Biblical Text

You can read Hebrews 10.1-18 here.

Sermon Video

You can watch the sermon video here.

Sermon Transcript

[Note: The actual sermon will differ somewhat from what I had typed.]

A little over a century before Paul was shipwrecked on the island of Malta, another ship sank in the Mediterranean. This was about 400 miles to the East of Malta, just off the Greek island of Antikythera. The ship, at a depth of about 45 meters, was lost for many centuries. Then in the Spring of 1900, the crew of another ship diving for sponges came across the shipwreck leading to an expedition by the Greek Navy later that year. The expedition unearthed many artefacts. And among them was a curious device, known today as the Antikythera mechanism.

For decades researchers hypothesized about the purpose of the device. They cleaned it up and disassembled it into a number of pieces, revealing an intricate array of gears. However, it was clear that some key parts were missing. Researchers have hypothesized that the device was used to predict the positions of the sun and moon and possibly the five known planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. However, even today, despite many later dives and a huge amount of funding, there is no consensus about what the device really did.

Why is this? Why, despite having some broad idea of what this device was and despite pouring millions of dollars into researching it, have we not been able to understand how the device functioned and what its full purpose was? First, there is the obvious reason that we do not have all the parts of the device. It is quite difficult to determine how a complex mechanism works if you do not have all the moving parts. Second, we do not have anyone we can consult who could tell us the true purpose of the device. In other words, we lack firsthand knowledge.

In many of my sermons, I have tried to stress how we are separated from the scriptures we consider authoritative. I have said that the scriptures were not written to us but for us. I have highlighted the fact that we are separated from the original writing of the scriptures by time, language, and culture. And as a result fully understanding the scriptures is not a straightforward task. Many of us read our bibles in English without ever remembering that the bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. 

Many of us read into the bible the cultural mores with which we are familiar, forgetting that the cultures within which the scriptures were written were quite different from the ones in which we live. As a result, we have many false interpretations of the scriptures. And one area in which this is glaringly obvious is our understanding of the role and purpose of the various rituals associated with the tabernacle and later the temple. Like in the case with the Antikythera mechanism, some parts are missing and a practitioner is also no longer alive.

It is because of this that today’s passage in Hebrews has been grossly misunderstood by most Christians and we fail to understand what the author is attempting to stress about the death of Jesus. Not observing the rituals of the Old Testament, we tend to merge all the sacrifices – burnt offering, fellowship offering, Passover and sin offering – under a single broad heading of sacrifice, failing to recognize that the purposes of each, not to mention the rituals associated with them, were quite different. The unfortunate result is that we misunderstand scripture.

So before we can even begin to look at our passage, we need to consider which offering or offerings the passage is referring to and try to understand its role and purpose in the Old Testament. In verses 1 and 3, the author uses the phrase ‘year after year’, which might indicate that he had in mind a ritual that was repeated annually. However, in verse 11, he uses the phrase ‘day after day’, which seems to indicate that he had in mind a ritual that was repeated daily. He, however, repeatedly speaks of the taking away of sin. 

The annual ritual that dealt with sin was, of course, the ritual during Yom Kippur. I am intentionally not calling it the Day of Atonement and the reason should soon become obvious. There was no specified daily ritual to deal with sin. However, Leviticus 4 and 5 describes what is commonly called the sin offering, which would be offered whenever a person or group became aware of some unintentional sin on their part. The two rituals are very different and we lose their meaning and fail to understand Hebrews if we conflate them together.

There are some remarkable differences between the two rituals. While in both, the person or persons involved lay their hands on an animal, in the sin offering ritual, that animal is sacrificed, while in the Yom Kippur ritual, that animal is driven out into the desert. While in both cases, the ritual is said to make atonement for the person of persons concerned, in the sin offering ritual it is the animal that is sacrificed that does this while in the Yom Kippur ritual it is the animal that is driven out into the desert that does this. 

In addition, in the Yom Kippur ritual, the goat that is killed is said to make atonement for the sanctuary, not for the people, a strange idea for us if ever there was one. More intriguing is when we consider the use of the word normally translated ‘to make atonement for’ in the rest of the Old Testament. It appears in non ritualistic contexts, such as when Noah is told that the ark will provide a shelter or covering for him; or when Jacob sends an offering ahead of himself to Esau. It also appears in the context of the burnt offering, which has nothing to do with sin.

