Saved Through The Blood Of The Lamb
Sermon
LIVING ON ONE DAY'S RATIONS
First Lesson Sermons For Sundays After Pentecost
Many times, especially during Lent, we hear that Jesus is the Lamb of God who shed his blood on the cross for our sins. But how do you feel when the doorbell rings, and you open the door, and there is someone holding a Bible who starts up a conversation leading up to questions such as, "Have you been saved? Have you been saved through the blood of the Lamb?" Or how do you feel when you turn on your television and an evangelist pleads with you to accept "the salvation that comes only through the blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God"? Or how would you feel if you were a Hebrew living in ancient Egypt where life was absolutely miserable working out in the hot sun with mortar and bricks, and all the Hebrews were told by Moses to mark the doorposts of their homes with the blood of a lamb in order to escape from the threat of death on the night when the first born child in every Egyptian home would die? It may be very hard for us to believe that anyone's life or anyone's soul can be saved through the blood of a lamb.
An old gospel hymn proclaims that there is "power in the blood of the Lamb."1 This old hymn maintains that the power of salvation comes to us through the shedding of Christ's blood on the cross. Ask a church member in a church we typically describe as fundamentalist, evangelical, or Pentecostal, and we will probably be told that, yes, there is definitely power in the blood of the Lamb. This churchgoer may have no difficulty whatsoever in believing that through the blood of Jesus shed on the cross God has made the power of his forgiveness and salvation available to us. A churchgoer from a more liberal mainstream denomination may believe that Christ's death and resurrection truly bring us salvation, but this belief may be mixed and mingled with a certain amount of doubt, confusion, and skepticism as to how salvation actually is made available through the cross of Jesus. It is safe to say that many church members from mainstream denominations find no way to make any sense out of the claim that through the blood of Christ shed on the cross God's powerful gift of forgiveness and salvation is made available to us. Just how can there be any power in the blood of the Lamb? Too often churches and pastors have been guilty of simply proclaiming that the cross is God's way of making salvation available, without providing any explanation to make more clear how the death of Christ is able to lead to our salvation.
Before we simply shrug our shoulders and decide that only fundamentalist, evangelical, and Pentecostal Christians can honestly believe that there is power in the blood of the Lamb, we need to try to understand what is being said in the Bible about the ritual of animal sacrifice. Why did the Hebrews in Egypt believe that the blood of a lamb, smeared both on the doorposts and overhead on the lintel, the beam above the doorway, would spare them from the dreadful death which would afflict the Egyptian households? There has to be a much deeper explanation for this than simply that if God saw the blood on the doorway, then God would know for sure that this was a Hebrew household for God to pass over and not an Egyptian household to be afflicted with the death of the firstborn. After all, it is reasonably safe to assume that God already knew which households were Hebrew and which were Egyptian!
A deeper understanding of today's scripture from the book of Exodus takes into consideration why the Hebrews were given such precise, detailed instructions for the first Passover observance. They were told to select an unblemished lamb and mark the doorposts and the lintel with some of the lamb's blood. The sacrifice of a first rate, unblemished lamb instead of a second rate animal was seen as absolutely necessary in order to obtain the Passover blessing of deliverance from death. The Hebrews were told to roast the lamb over the fire, and then prepare and eat the Passover meal in a big hurry, fully clothed with sandals on their feet while holding a staff used when walking. Picture yourself holding a big stick in one hand and trying to eat your food with your other hand! The Hebrews were instructed to eat unleavened bread and to rid their households of all leaven and all food that had been leavened. All this would serve to prepare the Hebrews to face the fact that when they escaped from Egypt they indeed would be in a big hurry. They would have absolutely no time to use leaven to make their bread rise. The painstaking preparation for the Passover observance was intended to deepen and purify the faith of the people not only so that their households would be passed over and spared from death, but also so that the Hebrews would be better prepared for the strong commitment of faith they would need when making the effort to escape from Egypt.
