twenty-three

I’ve been reading Hebrews a bit this week, prepping for my talk at the INN tonight, and I’m just getting pretty excited about what it says. In a very new way, forgiveness and redemption, is hitting me. I’m excited about the ideas that the Holy Spirit is leading me towards as I study it and I’m excited about the wild implications this promise, this new covenant, can/could/does/will have in our world. I’ll try to talk about it briefly here.

As a part of the summer INN this year, they are going through the book of Hebrews. Again, like last year, we’re using one of the Voice Project books. They are great books/commentaries, if you want something with a fresh take on the New Testament. Anyways, Hebrews. So, I’m speaking out of chapters 9 and 10 this week. Chapter 9 focuses on explaining how Christ is the true sacrifice for humanity, in stark contrast to the sacrifices offered in the temple, specifically on the Day of Atonement, which dealt with ritual cleansing and purification. These sacrifices, made by the high priest of Jerusalem were very important, but according to the writer of Hebrews, they were insufficient at offering complete redemption of the heart. So, Christ, the true sacrifice, offered himself up “once and for all” to deal with sin and deal with it completely.

There’s a lot of comparing and contrasting in this section of the book, looking at how Christ’s sacrifice was more true, the truest of all, and able to redeem not only the outer uncleanliness of the person, but the matters of the heart. And it’s in these descriptions of the limits of ritualistic religious action vs. the fullness of God’s sacrifice that I’m beginning to get excited about forgiveness, or for the sake of this post and to deal with problematic language, I’ll try to us the word redemption. For one, it’s described as full, or complete and finished. It goes far deeper than the surface, going to the heart. Now, I’ve heard this kind of argument or statement countless times, but for some reason, reading this text, I’m really getting excited about it.

It’s no longer about rituals or acts of penance to do away with sin. It’s about the redemption being given once for all, on the cross, for all time. It’s about Jesus’ sacrifice doing away with all perceptions that we could deal with our sin ourselves or be made more righteous by a certain manner of living or by saying a certain type of prayer or just getting one more area of our life together. This book looks at those rituals, those man-made sacrifices as insufficient all together. They serve as reflections, mirror-images, shadows of what the true act of sacrifice does. It’s only through this complete sacrifice of God’s son that this real, full redemption happens. And get this: It’s for everyone.

It’s for all. For all time. I’ll go out on a limb a bit here and entertain a couple of radical thoughts. The language describing the nature of the sacrifice specifically uses “once for all” repeatedly to nail down the point that Christ does not die again and again for our sins, but instead came to earth once, to die once, to forgive once for all. So, temporaly, that’s pretty amazing. All sins, those already committed, those being committed now, those being committed in the future, are dealt with here. It’s redemption that was done for me, before I was born, for the sins I have committed, am committing, and will committ. And it’s complete. The author seems to pound this point in with the deep hope that the people who read the book will realize that their actions, no matter how pious or earnest they are, are still insufficient to cover the gap of separation from God and while this is frustrating, it’s ok, because their actions are made obsolete by the one action of Christ on the cross.

And to go a little further, there’s no proposition made in this passage. It’s not “whoever says this prayer” or does this act gets forgiveness. It’s given to everyone. I’m not sure I can quite grasp the depth and breadth of what that means, but something hints to me that it’s a bigger view of who forgiveness is offered to than I’m capable of understanding. It’s dealing with all sins, redemption for all sinners, that’s for certain.

Now, before we all jump up and down, either in cries of joy for deep admiration for this forgiveness, or in cries of heresy that say I’m denying we need to do anything in response, I think it’s clear that a life redeemed does respond. I think if we work to gain an idea of the fullness of this redemption, we can not deny that a life of excited, freed response will soon follow. And here’s where we have to act. I think we have to work to understand redemption with a greater fullness, in it’s magnitude, so that we live lives of response. We don’t live out response to this forgiveness because we don’t believe it’s fullness. We doubt the depth and breadth of God’s promises. We want to believe redemption is full for us, but we don’t believe it can be as good as it sounds. And we sell God’s gift short.

Please, read Hebrews. Read this stuff. I need help understanding it all, so let’s talk about this. I know I’m throwing around a lot of religious speak in this, so I apologize. But these concepts are huge. And their implications, if we embrace their fullness, are the real ways that our world can be redeemed. We may need to open our eyes a little wider or shake off a little of our disbelief to get to the soul of this. But is it worth it? Real redemption, of self, of community, of creation?

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