There are many words in the Old Testament that are borrowed from the social practices of the Israelite culture or the cultures of their neighbors. Some such words are redemption, ransom, sin, offering, and yes, atonement. And because we use these words a lot in ritualistic or theological contexts, we have forgotten what these words originally meant. More dangerous is that we have used later understandings of these words to color our understanding of the biblical text. And this has happened most damningly with the word ‘atonement’.

The Hebrew word כַפֵּר (kaphar) meant, interestingly, exactly what it sounds like in English – to cover. The idea of bringing two parties together, which is inherent in the meaning of the word ‘atonement’ is completely absent in כַפֵּר (kaphar). All it means is that something is being covered and hidden from sight. The ark covered Noah and his family from the rain. The offering sent by Jacob was intended to hide his past failings from Esau. So what was this word doing in the context of the burnt offering, the sin offering and on Yom Kippur?

We cannot understand all of this unless we understand what the purpose of the tabernacle and later the Temple was. When humans rebelled against God and were driven out from the garden, they lost access to the presence of God. The heavens – the realm where God dwelt – and the earth – the realm where humans dwelt – were separated and put out of joint. This was not how they were created to operate. They were created to work as one single symbiotic reality. But because of human sin, this reality had been subverted and destroyed.

The tabernacle was the place where God once again began recreating the heaven and earth reality that he had initially created. Between the wings of the cherubim on the ark of the covenant was where this was fully realized. As usual, we Christians have added a lot of theological baggage when we speak of this. We call it the mercy seat or place of atonement or place of propitiation or atonement cover. And all these phrases only serve to obscure what the bible is trying to tell us about this crucial element of the tabernacle.

So I need to give you a little history of translation lesson. The Hebrew word used for what is often translated as ‘mercy seat’ is כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet), which has the same stem as כַפֵּר (kaphar). כַפֵּר (kaphar) is the verb to cover and כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) is the noun, the place where the covering happens. When the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek, the translators could not find any Greek word that communicated this idea. This is no surprise. There are many Hebrew words that do not have even close equivalents in Greek. I request you to ask me about these later.

Since they did not have a ready word, they chose a word in Greek that was a best fit in their view. They chose the word ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion), which meant ‘place where mercy was received’. Now most of us are reasonably familiar with multiple languages. Some of us are fluent in multiple languages. So you should know that whenever we translate from one language to another something is always lost in translation. Think of the Hindi words जुगाड़ (jugaad) or अड्डा (addaa), which have no equivalent in English.

So, if we knew that a document was originally written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek, to which language should you look to obtain the meaning of the document? It is clear that you should look to Hebrew for the meaning of the original Hebrew text. Indeed, even when you read the Greek word used in a Greek document written by a Hebrew native, you should think of the Hebrew meaning rather than the Greek meaning. It is our failure to recognize the Hebrew roots of our scriptures that has created way too many problems.

So if כַפֵּר (kaphar) means ‘to cover’ and כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) is the place where the covering happens, then even when we see the word ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion) in the New Testament, we should be thinking that it is the Hebrew word כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) that the Jewish author was thinking of. So, if the place between the cherubim on the ark of the covenant was a place where covering happens, what exactly was being covered? Remember, the Hebrew word כַפֵּר (kaphar) is often translated as ‘to make atonement for’ in the offerings we are considering.

We have two distinct kinds of offerings that Hebrews refers to – the annual offering during Yom Kippur and the possibly daily sin offering. כַפֵּר (kaphar) is used in both these contexts. כַפֵּר (kaphar) is also used in the Yom Kippur ritual to describe what happens to the sanctuary. And כַפֵּר (kaphar) is also used in the context of the burnt offering, which is not related to sin. So what is it that ties these different offerings together? What is the unifying theme that will allow us to understand what Hebrews is saying?

The burnt offering was a voluntary offering that anyone could offer at any time. However, the presumption of the ritual is that the offeror may have some unconfessed sin that he or she was not aware of yet. Maybe I had done something that hurt my neighbor without my knowledge. Or maybe I did not do something that could have alleviated the trauma faced by my neighbor. Both of these were unintentional on my part. But I am still not aware of them. Yet, since I have sinned, the guilt associated with it contaminates me.

But I am coming before God voluntarily in my ignorance and expressing my joy in being a part of his people by offering my burnt offering. In this context, the animal being offered, while being offered as a voluntary burnt offering, serves double duty for my sin of which I am still unaware. The idea in the Old Testament is that, on account of human sin, the stain of death spreads through the whole world, threatening the integrity of the tabernacle and rendering the recreation of the heaven and earth reality untenable.

