Passion Sunday 2024

That by thy great goodness they may be governed and preserved evermore,
both in body and soul…
(Collect, Passion Sunday)
 
        
The readings for the Sunday Next before Holy Week, invite us to study the doctrine of Christ’s sacrifice and priesthood. (Melville Scott, Harmony of Collects, Epistles, and Gospels) Today is called Passion Sunday, or the Sunday of the Atonement. Today we are called to learn about the doctrine of the Cross. The death of Jesus Christ must call us into far more than syrupy sentimentality and the short-lived pangs of a guilty conscience on Good Friday. Christ’s sacrifice and death must command such attention and respect of intellect that sound doctrine will move our wills to submit to the great mystery of godliness. (1 Tim iii. 16)
        
Atonement Sunday calls us to remember the practice of atonement for sins in Jewish history and how Christ’s atonement perfects them all. In the Old Testament the Jewish high priest would enter into the tabernacle at Jerusalem to make atonement for the people’s sins on the eve of Passover. He would have sacrificed a one-year-old, male lamb, without spot or blemish. He then would have painted the doorposts leading into the inner sanctum of the temple, the holiest of holies, the presence chamber of God, with the blood of a sacrificed lamb. Next, he sprinkled the blood on the mercy seat, the place signifying God’s encounter with man, Moses. Then, he dredged the altar of incense, a symbol of prayer, with the blood. Finally, the priest would have undergone ritual washing for impurity and irregularity contracted by the bloody sacrifice. Thus, the Jewish high priest entered into the holiest of holies, the inner sanctum, only once a year, and every year to make sacrifice for his sins and the sins of the people. For the Jews, sinful man came closest to God by the external and visible sacrifices of the high priest. The sacrifices could make neither the priest nor the people perfect, as pertaining to the conscience; which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation. (Hebrews ix, 9,10) Neither food nor drink, bodily or fleshly cleansing, could make the conscience clean. Jeremiah had asked rhetorically; Shall the holy flesh take away from your crimes?’ (Jer. 11:15)
        
Canon Scott reminds us that Jewish promises are Christian realities, their hopes our certainties, their future our present. (idem) What the Jews did to make atonement for sin was a forerunner and precursor to what Christ would do for us. The author of the Epistle continues.

But when Christ became an high priest of good things yet to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.
 
When Christ became our High Priest, in and through His death, He passed through the tabernacle of His body, His external and visible nature, beyond the veil of His flesh (idem) to God. When he finished His earthly mission to us, He ascended, to enter into the holy place of Heaven, to plead our cause and the merits of his eternal redemption for us. Through His Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, Christ was opening the door of the Kingdom of Heaven to us, having torn down the wall of separation between the external world and the internal and invisible world of the spirit. Christ’s atonement for our sins was made in time and space but was eternally perfect. His redemption of our sinful human nature was made once for all, for the sins of the whole world, needing no repetition.
        
The Jewish high priest offered his sacrifice to atone for sins in the tabernacle made with hands. Christ offered his sacrifice in tabernacle of His own body, not made with hands. The Jewish high priest offered the blood of goats and calves, a life less and inferior to his own. Christ shed His own blood and offered Himself. The Jewish high priest entered the temple of Jerusalem, a model of heaven. Christ entered heaven itself. The Jewish high priest offered the death of a brute beast. Christ became His own brute beast and made His own death the test of His own obedience to the Father. Death would be no barrier to life but the means of embracing a better and more perfect life with the Father.

