Purification Systems: Hebrews 9:11-14
Ordinary Time (Halloween)
But Christ has appeared
as the high priest of the good things that have happened. He passed through the
greater and more perfect meeting tent, which isn’t made by human hands (that
is, it’s not a part of this world). 12 He entered
the holy of holies once for all by his own blood, not by the blood of goats or
calves, securing our deliverance for all time. 13 If
the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkled ashes of cows made spiritually
contaminated people holy and clean, 14 how much
more will the blood of Jesus wash our consciences clean from dead works in
order to serve the living God? He offered himself to God through the
eternal Spirit as a sacrifice without any flaw. (CEB)
Happy Halloween! It’s not a Church holiday, but it does land
right on a Sunday this year. Given that
last Halloween was even more unusual than this, some people are pulling out all
the stops to celebrate this spooky day.
In recognition that ketchup is one of the go-to ingredients for fake
blood in homemade costumes, Heinz released this month a line of specially
designed bottles of “tomato blood.” The
squeeze bottles still have the same Heinz logo and shape but are labeled with
the new name and a few Halloween-esque additions like bats and gravestones.
Not content
with a product redesign, the company also opened a pop-up Halloween store last
week at Santa Monica Place. People can
go and get a white costume that they then cover with ketchup blood splotches at
the interactive “drip stations.” If you
can’t make it out to California, no problem; the drip station creation process
will be livestreamed on their social media platforms. If you want to get in on the action yourself,
“Fans can bring the Halloween spirit home with the new HEINZ Tomato Blood
Costume Kit, which includes everything you need to change your look from day
to fright, including HEINZ Tomato Blood Ketchup, face paint,
tattoos, vampire fangs, applicators and more.”[1]
We gather on
this All Hallows’ Eve with no ketchup but with a Scripture that has some
interesting things to say about blood. Did
anyone else grow up with the “blood theology” hymns—“There’s Power in the
Blood,” “Nothing but the Blood,” “Are You Washed in the Blood”? To the uninitiated, they’re incredibly creepy
statements, but there’s a whole branch of Christian theology that focuses on
the efficacy of Jesus’ blood to cleanse us of sin. It’s not in the literal sense of dousing
ourselves in Jesus’ platelets (or ketchup), but it’s the metaphorical language
supporting the idea that the actions of the crucifixion are the highest point
of Jesus’ doings here on earth. In this
kind of substitutionary atonement—five dollar theological phrase for your Sunday
use—salvation is tied to the death of the Christ, the Messiah, whose sinless
blood washes us clean by taking our place as the sacrifice for penance to God. It is, in a gruesome sense, the ultimate
Brita filter.
This kind of
purification or atonement theology is usually grounded in this text and a few
others—“how much more will the blood of Jesus wash our consciences clean?” And it is one way to read the text, but these
verses for today have a specific background we should not overlook. The book of Hebrews is less of a letter and
more of a sermon for the Jews who had become Christians and were settling into
a solidifying faith system. Daniel
Harrington notes that, “The focus of Hebrews is not the earthly or historical
Jesus. The author never cites a saying
of Jesus found elsewhere in the Jesus tradition, and never mentions specific
healings or other miraculous actions done by Jesus.”[2] This message is about why Jesus’ life matters
in a different way than anyone else’s but also why Jesus fits in with the
Jewish notions of how God acts among God’s people—so there has to be a note
about what happened with the cross.
“But Christ
has appeared as the high priest.”
Professor Amy Peeler writes that, “No other book in the New Testament
explicitly calls Jesus a priest, let alone a High Priest. For this sermon, however,
Jesus’ priesthood becomes the primary vehicle for explaining the meaning of his
death and resurrection. Priests were powerful figures in Israel and in other
Greco-Roman societies, exercising both spiritual and political power over the
people. Proclamation that Jesus is High Priest boldly asserts his position of
power.”[3]
What we often
fail to realize when we sing these songs about the power of the blood and the
Heinz dousing of this metaphorical shower is just how extremely Jewish
it is. We who are Gentiles—that is,
non-Jews—don’t have the same cultural background to understand that the
preacher here isn’t talking about a tent revival but an intricate and ancient
practice of relationship with the Holy. Rather
than focusing on our need for a good spiritual bath, this text sings a powerful
hymn of praise for the God Who is so much more than we can ever imagine and
Who comes and lives with us anyway.
So many of the
blood songs talk about our unworthiness and that, too, is a specific kind of
theology, but Hebrews is not interested in making us small. It is very interested in reminding us that
God is big. “He entered the holy
of holies once for all by his own blood,” writes the author in amazement—this
is a part of the Jewish temple where only the high priest could go, and only
sometimes, and only with the right kind of sacrifice, but Jesus walked in with
His own self because it is His place.
He gets to do that; He gets to rewrite the rule book, He gets to tear
the curtain of separation in half, He gets to defeat death itself, and then He
comes back for us.
