Offering and sacrifice
AJM : Holy
Trinity 2 May 2004 pm
Reading
Micah 6.6-8
Introduction
Good evening. Today we begin a new series of topics in
our sermons and our cell groups. The theme of the series is ‘Something old,
something new’, and we will be looking at key topics which run through both the
Old and the New Testaments. This week we are looking at offering and sacrifice.
In future weeks we will be covering themes like kingdom, poverty and oppression,
servanthood, prayer, pain and suffering, the names of God, wisdom, the word, glory,
justice, salvation and others. We hope that this way we will be able to take a
close look at some of the things which are central to our faith. Some of them
are familiar; others perhaps matter more to God than they often do to us. It
will be a good discipline.
Let’s pray.
Well, we begin with offering and sacrifice. It’s a
topic which lies at the core of our faith; and yet the very words ‘offering’
and ‘sacrifice’ are not ones we often use. They are not concepts which fit in
very well with the culture we live in. Maybe we talk of a parent’s sacrifice,
and we admire it. I read the other day of a father who died trying to prevent
the rebels of the LRA in
But by and large neither sacrifice nor offering are
big concepts in our world. For most of us, parenthood isn’t something we do as
a sacrifice, it’s something we do because we want to. And for most of us,
offering isn’t something which requires much of us, because we only give what
we can afford – Mr Robinson included. Offering and sacrifice are not
fashionable concepts. Our world doesn’t celebrate offering, it celebrates
receiving. And it doesn’t celebrate sacrifice, it celebrates success.
And yet offering and sacrifice are the major themes
which govern the people’s relationship with God throughout the Old Testament.
Offering and sacrifice are what Jesus came for, and the means by which he
reconciled us to God. Offering and sacrifice are at the core of our faith and
the core of our spiritual health. We cannot afford not to understand them.
A way in
So let’s start by thinking of a way in. I’d like you
to think of the most recent time you apologised to someone, or someone
apologised to you. When you’ve thought, please raise your hand (I won’t ask you
to share it!)…
I wonder how that was played out. Perhaps it was like
this. Imagine that my husband has unintentionally hurt me in some way, and that
he wants to put this right. So he says he is sorry, and he gives me a bunch of
flowers. Why does he do that? Well, it’s to show me that when he says he
is sorry, he means it. He’s reinforced his words with an action. And it was an
action which cost him something, in terms of money - but more importantly in
our culture in terms of time. It’s both an offering and a sacrifice.
But imagine now that he comes in and just flings the
flowers at me. ‘There! I’ve brought you some flowers! You can stop going on
about it now.’ Would that be effective? Probably not. He’s made an offering,
but that was all it was. It was an action all right, but it didn’t mean
anything. It wasn’t about me at all; it was about him. It wasn’t really about
saying sorry or putting our relationship right, it was more about paying a small
fine to get off the consequences. Not the same thing at all.
Offering and sacrifice in the Old Testament
Now let’s see if we can travel from postmodern
Where do we start? Think of my husband’s offering of
flowers. He makes it because there is something to put right. The offering deals
with an offence, a hurt. Well, in his case the offence is trivial. In our
relationship with God it isn’t trivial. So what is it?
I think the only way we can understand it is to go
back to the beginning. This is what Moses tried to do when he wrote the book of
Genesis. Moses began with the question: what is the problem, to which a
solution is necessary? This is what he came up with.
Inbuilt in man is the capacity to choose. In
particular, we have acquired the capacity to choose between good and evil,
between God and not God. Sometimes we choose good, but fairly consistently we
choose evil. God is the source of life, and so when we choose that which is not
God, we choose death. Even as Christians this remains true: we have the same
choice, and frequently we find ourselves making the wrong one, even without
meaning to. The word for this is sin. The consequence of sin is death. And the
difficulty is that we all do it. As the apostle John said, if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in
us. Now if that’s not a problem I don’t know what is.
But because we are made in the image of God, we have
good within us too. And that’s what we prefer to think about. We prefer to
think about the good within us than the sin within us. We know that we sin
because we are sinned against, and we prefer to talk about how we’ve been
sinned against. We do try very hard a lot of the time, and we prefer to tell
ourselves we are bound to make the odd mistake, but basically we’re trying our best
and it’s really not our fault. For thousands of years we’ve been telling
ourselves that although there’s the odd hiccup, basically everything’s fine.