It is the stain of death that is covered by the lifeblood of the animal in the offerings. And the scapegoat over which the High Priest confesses the sins of the people takes the sins of the people with it into the desert so that the other goat’s blood can cover the stain of death caused by the sins that the people were unaware of and could not confess. You see, the sacrifices in the Old Testament were never meant to do anything concrete about the sins of the people. It is only when we misread the Old Testament that we think this is what was happening.

Rather, the lifeblood of the animals temporarily cleansed the sanctuary and in particular the כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) between the cherubim on the ark of the covenant. Each time the offering was made, either annually or daily, the כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) was cleansed so that the small heaven and earth reality was maintained. It was just a small beachhead in this world to remind us of what God longs for and what we lost. We need to remember this as we now turn to the passage in Hebrews to try and understand what it teaches us.

Our passage begins with the words, “Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach.” Hebrews is stating something that he expected the hearers to know. He does not mean that the Israelites thought that the sacrifices were the reality and were designed to make those who approached God perfect. This is a misunderstanding that, especially since the Reformation, we have been inclined to believe.

However, a careful study of the Old Testament will reveal that there is no offering or sacrifice that deals with intentional sins. So when, in Isaiah 1, God says, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow,” we need to ask, “How would that happen?” Isaiah had listed some quite intentional and repeated sins before these words from God. Hence, God was promising to deal with their intentional and repeated sins. This obviously could not happen through the Levitical rituals since the rituals in the Old Testament only dealt with unintentional sins.

We see this quite clearly in Psalm 51. David wrote this after his intentional sin of raping Bathsheba and having her husband Uriah murdered. The psalm clearly shows David struggling to imagine how God would cleanse him from the guilt incurred by his wilful sin. In the entire psalm, he does not even once use either כַפֵּר (kaphar) or כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) because he knows that these are applicable only for unintentional sins. In other words, the Jews knew that the Levitical rituals were not God’s final solution to the problem of human sin.

Hebrews then goes on to say that, if the Levitical sacrifices actually did anything concrete about sin, there would be no need for those sacrifices to be repeated. This logic is quite strange. When I eat a meal, it actually satisfies my hunger. But this does not mean that I will never need to eat again. So what is Hebrews really getting at? I think what is happening here is that Hebrews has put his conclusion into the preface of the argument, preparing his hearers to listen carefully to his argument by telling them something that was somewhat shocking to hear.

When Hebrews declares, “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins,” many of us probably think that this is what the Jews believed. They believed that the blood of the animals would take away sins. But we have seen that the Old Testament rituals were not designed to do anything concrete about sin. All they did was cover the stain of death caused by sin so that the living God could sit enthroned between the cherubim on the ark of the covenant and be among his people. 

This is why Hebrews makes it clear that “In these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin year after year.” The sacrifices reminded the offeror that the sacrifice only restored the heaven and earth reality of the כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet), leaving his or her sins still undealt with. The guilt that a person incurred on account of his or her sins, whether intentional or unintentional, was never dealt with by any of the Old Testament sacrifices. It is only the stain of death caused by sin that was covered between the cherubim on the ark of the covenant.

So the ancient Israelite was well aware that his or her sin was actually not dealt with. He or she knew that the guilt for transgressions had not been taken away. However, God had promised through his prophets that, “The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Yahweh as the waters cover the sea.” For this to happen, Yahweh would need to flood the entire earth with his glorious presence. The chasm between the reality of the small reclaimed area of the ark of the covenant and the promise was enormous.

The problem here is twofold. First, the area in which the heaven and earth reality was established was just a small portion on top of the ark of the covenant, not the whole earth as promised by the prophets. Second, this area was subject to desecration and defilement with every sin committed by humans. This is why the Israelites had to make their offerings so that the stain of death associated with their sin could be covered by the lifeblood of the sacrificed animal. Such a twofold problem needed a twofold solution.

The Old Testament only hints at the solution in a couple of places. The New Testament takes it on more fully and we see that God deals with the solution in the reverse order. He first deals with the problem of the impermanence of the effects of the animal sacrifices. Remember, the stain of death caused by sin always threatened to violate the sanctuary and the כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) in particular. It would have been of no use to make the effects of the כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) spread throughout the earth if the effects were temporary.

It is this that our passage in Hebrews tackles. Hebrews speaks of the impermanence of the Old Testament offerings and then tells us that Jesus’ sacrifice had a permanent effect. How did this happen? Remember the word ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion)? It appears only twice in the New Testament. It occurs in Hebrews 9, where the author just mentions it and does not say anything more. The other occurrence is in Romans 3.25, where Paul writes, “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.”