That—that’s
pretty impressive. One of the
cornerstones of Christianity is the concept of a relationship with God Who
knows our name, knows the count of hair on our heads, and sometimes we get used
to that. Jesus becomes our pal with whom
we chat every once in a while and invite to the family holiday dinner and we
forget that God is the architect of the universe. We just finished our series last week on Job
and God’s reminder that Job was not there when God set the limits of the sea or
formed the leviathan of the deep; we were not there when God traced the paths
of the stars or set the galaxies spinning through space.
But we are
here, now, we who bicker over whether or not someone is clean enough for God to
be able to deal with them.
“If the blood of goats and
bulls and the sprinkled ashes of cows made spiritually contaminated people holy
and clean, 14 how much more will the blood of Jesus
wash our consciences clean from dead works in order to serve the living God?”
The word
“wretched” gets attached to a lot of blood theology hymns and statements; in
the well-known “Amazing Grace,” one verse rejoices that God “saved a wretch
like me.” It is, again, that aspect of
making ourselves small. To a degree,
this is good; it is good to remind ourselves that we are not perfect and that
there are consequences when we cause ourselves or others harm by our
thoughtlessness. But it is not good when
this goes overboard and we see only the wretchedness, only the sin, only the
need for cleansing blood as though we are nothing but our mistakes needing far
more than artistically placed ketchup to even dare to exist in the world. We miss the point when we get hung up on how
many ways we are impure rather than how God can take anything we’ve done or not
done and make it work.
“Wretched” now
means something that is “deplorably bad or depressing,” but it comes out of a
much different context. The word is from
Old English, the language spoken in what is now England until the end of the 11th
century or so. In Old English, wrecc
comes from wræcca, wrecce—an exile or stranger.[4] A wrecc was somebody who had, for
whatever reason, left the tightly-knit communal structure of the Anglo-Saxon life,
a person cut off from the safety of hearth and home. It was someone who no longer belonged.
The writer of
Hebrews wasn’t thinking of Anglo-Saxon wretches when writing of Jesus’
cleansing power, not least because the language didn’t exist yet. But those concepts of separation and union
are a thread throughout human history and into our own lives—we, too, want to
know how to belong, where to claim community, whether we are clean enough or righteous
enough or holy enough or loved enough or simply enough to be part of this
service to the living God. And this
passage says, yes.
Yes, you are
part of this, not because you have suitably groveled in your wretchedness, not
because you are covered in blood, not because you have done enough of anything
but because the high priest Jesus created a throughway for us to walk. “Christ has appeared as the high priest of
the good things that have happened,” rejoices the writer of Hebrews. It’s not an appearance of God’s disgust at
how unclean we are; it’s a complete overhaul of the expectations of how one
rejoins the community, how we are invited back in and are no longer wraecce,
wretched, because what we do is remade into actions that glorify the God Who is
big enough to see other possibilities.
Professor Peeler writes, “The author
promises that Jesus’ sacrifice will redeem from dead works so
that participants can serve the living God (9:14). Hebrews
helps us see that the difference is not between believing verses doing, but
between performing dead or living deeds. Humans, whether they be Jews from the
Old Testament with a written list of sacrificial practices or Christians in [the
21st century] with a mental list of deeds that should be performed,
all have a propensity toward dead works, actions performed by rote lacking any
internal motivation. These are the works that are incompatible with faith.
“But Jesus’ sacrifice opens another
way. Jesus’ sacrifice cleanses the external and internal so
that we can offer our whole selves to God, just like he did. It is not really about
what we do; the same action can be a dead work or a lively praise, but it is
about surrender…Are you doing works just to do the work or are you doing them
because you are surrendered to the living God? When we surrender ourselves as
Jesus did, it becomes possible to serve the living God with a living faith.”[5]
This Christ Who is powerful enough to
bypass the centuries-old systems of sacrifice and create a new way of
invitation is powerful enough to recognize when our motives are the things that
need a good scrubbing. Are we wearing a
costume of faith that hides our boredom or our exhaustion or our skepticism or
our anger? Be honest enough to bring
those to God, not because it is wrong to feel any of those things but because God
is not interested in our facades. God
works in truth and invites us to do the same, offering not dead works and
blood-stained robes but living faith and purity of heart, joining the community
of praise with our entire, honest selves.
May we have the humility to step back
when we are trying to tell God how to be in relationship with us; may we have
the grace to allow ourselves to be in relationship with God; and may we have
the courage to accept Christ’s purification, breaking open our hearts to love our
neighbors and ourselves. Amen.
[1]
The
Kraft Heinz Company - Ketchup Has Never Been Spookier: HEINZ Tomato Blood
Ketchup Haunts National Grocery Stores, Just in Time for Halloween
[2]
Harrington, “Hebrews,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible One Volume Commentary
(Nashville: Abingdon, 2010), 881.
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