But God has always known, as he watches people beetle
off in the opposite direction from the one he’s in, that it isn’t. So he came
up with the 10 commandments as a kind of yardstick, as a way for people to
measure themselves against a fixed standard. This is what it means to live without sin, without damaging your
relationship with me and losing touch with life, he said. See how you get on.
Well, they didn’t get on very well at all. They realised it wasn’t as easy as
they thought. They realised they weren’t up to it. They needed a way out. They
needed a mechanism for putting their failures right.
So God gave them one. This was it: offering and
sacrifice. We have left Genesis and we are now in Leviticus, chapter 16. This
is the system. The priest Aaron shall take two goats. One is a sin offering. He
shall kill this goat as an offering for the sins of the people. The goat will
sacrifice its life in order to put right the relationship between God and the
people; and God will give them back the life which they have lost. The other
goat is called the scapegoat. 
Aaron will lay his hands on this
goat’s head, and confess the sins of the people. The goat will be released into
the wilderness, carrying those sins away with it. Now that is a powerful
ritual. Imagine that we were to do it here. Goats were very valuable things;
they still are, in many parts of the world. Imagine that we have two goats. One
we will watch die, dying the death that should be ours. And the other we will
watch set off into the desert, knowing it carries our sins on its back. Here it
is. This is a picture painted by Holman Hunt of the scapegoat. Often when we
pray we ask people to visualise themselves handing things over to God. But this
is much more powerful. See the red ribbon wound round its horns? That’s your
sins. And when it leaves this building, it takes them with it.
So that’s what the people learned to do. And each
time, they were forgiven and their relationship restored. But it wasn’t long
before the power of the symbolism began to wear off. It became a bit of a
ritual. It stopped being something they meant, and became something they did.
OK, come on, we’ve got to the goat bit now. Whose turn is it to provide the
goats? OK, come on, here are the flowers. When’s tea?
Now God didn’t like this. Not only were the people
turning their backs on him in a million different ways, but they thought that
this ritual was an easy way of making it not matter.
So God complained. He complained through the prophets.
This is what he said through Isaiah: ‘this people draw near with their mouth and honour me with their
lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment
of men learned by rote’ [29.13]. God doesn’t want the flowers. He wants the
heartfelt apology that the flowers are supposed to represent. He’s not
interested in dead and abandoned goats. He wants the restoration of
relationship which these beautiful goats were sacrificed as a costly means of
achieving. You can’t buy forgiveness with money, or love with empty gestures.
You have to mean it. And if you mean it, you can’t keep behaving the same way. The
sacrifice is not a get-out clause, it’s a way of saying forgive me, restore me,
cleanse me; it’s a way of saying pour your life into my death and help me to do
better.
So. Over the next few centuries the prophets were
given the job of voicing God’s objections as the people sinned persistently and
sacrificed regularly. Go on, get on with it, he exclaims sarcastically through
Jeremiah. Add your offerings to your
sacrifices, and eat the flesh while you’re at it! But that’s not what I meant. I’m not a God of sacrifices, I’m a
God of love. It’s relationship I want. This is what I said: obey my voice, and I will be your God, and
you shall be my people; and walk in all the way that I command you, that it may
be well with you. [ch 7]. That’s the issue, not some ritual. For crying out
loud, can’t you tell the difference between the means and the end?
Micah continues the lament. Come on, complains God in
chapter 6, what have I done to deserve this? Didn’t I rescue you from slavery,
didn’t I send you Moses and Aaron and Miriam, leaders and priests and prophets
to guide you and help you? When you come before me to bow before the Lord of
life, do you think I want thousands of dead goats and millions of rivers of
oil? That’s supposed to be for your benefit, not for mine! Even if you gave me your own children in
sacrifice, do you think that’s what I want? What do I want? I’ll tell you what
I want – it’s your hearts I want. I want you to turn to me, to share your life
with me and allow me to share mine with you. I want you to live as if you know
I love you. I want you to be my agents in the world, that’s what I want. Come on! Get real! Get a life!