The New Testament understanding of Christ as the Lamb of God is related directly to the Old Testament understanding of how anyone's life or anyone's soul could be saved through the blood of a lamb. If the dynamics of salvation are to become more than just a mumbo--jumbo mystery for us, it is absolutely important to go way back in time and try to understand how the sacrifice of a lamb or the sacrifice of Christ as the Lamb of God made sense to devout believers as a way to make the power of salvation available to God's faithful people. Only then will we be in a position to see how ancient wisdom can be reinterpreted in order to make sense today according to a modern point of view.
First of all, we need to understand that in the Old Testament the blood of a sacrificial animal is regarded as containing the vitality of the life of the animal. The death of a sacrificial lamb is seen, therefore, as an event that releases the vitality of the animal's life as a blessing which brings cleansing and renewal. Frequently in temple worship the priest would take the blood of the sacrificial animal and then sprinkle the altar and also the people with this blood. It was believed and understood that the sacrificial animal's life, vitality, and energy were present in the blood that the priest sprinkles on the altar and the people. This action of sprinkling the blood on the people was seen as making the animal's life, vitality, and energy available to the people as a powerful blessing, a blessing which cleanses the people from their sins and renews the people's spiritual vitality and strength.
This Old Testament viewpoint of the blessing through the sprinkling of the animal's blood is carried over into the first letter of Peter in the New Testament. The Christians to whom this letter is written are described as those "who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood" (1 Peter 1:2, italics added). In the New Testament the blood of Christ and the life of Christ are understood as existing together as an inseparable combination. In John 6:53 Jesus says to his listeners, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." Christ's shedding his blood for us is understood as Christ giving the vitality of his life for us. In the service of Holy Communion we drink of the cup which symbolizes the blood of Christ, because the cup symbolizes our receiving the power and the vitality of the life of Christ. The communion cup as a symbol of Christ's blood shed for us is a reminder that through the death of a sacrificial lamb or through the death of Christ as the Lamb of God, spiritual power and spiritual vitality are released and made available to God's faithful people.
Our modern day understanding of the principles of atomic energy and nuclear physics can enable us from a contemporary point of view to appreciate the biblical understanding of how death leads to new life. We are aware that the splitting of an atom leads to a release of power and the start of a nuclear chain reaction. Similarly, the death and resurrection of Christ can be understood as a type of spiritual "nuclear explosion" that released the energy of Christ's life in the form of an ongoing, powerful chain reaction consisting of endless life and endless love. Just as radioactive isotopes of cobalt can be used to treat various types of cancer, so the released energy of the crucified and risen Christ has the healing and cleansing power to cure the cancer of the sinsick soul and give us a new lease on life. Our awareness of the power that comes through the splitting of the atom can lead us to view with grateful appreciation instead of scornful skepticism the biblical understanding of how the death of a sacrificial lamb or the death of Christ as the Lamb of God brings about cleansing and renewal. We need to realize with deepest gratitude that our spiritual ancestors in the Old and New Testament were in touch with something powerfully true when they claimed that through death comes life. Back in the days when the Bible was being written, the language of animal sacrifice was the only language available to God's faithful people to describe the profound mystery of how death in God's hands leads to the miracle of cleansing, the miracle of renewal, the miracle of new life.
