Sacrifice
Christian faith has always explained Christ’s death as a sacrifice. However, though many cultures have had sacrificial practices, Christ’s death is never portrayed according to a pagan view of sacrifice. Pagans offered sacrifices of their own design in hopes that the gods would respond with rain, good crops, or other tangible blessings. On the other hand, the Jews did no such thing. The sacrificial system was carefully designed by God. No part of it was the product of human initiative. Jewish sacrifices were instituted by God, provided for by God, and meant to be part of the fulfillment of a covenant instituted by God. Additionally, Jewish sacrifices were not meant to curry God’s favor, but to atone for the sins of the people. Over hundreds of years, the practice of gruesomely killing animals and spreading their blood over their doorposts (as in the Passover story) and over the altar (in the Tabernacle and Temple), taught the Israelites the truth that sins are only forgiven if blood is shed (Hebrews 9:22).
Though Jesus spent considerable time talking about his death throughout the gospel narratives, he does not spend much time interpreting what his death means (the most significant exception is the institution of the Lord’s Supper, where he explains that his body is being broken for his people). This was fleshed out in the writings of the apostles under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but we get some clues about we should interpret Christ’s death as sacrifice from the Old Testament context.
Perhaps the best example from the sacrificial tradition is the liturgy for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16). Two lambs are involved in this ritual. One is slaughtered and has its blood sprinkled on the mercy seat. The other is the scapegoat that has the sins of the people confessed over it and is then driven out into the wilderness. In this ritual, we begin to see that atonement for sin necessarily involves death, but death on its own is not sufficient; there must be a sin bearer that can take the sin away from the people. We see that both of these aspects come into play in the New Testament’s understanding of Christ’s death.
We can even get a glimpse of how we need to interpret Christ’s atoning sacrifice based on geography. Genesis 22 tells us the story of Abraham being called to sacrifice his only son in the land of Moriah. We read in 2 Chronicles 3:1 that Solomon built the Temple on Mount Moriah. This ties the ritual Temple sacrifice with the paradigmatic story of Abraham and Isaac. Not only is there the theme of sacrifice similar between the two passages, but even the very location. It is not a coincidence that the Temple was built on the site of the almost sacrifice of Isaac where Abraham called God by the name “The Lord will provide.”
This geographical significance is strengthened when we consider how the author of 2 Chronicles ties Solomon’s building of the Temple with “where the Lord had appeared to his father David, at the place that David had prepared on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.” The Temple and the worship that takes place at the Temple is here bound up with the story in 1 Chronicles 21, where David’s sin results in a plague ravaging Jerusalem. Here we find wisdom in the saying, “Please let me fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercies are very great. But do not let me fall into the hand of man.” The Lord then commanded David to build an altar on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite. Ornan offered the land to his king for free, but David responded, “No, but I will surely buy it for the full price; for I will not take what is yours for the Lord, or offer a burnt offering which costs me nothing.” Here, in a fundamental way, the costliness of authentic sacrifice is affirmed, pointing to the terrific cost of redemption.
What is particularly significant about these geographical observations is that these events are not only bound up with each other, tying them together within the Jewish mind, but they are also geographically connected with the crucifixion. Jesus was crucified only a short distance away from the Temple mount. It is certainly interesting that Christ would die on more or less the same spot that Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, where David made his famous offering to God, where Solomon built the Temple and where hundreds of years of Israelite worship, centered on atonement.
Though we cannot take these Old Testament images and simply add them together and come up with the Christian doctrine of atonement, they must be taken seriously. If we attempt to understand the sacrifice of Christ without rooting it in the sacrificial tradition of ancient Israel, we will, in practice, be rooting it in some other framework. Again, if we do this, we will find that we are thinking about God, not according to how God has actually made himself known, but according to how we want to think of him, which is nothing less than making God in our own image.
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