And then he pointed out the discrepancy between
sincere, inward repentance and repentance confined to external offerings. The
difference is measured in actions; and when it came to actions, their whole
society was going seriously wrong. Prophet after prophet thundered out God’s
protest. Pursue justice! Treat orphans and widows well! Don’t prioritise goods
or things which are not me! Don’t get submerged in your prosperity and forget
me! Don’t accept a society of violence and robbery! Treat foreigners well!
Don’t compromise with other religions! Don’t binge drink! Don’t build your life
round money! And for God’s sake don’t think that turning up to make the right
sacrifices will cover all this lot over! For, he said to Hosea, I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings. What wife would not
agree? It’s your love I want, not bunches of flowers or expensive presents.
Those might be good ways of expressing love, but they are not the love itself.
Don’t get them confused.
Offering and sacrifice in the New Testament
That brings us to the New Testament. After a few more
centuries of this, God is beginning to get desperate. Will they not listen? So
he produces his trump card, the one all this was leading up to. The trump card
is Jesus. How it works is explained it in the letter to the Hebrews, chapters 9
and 10. Think back to the two goats. One represented sin, and its sacrifice was
effective because its life was poured out as a substitute for the people’s
lives. The other represented forgiveness, and its sacrifice was effective
because as it went into the wilderness it carried away the people’s sins. But the
goats had become an empty ritual; so God sent his only Son, so that through his
death we could find the life we had lost. It was as if God said OK, forget the
symbolism, let’s do it for real. Here is my son. He doesn’t just represent
life; he is life. When you kill him - because that is what you will do -
he will give his life for yours, and he will send his Spirit to live within you
and re-unite you with me. When you blame him - because that is what you will do
- he will take that blame, although he doesn’t deserve it; he will ask
forgiveness for you, and you will be freed from your guilt. Will that do? Will
you respond to that, cries God, or will even that become a ritual to you? Will
that, says God, stir you to respond with your hearts to my love for you, and
provoke you into living it out in the choices you make and the way you behave?
Will it?
Where do we go from here?
Well, we’ve come on a long and rather theological journey.
We’ve entered into a thought world that doesn’t come naturally to us. But what
is God saying to us now? Does all this affect us today, or is it just history?
What does he require of us?
1. Communion
As I’ve prepared this sermon a
number of things have occurred to me. First of all, let’s think about what we
do when we take communion. Each week we gather and we break bread and drink
wine as a way of remembering Jesus and reminding ourselves what he has done for
us. It’s a lot less spectacular than slaughtering a goat and discharging our
sin into another one, isn’t it. But from God’s point of view it’s a lot more
costly. Let’s not forget that when we celebrate communion together. Let’s
remember that this simple action of taking bread and wine is about two
fundamental things. One is our life. We are
alive in God because Jesus died to make us so. And the other is our forgiveness.
We are forgiven by God because we may place our sins on Jesus, just as the
Hebrews placed them on the scapegoat. We must never take either of those things
for granted, as they so often did.
2. The spiritual life of the individual – the bad news
So if we don’t want to take all this for granted, what
must we do? I think there is some bad news and some good news. Let’s start with
the bad news.
The bad news is that you are sinful. You are by nature
inclined to make choices of death rather than choices of life. As a result, you
need to be cleansed. You cannot be cleansed by going through the motions; you
have to mean it. You have a God who loves you. He knows you cannot love him and
love one another as he loves you, but he wants you to try. It’s what’s in your
heart that counts, as Jesus often said.
What, you might ask, does that mean in practice? What does
your sin consist of? Isn’t it enough to try your best? Do we have to be so
negative about ourselves? One very striking thing is that both the Old
Testament and the New Testament writers are at pains to point out that all
this, whether it’s the sacrificial system or the death of Jesus, is meant to
deal with sin which is unintentional. Leviticus 4.2 says ‘if anyone sins unwittingly in any of the
things which the Lord has commanded not to be done…’ Hebrews 9.7 repeats that sacrifice was for sins committed in ignorance. What
conclusions do we draw from that?
Firstly,
that we make heart offerings to other people and to God even, or especially,
when we have hurt them without meaning to.