What then might be a meaningful Passover experience for us according to our own present day understanding of reality? Perhaps we need to receive instructions from a Jewish rabbi who wrote an article in the weekly religion section of a metropolitan newspaper describing how the Passover observance today is celebrated as a meaningful experience. In his article Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff, the Senior Rabbi at Temple Israel in Columbus, Ohio, explains that at the Passover observance known as the Seder, the flat, unleavened bread with no seasoned flavor is intended to serve as a reminder that life in slavery is flat and tasteless compared to life as the free people God wants his faithful people to be. On the ceremonial Seder plate there are five symbolic foods: 1) a roasted lamb shank bone as a reminder of the lambs slaughtered for food to take on the journey out of Egypt; 2 and 3) an egg and a sprig of parsley as symbols of springtime and the movement out of slavery into freedom; 4) some bitter herbs, usually horseradish, as a reminder of how bitter slavery can be and how much we should fight against it; and 5) a mixture of apples, nuts, honey, wine, and spices called charoset, which looks like the mortar used by slave labor to make brick walls in Egypt, but which has a sweet taste showing that freedom and new life are always possible with God's help. Rabbi Nemitoff would teach us that Passover is more than just a time to remember how horrible it was to be slaves in Egypt. Passover is also a time to rededicate ourselves to fighting injustice and persecution in our world today.2
The first Passover instituted by Moses in Egypt was intended to prepare the Hebrews to face up to the difficult journey that would take them out of Egypt headed toward the Promised Land. Perhaps in keeping with that first Passover, we also could participate in worship that includes a meal of lamb and unleavened bread which is not eaten leisurely but in a big hurry with one hand on a packed suitcase or some other object used in travel, comparable to the wooden staff a Hebrew was expected to have in hand during the first Passover observance. As we eat our meal and gulp down our food in a big hurry, we can think about the ways in which we are held helplessly captive in our own life situations. We can dedicate ourselves to undertake the difficult journey that will be required to take us out of captivity into the new freedom God wants us to have. To what extent are we held captive in a daily schedule so busy and so overcrowded that again and again we live on a "fast food" diet of microwave meals, ready--mixed, frozen food complete dinners, or whatever we can grab quickly at the nearest McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken? Perhaps our own Passover observance ought to include some typical modern day "fast food" to be eaten in a big hurry as a reminder of our own need to be delivered from a hectic family schedule requiring us to gulp down our food quickly and run out the door to the next big event on our overcrowded schedule with no time for leisurely conversation.
At this Passover meal a cup of grape juice or wine reminds us of the awful journey Jesus took to win freedom for us, carrying his cross through the streets of Jerusalem toward the terrible destination where Christ, the Lamb of God, shed his blood on the cross and died in order that there would be a spiritual "nuclear explosion" to release the power of endless life and endless love in order to make us truly free and no longer captive to sin and death. Yes, we can agree there is powerful truth in the old gospel hymn which insists that "there is power in the blood of the Lamb." We can reinterpret the Bible's ancient understanding of animal sacrifice with the help of today's nuclear age imagery to describe how death leads to life through a powerful chain reaction of endless life and endless love that extends all the way to us from Jesus' death on the cross. Passover, Good Friday, and Easter are a powerful reminder that in God's hands death is forced to trigger an explosive eruption of new life. We in this nuclear age can truly believe there is indeed salvation power in the blood of the Lamb.
____________
1. Lewis E. Jones, "There is Power in the Blood."
2. Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff, "Show--and--taste evokes story behind Passover," Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, March 26, 1999, "Faith and Values" Section D (description of Passover Seder and its significance), p. 2.
An old gospel hymn proclaims that there is "power in the blood of the Lamb."1 This old hymn maintains that the power of salvation comes to us through the shedding of Christ's blood on the cross. Ask a church member in a church we typically describe as fundamentalist, evangelical, or Pentecostal, and we will probably be told that, yes, there is definitely power in the blood of the Lamb. This churchgoer may have no difficulty whatsoever in believing that through the blood of Jesus shed on the cross God has made the power of his forgiveness and salvation available to us. A churchgoer from a more liberal mainstream denomination may believe that Christ's death and resurrection truly bring us salvation, but this belief may be mixed and mingled with a certain amount of doubt, confusion, and skepticism as to how salvation actually is made available through the cross of Jesus. It is safe to say that many church members from mainstream denominations find no way to make any sense out of the claim that through the blood of Christ shed on the cross God's powerful gift of forgiveness and salvation is made available to us. Just how can there be any power in the blood of the Lamb? Too often churches and pastors have been guilty of simply proclaiming that the cross is God's way of making salvation available, without providing any explanation to make more clear how the death of Christ is able to lead to our salvation.
Before we simply shrug our shoulders and decide that only fundamentalist, evangelical, and Pentecostal Christians can honestly believe that there is power in the blood of the Lamb, we need to try to understand what is being said in the Bible about the ritual of animal sacrifice. Why did the Hebrews in Egypt believe that the blood of a lamb, smeared both on the doorposts and overhead on the lintel, the beam above the doorway, would spare them from the dreadful death which would afflict the Egyptian households? There has to be a much deeper explanation for this than simply that if God saw the blood on the doorway, then God would know for sure that this was a Hebrew household for God to pass over and not an Egyptian household to be afflicted with the death of the firstborn. After all, it is reasonably safe to assume that God already knew which households were Hebrew and which were Egyptian!