For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? (Hebrews, ix, 13,14)
 
Christ offers His body to cleanse our consciences from dead works through the eternal Spirit. The Jews cleansed their bodies, but not their souls. Christ offers the first completely to purify and perfect the second. He sacrifices His body completely in order to achieve union with Father, for us. He does what we could never do. He dies purely and perfectly to the world, the flesh, and the devil, so that He might unite us with God. St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that

the blood of Christ cleanses the conscience inwardly, which is accomplished by faith: ‘Purifying their hearts by faith’ (Ac. 15:9), inasmuch as it makes one believe that all who adhere to Christ are cleansed by His blood. (Comm. Hebrews, ix…)
And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance. (ibid, 15)
 
Christ carries us from the Old Testament to the New. He makes death not something final as an end but a means, an instrument, a facilitator for new life with God the Father. Christ makes the Old Testament New because He gives us the promise of eternal inheritance. From Christ’s death to sin and Satan, our faith and hope through love of Jesus Christ can find freedom in His Resurrection and Ascension, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Peter i. 4,5) And, we are baptized into His death (Romans, vi. 4). His Atonement is all effectual for those who believe.
        
Today, Christ Himself calls us to believe in what He did because of who He was. He alone is well-suited to save us. With the Pharisees, on the best of days, we tend to judge Christ. Our instinct is to be cynical about Him. We are not of God because we do not hear God’s words. (St. John viii. 47) We launch back at Him and say, Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil? (ibid, 48) Christ comes from God and knows God. He seeks not [His] own glory for His Father seeks and judges. (ibid, 50) The Pharisees, you, and I judge ourselves and seek our own glory. If we keep the Word of God, in Jesus Christ, we shall never see death. (ibid, 51) All we see in Jesus Christ is another man, perhaps, at best, another Abraham. How can Christ claim to offer life after death if he is but a mere man? Christ seems to make Himself out to be more than a man. Of course, in the Gospel, He prepares us for the more than a man that He is. We forget that God made us for Himself, for eternity. Christ intends to reestablish the possibility of our eternal inheritance. Thus, He does not honor himself. The Man apart from God who honors himself, dies. Christ knows God and keeps His saying, His Word. The Word that Christ is and keeps will see Him through death, for all of us, into new life. We claim that God is our God. We glorify ourselves, but Christ glorifies God. The One Christ knows surely and certainly, He glorifies. He knows, while we can only come to know.  For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. (St. John vi. 38)
        
Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad. (ibid, 56) Inwardly and spiritually, long before Christ’s coming, with faith and hope, Abraham saw Christ’s coming. The Pharisees, you, and I cannot see spiritually and inwardly. Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. (ibid, 58) Christ binds the past and the future to the present. As St. Thomas reminds us, For eternal existence knows neither past nor future time, but embraces all time in one indivisible [instant]. (Comm. John…) Christ’s source and origin come to us from the Eternally Now of God, I am. Christ is the future hope of all the ancient Jews of the past, like Abraham, in the present. He is our hope now, soon to become history, in the future. Christ derives His meaning and definition from Eternity for you and me. God revealed Himself to Moses in history as I am. Christ is God’s great I am in our history.
        
The history of God’s great I am must find relevance for us today. Christ doesn’t say it, but He is holy, harmless, and undefiled, separate from sinners, ‘made higher than the heavens’, in His unique Sonship, knowledge, and being. (idem, Scott) However, I am will elaborate for the purposes of our faith, hope and love, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto to the Father, but by me. (St. John xiv. 6) He says this so that we might find in Him the way home to Heaven, by the Truth that He is, through His life, now for the future. I am the bread of life, (St. John vi. 35) that we might feed on Him as God’s Word, nourishing us inwardly and spiritually for the Kingdom. I am the light of the world, (St. John viii. 12), that we might walk to Heaven through the light that He is. I am the door (St. John x. 7) through whom we might walk, at present. I am the good shepherd (St. John x. 110 that He might herd us home, now. I am the true vine (St. John xv. 1) that here we might begin to bud as His branches. And, finally, I am the resurrection and the life (St. John xi. 25) that He who holds the keys of death and the grave might make it into the seedbed of faith, hope, and love that leads us now, on this Passion Sunday, this Atonement Sunday, to His glory, even forever.
Amen.
©wjsmartin