The sacrificial animals were to be killed in a particular way, their blood dealt with in special ways, the best portions burnt at an altar to the one God, as a way of asking for forgiveness, and demonstrating the depth of remorse and repentance. But this system was not working too well... There are many rules around how the animal, the person seeking atonement, the priest, how all of these should prepare for their participation in this ritual of reconciliation with God. The ritual became its own act of sin, becoming more important to people than the function it was meant to serve. Books in the Hebrew Scriptures tell how the people of God failed to understand that the ritual was not the holy and consecrated thing, but rather the relationship that the people kept, with themselves, with each other (and especially with the oppressed, disenfranchised and weak) and the relationship they kept with God. The ritual was meant to be part of the relationship reconciliation toolkit. The ritual instead became its own god placed alongside what should have been the One God.

Prophets across the ages were tapped on their shoulders by God, and given the word of the Lord. They spoke out about the way in which the rituals (of reconciliatory sacrifice, of festivals of thanksgiving) had displaced the true meaning of the reconciliation and relationship with God. Perhaps not unlike our modern hallmark festivals: Christmas, birthdays, valentines day, thanksgiving day - do we observe these festival days truly as days of thanksgiving for Christ, life, love, and plenty respectively? Or do we observe these festival days as rituals of turkeys, hams, treats, gifts and cards? Do we celebrate these festival days as days of relationship or days of merchandising, consumption and consumerism?

I imagine God in heaven shaking His head time and time again and saying "Looks like I have to go find me yet another prophet to tell these fool people what's what down there on earth."

I maintain a hope for life on other planets, partly because I would like to imagine a less foolhardy race of beings somewhere, who have been able to get the message of God, and live it with a modicum of consistency - for we have surely failed at doing this on this planet! But our Lord tried long and hard to get us to understand His message through commandments, leaders, judges, kings, prophets.

Then he sends a lamb.
A human lamb.

And this lamb is not sacrificed in accordance with the laws of purity and temple sacrifice.

The ones who put him to death are not consecrated ones, as priests who perform sacrifices should be.

They probably have not bathed and adequately cleansed themselves since their last intercourse.

Their last intercourse might have been with a prostitute. Or a he-goat for all we know.

They are most inappropriate hands for putting our sacrificial lamb to death.

The sacrificial lamb should be unblemished,

But this lamb arrives at the cross, which ends up being the altar at which he is sacrificed, physically soiled in every imaginable way: spat upon, beaten, kicked, crowned with a mockery of thorns on his head, clothing ripped, doubled over from the weight of the timber that he would shortly be hung on, nailed to.

That weight is negligible though, compared to the weight he will bear when he is nailed in place and hoisted up, beside criminals, dying the agonizing death which birthed him into eternity, like the scapegoat in Leviticus, bearing all our sins upon his head, so that we could be set free. So that we would not have to carry the burdens of our own regrets, bad intentions, unkind thoughts, and deeds that have fractured our relationships with self, others and God.

This is some serious shit.

This lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

This lamb of God who sets us free.

Make no mistake, the ones who brought him to his death in the manner of a common criminal, they were not the priests in this scene of the Jesus story. This lamb was both the sacrifice and the high priest in making himself the sacrifice. There was in fact no high priest worthy of being the one to put him to death. So he, knowing fully what his death would mean, wanting with all his human self to avoid the pain and punishment of it all, asking his Father to take this cup from his lips, he brought himself to the sacrificial altar of the cross, knowing the death he would receive to bring us liberation from the burden of sin. This is some serious shit.

This is the message in Hebrews chapter 2, verses 17 and 18, paraphrased from the Amplified Bible and the NRSV:

It is evident that it was essential that He be made like his brethren in every respect, in order that he might become a merciful (sympathetic) and faithful High Priest in the things related to God, to make atonement and propitiation for the people's sins [like the sacrificial lamb of old].

For because He Himself [in His humanity] has suffered in being tempted (tested and tried), He is able [immediately] to run to the cry of (to assist, to relieve) those who are being tempted and tested and tried (ie us all) [and who therefore are being exposed to suffering].God Himself, in heaven understood that He could not get through to us speaking from His Godly boots in heaven, so He came down to earth in human boots, He suffered, was tempted, tried, tested, and now, with the knowledge of the human experience, with the knowledge of the ignorant and unrealized divine that is the human condition, now he is able to attend to us in the very midst of our suffering.

God works on himself, in being made like his brothers in every way, even onto a suffering and awful death, God works on himself so that he might become a merciful, compassionate, sympathetic and faithful high priest. And then as the high priest, he lays his own mortal self on the cross: an atonement for our sins. So that not one of us has to carry the burden of our regrets and things we (may) have done wrong on our puny little human shoulders. He knows we cannot carry it, and he comes to take it on his shoulders.

I think of the impossible drawings of the artist Escher. Stairways that twist and intertwine impossibly,

birds that fly both forward and backward,

a box whose front is its back.

Jesus, as the high priest and the sacrificial lamb, is both the thread and the eye of the needle. He accomplishes for us what no high priest, no lamb on their own could do.

Thanks be to God, for this lamb of God who takes away all our sins, for this is truly some serious shit.