A deeper understanding of today's scripture from the book of Exodus takes into consideration why the Hebrews were given such precise, detailed instructions for the first Passover observance. They were told to select an unblemished lamb and mark the doorposts and the lintel with some of the lamb's blood. The sacrifice of a first rate, unblemished lamb instead of a second rate animal was seen as absolutely necessary in order to obtain the Passover blessing of deliverance from death. The Hebrews were told to roast the lamb over the fire, and then prepare and eat the Passover meal in a big hurry, fully clothed with sandals on their feet while holding a staff used when walking. Picture yourself holding a big stick in one hand and trying to eat your food with your other hand! The Hebrews were instructed to eat unleavened bread and to rid their households of all leaven and all food that had been leavened. All this would serve to prepare the Hebrews to face the fact that when they escaped from Egypt they indeed would be in a big hurry. They would have absolutely no time to use leaven to make their bread rise. The painstaking preparation for the Passover observance was intended to deepen and purify the faith of the people not only so that their households would be passed over and spared from death, but also so that the Hebrews would be better prepared for the strong commitment of faith they would need when making the effort to escape from Egypt.
The New Testament understanding of Christ as the Lamb of God is related directly to the Old Testament understanding of how anyone's life or anyone's soul could be saved through the blood of a lamb. If the dynamics of salvation are to become more than just a mumbo--jumbo mystery for us, it is absolutely important to go way back in time and try to understand how the sacrifice of a lamb or the sacrifice of Christ as the Lamb of God made sense to devout believers as a way to make the power of salvation available to God's faithful people. Only then will we be in a position to see how ancient wisdom can be reinterpreted in order to make sense today according to a modern point of view.
First of all, we need to understand that in the Old Testament the blood of a sacrificial animal is regarded as containing the vitality of the life of the animal. The death of a sacrificial lamb is seen, therefore, as an event that releases the vitality of the animal's life as a blessing which brings cleansing and renewal. Frequently in temple worship the priest would take the blood of the sacrificial animal and then sprinkle the altar and also the people with this blood. It was believed and understood that the sacrificial animal's life, vitality, and energy were present in the blood that the priest sprinkles on the altar and the people. This action of sprinkling the blood on the people was seen as making the animal's life, vitality, and energy available to the people as a powerful blessing, a blessing which cleanses the people from their sins and renews the people's spiritual vitality and strength.
This Old Testament viewpoint of the blessing through the sprinkling of the animal's blood is carried over into the first letter of Peter in the New Testament. The Christians to whom this letter is written are described as those "who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood" (1 Peter 1:2, italics added). In the New Testament the blood of Christ and the life of Christ are understood as existing together as an inseparable combination. In John 6:53 Jesus says to his listeners, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." Christ's shedding his blood for us is understood as Christ giving the vitality of his life for us. In the service of Holy Communion we drink of the cup which symbolizes the blood of Christ, because the cup symbolizes our receiving the power and the vitality of the life of Christ. The communion cup as a symbol of Christ's blood shed for us is a reminder that through the death of a sacrificial lamb or through the death of Christ as the Lamb of God, spiritual power and spiritual vitality are released and made available to God's faithful people.
Our modern day understanding of the principles of atomic energy and nuclear physics can enable us from a contemporary point of view to appreciate the biblical understanding of how death leads to new life. We are aware that the splitting of an atom leads to a release of power and the start of a nuclear chain reaction. Similarly, the death and resurrection of Christ can be understood as a type of spiritual "nuclear explosion" that released the energy of Christ's life in the form of an ongoing, powerful chain reaction consisting of endless life and endless love. Just as radioactive isotopes of cobalt can be used to treat various types of cancer, so the released energy of the crucified and risen Christ has the healing and cleansing power to cure the cancer of the sinsick soul and give us a new lease on life. Our awareness of the power that comes through the splitting of the atom can lead us to view with grateful appreciation instead of scornful skepticism the biblical understanding of how the death of a sacrificial lamb or the death of Christ as the Lamb of God brings about cleansing and renewal. We need to realize with deepest gratitude that our spiritual ancestors in the Old and New Testament were in touch with something powerfully true when they claimed that through death comes life. Back in the days when the Bible was being written, the language of animal sacrifice was the only language available to God's faithful people to describe the profound mystery of how death in God's hands leads to the miracle of cleansing, the miracle of renewal, the miracle of new life.
