Passion Sunday

 
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 shall learn about the doctrine of the Cross. The death of Jesus Christ requires our attention as we learn the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice for us. Christ’s death must command such 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 would sprinkle the blood on the mercy seat, the place signifying God’s encounter with man. Then, he would dredge 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) The Jewish priests would cleanse the external and visible world but could never make the conscience clean. Jeremiah had asked rhetorically; Shall the holy flesh take away from your crimes?’ (Jer. 11:15) A clean body never means a pure soul.
        
Canon Scott reminds us that Jewish promises are Christian realities, their hopes our certainties, their future our present. (idem) The Jews made atonement for sin with hope for what the Messiah would do in the future. 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, through the tabernacle of His body, His external and visible nature, He promised to take us beyond the veil of His flesh (idem) back to God. When He finished His earthly mission to us, He ascended to enter into the holy place of Heaven to plead our cause through 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 conscience, man’s spirit. Christ’s atonement for our sins was made in time and space but was eternally effective. 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 the tabernacle of His own body, not made with hands. The Jewish high priest offered the sacrifice through the blood of goats and calves, from lifeless and inferior creatures. 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 final punishment but now a way of entering into full and perfect life.

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 sacrifices His body because His soul is one with the Father. 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’. (Heb.C9.L3, 446) Those who embrace Christ will be cleansed by His blood once shed, as His Spirit applies is power and washes us inwardly and spiritually. 

Christ makes death the seedbed for new life with God the Father. Death is necessary for us to inherit the eternal promises. From Christ’s death to sin and Satan, our faith and hope 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) We are baptized into His death (Romans, vi. 4). His Atonement is the payment made to God for all human sin. His Atonement has power for those who believe.
         
Today, Christ calls us to believe in what He did because of who He was. He alone can work out our salvation. We must begin to hear God’s words because we come from God. (St. John viii. 47) We need to learn again that Christ is the God-Man, who seeks not [His] own glory, but the glory of the Father for all men. (ibid, 50) 

Christ continues. Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad. (ibid, 56) Inwardly and spiritually, with faith and hope, every day, with Abraham we must rejoice and be glad in Christ’s coming. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. (ibid, 58) Christ shares His eternal life with the Father, and has now come down from Heaven to share it with us. He will work out our salvation in His own suffering and sacrifice. Christ the eternal, I Am, I Am the Son of God, comes to return us to our Heavenly Father.
        
The history of God’s great I Am must find relevance for us today. Christ is the Second Adam, who will show us once again what it means and what it looks and sounds like to be the Son of God. We too can become the sons of God by imitating Him. From the first Adam, we have inherited sin and death. From the Second Adam, we can receive righteousness, spiritual death, and new life.  No man cometh unto to the Father, but by me. (St. John xiv. 6) Nothing now stands to separate us from God except for our own unbelief and the refusal to repent, die to sin, and come alive to righteousness. Christ’s death is the model for our own spiritual death. His death can become something good with power to save us. Pleading the power of His death helps us to resist temptations and die to sin. His death now, rather than being a tragic end, can become our inspiration for a new life, each and every day, as we follow Him home to Heaven.
Amen.
©wjsmartin