I ended up with a blank sheet of paper, but one person wrote, "I know that Jesus saves me." That led onto an interesting discussion along the lines of: saves you from something? Or for something? How does Jesus save you? What does "Jesus saves me" actually mean? As I recall, nobody had much idea what the words meant, but it was in car-sticker vogue at the time.
For me, the saving aspect of Jesus has always been a problem. I've often heard it said that because Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins, God was able to forgive human beings. But how does that work?
If God is God, why couldn't God forgive human beings any time he wanted? Especially if God is love. Mere human beings do as much for those they love, so forgiveness shouldn't be beyond God's capabilities. Besides, according to the Psalms particularly, God has always forgiven human sins. What difference could Jesus dying in agony on a cross possibly make to God's forgiveness?
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews has tied in this idea of forgiveness with the idea of sacrifice. Developing his argument that Jesus is the High Priest par excellence, he now says that unlike the Jewish High Priests of the Old Testament, Jesus has no need to offer sacrifices for sins - his own and other people's - because he offered himself as the final sacrifice.
The law, says the writer, could only appoint high priests with human limitations, but the fulfillment of God's oath regarding the priesthood of Melchizedek (The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, "You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek." Psalm 110:4) makes Jesus the perfect priest forever.
The Old Testament system of sacrifices was complex and is difficult for those of us with Western eyes to understand today. Not all sacrifice was to atone for sin, but all sacrifice was designed to help human beings return to God's presence. Thus some sacrifice might be because people were ritually "unclean". They hadn't done anything to provoke God's displeasure, but nature itself had rendered them unfit for God's presence. For instance, fresh blood needed to be cleaned away before people could enter God's presence, thus menstruating women were ritually unclean for the time of their menstruation.
This can be understood if we think in terms of how we might dress to visit Buckingham Palace to receive an award from the Queen. Everyone would wear the best clothes and be sparkling clean. Nobody would enter her presence with unwashed hands, especially if they had a job which dealt with human or animal blood. It follows, then, that everyone would want to be properly "dressed" in the presence of God. Jesus himself developed this idea when he spoke of life after death as a banquet where everyone was welcome, but any who weren't properly dressed would be turned out (Matthew 22:1-14).
Sin was that which came between God and human beings, so again, needed to be cleaned away before human beings could enter God's presence. Basically, sin was thought of as somehow disrupting God's perfect order in the world. In today's terms, it was perhaps a sort of pollution. This pollution needed to be sorted so that God's world would again be in perfect order and harmony. The way the Israelites achieved cleansing and restoration was to remove the offence by sacrifice. Perhaps the easiest sacrifice for us to understand today is that of the scapegoat, whereby sins were symbolically placed upon the goat who was then expelled from the community into the desert.
Although we may not acknowledge it, we still find scapegoating useful today, especially in groups or crowds. Racial slurs, for instance, scapegoat all the ills of a community onto those of a different race who are hated and hounded with the underlying feeling that everything would be all right if only they weren't there.
In fact, the sacrificial system was not so much a system of punishment or the need to appease an angry God, but more the means by which those who for some reason weren't fit to be in God's presence, could be restored to God. So sacrifice was more a symbol of God's generosity and grace than a symbol of his anger and retribution.
The writer of Hebrews sees the crucifixion of Jesus as the final and ultimate sacrifice. Rather than being a final attempt to appease an angry God or the final punishment for the sins of humanity, it's the end to the need for sacrifices. Through Jesus on the cross, God has come even nearer to his people because as the writer says, Jesus is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. Jesus has defeated death and is permanently in God's presence. Therefore any who turn to Jesus will also be in God's presence. There is now no need for sacrifices of any sort. We have instant access to God through Jesus.
Although this is so familiar to us that we scarcely consider it, it was a very new thought for the Jews of the first century. Their only access to God was through their religious leaders, who acted on their behalf and mediated between them and God and between God and them. Jesus was the first to regard God intimately enough to call God "Abba", and through his death on the cross Jesus enabled that closeness to God to continue for us for all time.
Through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, we need never be out of God's presence. We need never be out of communion with God. We cannot be separated from God even by our own wrongdoing. That's sacrifice indeed - the ultimate sacrifice.