What then might be a meaningful Passover experience for us according to our own present day understanding of reality? Perhaps we need to receive instructions from a Jewish rabbi who wrote an article in the weekly religion section of a metropolitan newspaper describing how the Passover observance today is celebrated as a meaningful experience. In his article Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff, the Senior Rabbi at Temple Israel in Columbus, Ohio, explains that at the Passover observance known as the Seder, the flat, unleavened bread with no seasoned flavor is intended to serve as a reminder that life in slavery is flat and tasteless compared to life as the free people God wants his faithful people to be. On the ceremonial Seder plate there are five symbolic foods: 1) a roasted lamb shank bone as a reminder of the lambs slaughtered for food to take on the journey out of Egypt; 2 and 3) an egg and a sprig of parsley as symbols of springtime and the movement out of slavery into freedom; 4) some bitter herbs, usually horseradish, as a reminder of how bitter slavery can be and how much we should fight against it; and 5) a mixture of apples, nuts, honey, wine, and spices called charoset, which looks like the mortar used by slave labor to make brick walls in Egypt, but which has a sweet taste showing that freedom and new life are always possible with God's help. Rabbi Nemitoff would teach us that Passover is more than just a time to remember how horrible it was to be slaves in Egypt. Passover is also a time to rededicate ourselves to fighting injustice and persecution in our world today.2
The first Passover instituted by Moses in Egypt was intended to prepare the Hebrews to face up to the difficult journey that would take them out of Egypt headed toward the Promised Land. Perhaps in keeping with that first Passover, we also could participate in worship that includes a meal of lamb and unleavened bread which is not eaten leisurely but in a big hurry with one hand on a packed suitcase or some other object used in travel, comparable to the wooden staff a Hebrew was expected to have in hand during the first Passover observance. As we eat our meal and gulp down our food in a big hurry, we can think about the ways in which we are held helplessly captive in our own life situations. We can dedicate ourselves to undertake the difficult journey that will be required to take us out of captivity into the new freedom God wants us to have. To what extent are we held captive in a daily schedule so busy and so overcrowded that again and again we live on a "fast food" diet of microwave meals, ready--mixed, frozen food complete dinners, or whatever we can grab quickly at the nearest McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken? Perhaps our own Passover observance ought to include some typical modern day "fast food" to be eaten in a big hurry as a reminder of our own need to be delivered from a hectic family schedule requiring us to gulp down our food quickly and run out the door to the next big event on our overcrowded schedule with no time for leisurely conversation.
At this Passover meal a cup of grape juice or wine reminds us of the awful journey Jesus took to win freedom for us, carrying his cross through the streets of Jerusalem toward the terrible destination where Christ, the Lamb of God, shed his blood on the cross and died in order that there would be a spiritual "nuclear explosion" to release the power of endless life and endless love in order to make us truly free and no longer captive to sin and death. Yes, we can agree there is powerful truth in the old gospel hymn which insists that "there is power in the blood of the Lamb." We can reinterpret the Bible's ancient understanding of animal sacrifice with the help of today's nuclear age imagery to describe how death leads to life through a powerful chain reaction of endless life and endless love that extends all the way to us from Jesus' death on the cross. Passover, Good Friday, and Easter are a powerful reminder that in God's hands death is forced to trigger an explosive eruption of new life. We in this nuclear age can truly believe there is indeed salvation power in the blood of the Lamb.
____________
1. Lewis E. Jones, "There is Power in the Blood."
2. Rabbi Arthur Nemitoff, "Show--and--taste evokes story behind Passover," Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, March 26, 1999, "Faith and Values" Section D (description of Passover Seder and its significance), p. 2.