I think often we persuade ourselves that if we didn’t mean it, we shouldn’t really
have to put it right - saying sorry implies an acceptance of guilt, and as we
are nice people trying our best under difficult circumstances, that doesn’t
seem quite fair. But I don’t think that’s how God sees it. God is saying that
it’s the opposite. Intentional sin is something we shouldn’t even consider.
It’s exactly this unintentional sin, the stuff we can’t help, which needs
dealing with. So I invite you to practise – apologise, not just as a matter of
form, not just with the token flowers, but from the heart, when someone is
upset by something you have said or done or not said or not done. Think not of
your moral status, but of their feelings. And do the same, only more so, to
God. Come to him each day aware not of your wickedness but of your weakness.
It’s not about how awful you are, it’s about how much you fall short of God’s
way of doing things, how much you live in ways that are infected with death
instead of infected with life.
Secondly,
and this is quite straightforward, don’t do it on purpose. Where you have a
choice, make it, and make sure it’s a life choice and not a death choice. Don’t
do any of the things the prophets screamed about. And don’t repeat sin even if
it was unintentional, once you have identified it. This is what it says in
Hebrews: if we deliberately keep on
sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for
sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgement… How severely do you
think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God
underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that
sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? I conclude that
if God didn’t want goats killed for no reason, he certainly doesn’t want Jesus
killed for no reason. Don’t risk it!
3. The spiritual life of the individual – the good news
Well, that’s the bad news. Here’s the good news. When
you enter into the spirit of the offering and sacrifice made for you by Christ,
two things happen.
Firstly,
it gets you permanently off the hook. When the people sinned in Old Testament
times, the goat offering did certain things for them. Each time it was made, it
cleansed them. But it had to be repeated, just as you have to wash your clothes
over and over again because they get dirty every time you wear them. The
offering of Jesus doesn’t have to be repeated, it only has to be remembered. We
already have the life that in Old Testament times they had to ask for over and
over again.
Secondly,
it changes you. The sacrifice of Jesus is made not on earth but in heaven. It
doesn’t just change our status before God, it changes our whole relationship
with him. We don’t have to come before him in fear and trembling, as they did;
we can march straight into his presence. And as God is life, life is what we
receive when we do that. Life changes us. It gives us a whole spiritual power
we didn’t previously have. We are cleansed in our consciences from acts that
lead to death, as Hebrews 9.14 puts it. We are being made perfect. As we give,
so we receive.
4. The spiritual life of the community
Well, that’s what it means for us as individuals. But
there’s more. The prophets spoke not to individuals but to a people. This is
something which we tend to forget, because we live in a society which
celebrates the individual. I remember sitting in lectures at
And they all made the same complaint: the people were
guilty of deliberate sin, and of thinking they could cover it up with ritual
sacrifice instead of by sincere repentance and a change of heart and mind. Each
prophet spelled out what the issues were – and they were things like this.
Widespread sexual immorality. A society based on the pursuit of wealth.
Dishonest work practices. Making other things more important than God. Getting
mixed up with the practices of the peoples around them who did not know God,
and adopting their lifestyles.
Not much has changed. These are still the issues for
us today. Christians are called to live in a way that stands out from the way
that those around them live. If there are enough Christians in a country, the
complaints of the prophets should not be necessary. These deliberate kinds of
sin should not be present, only the unintentional ones which can be put right with
an apology and left behind by the transforming power of the Spirit of God.
That begs the question, what would a nation look like,
if it had a sizeable Christian presence within it, and each of those Christians
was living in the power of the Holy Spirit, as a person with a renewed heart
and mind? Would it look like, say, the
Well, it’s easy to take the specks out of other
people’s eyes rather than look at the plank in our own. Let’s look at the plank
in our own. In
Well, in some ways there’s not much we can do about
it. But in others there is. As the Italian professor said, we are our nation.
We don’t have to be dominated by thoughts of what we can receive and how we can
succeed. We don’t have to conform to the spirit of our age. We can ask for the
courage to be different, to live in a way which marks us out from those around
us who do not know God. This is how Paul put it to the Christians in
Therefore I
urge you, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices,
holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not
conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind.
They did it: their lifestyle was so different from
that of the society which surrounded them that more people were drawn into the
church than at any period since. We need to try and do it too. Otherwise
Christ’s sacrifice means nothing, and we make our offering in vain.
Amen.