The phrase ‘sacrifice of atonement’ is the Greek word ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion). Remember what we have learnt so far. ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion) was used in the Septuagint when the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek. The translators used ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion) to translate the Hebrew word כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet), which referred to the region between the cherubim on the top of the ark of the covenant. And כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) meant the place where the stain of death was covered by the lifeblood of the animals that were sacrificed.

Remember also what we learnt about translation. In order to understand what is being spoken of we need to understand what the Hebrew word כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) meant and not be misled by the normal meaning of the Greek word ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion) because the Jewish authors, Paul in Romans or the author of Hebrews, would have been thinking in line with their Jewish worldview. So, if I were to re-translate Romans 3.25, it would say, “God presented Christ as the place where death’s stain was covered, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.”

In other words, Jesus himself has taken the place of the top of the ark of the covenant, the place where the stain of death was covered. And now we can see why the result is permanent. Through his death, Jesus conquered death. Death has no hold over him. And the stain of death cannot threaten him because he has defeated death and has been raised to a new life in a resurrection body that is not subject to death. You see what Hebrews is doing is not comparing animal sacrifices with the sacrifice of Jesus. Think about it.

Who would compare the death of an animal to the death of a human made in the image of God. It is a ridiculous idea to think that the great thinker of Hebrews was comparing animal life to the life of Jesus. However, because we forgot our roots we misunderstood the role and function of the Old Testament sacrifices and hence misunderstood what our scriptures are teaching us about Jesus’ death. So if Hebrews is not comparing the sacrifice of animals and Jesus’ sacrifice, what in the world is he comparing. 

If you have been paying attention, it should be obvious by now. Hebrews is comparing the כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) and Jesus’ body, as is made clear by Paul in Romans 3.25. That’s why Hebrews writes, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.” Jesus’ resurrection body, unaffected by and immune to the effects of death, is the new כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet). And since Jesus’ body is unaffected by and immune to the effects of death, blood is not needed anymore because the conditions for which the blood was needed no longer exist. 

Let me repeat what I have been saying because this goes against much of what most of us have learnt through our lives as Christians. Only a person who had forgotten that humans were made to be God’s image bearers could ever think of comparing animal sacrifice to the sacrifice of Jesus. And since Hebrews actually begins with the claim that the Son is the express image of God, it is clear that he has not forgotten this crucial truth of biblical theology. And so he does not compare the blood of animals with the blood of Jesus.

Rather, he compares the כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) and the resurrection body of Jesus. The covering provided by the כַּפֹּֽרֶת‎ (kaporet) was temporary because it was constantly threatened by the spread of the stain of death. However, the covering provided by Jesus’ resurrection body is permanent because death has no hold over him anymore. And since the animal sacrifices were instituted to repeatedly establish the heaven and earth reality, they were no longer needed because in Jesus’ resurrection body this reality exists forever and cannot be threatened by death.

This is why Hebrews can say, “But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.” The sacrifice was always for the establishment of a heaven and earth reality so that God and humans could live together. Now that Jesus – fully God and fully human – has sacrificed himself and has received a resurrection body that is unaffected by and immune to the effects of death, his work is done. So he has taken his seat at the position of authority – the right hand of God, from where he governs the world.

We have lost sight of the purpose for the sacrifices. They were always for the re-establishment of the heaven and earth reality so that God and humans could live together. That has always been God’s purpose and we unfortunately have diminished the biblical reality by thinking that the scriptures do the absurd of comparing Jesus’ sacrifice to the sacrifice of animals. Rather, Jesus’ death has established a permanent heaven and earth reality in his resurrection body. And having done this, GOd has begun the second stage of the reclamation.

Through his church, Jesus has gone to the ends of the earth. His church is the new beachhead where the heaven and earth reality is experienced. This reality is experienced notably when, empowered by the Holy Spirit, his church declares to the world that Jesus is Lord and that God has raised him from the dead. It is experienced when, infilled with the Holy Spirit, his church supports the causes of justice and preservation of his good creation. And it is experienced when, following his command, his church gathers around his table to express its unity with him.

So as we prepare to participate in Holy Communion, let us do so by remembering what Jesus’ death has accomplished – a permanent heaven and earth reality that is spreading through the world. And let us do so by heaving a sigh of relief that the sacrificial system has been rendered obsolete by Jesus’ death and participate with the cry, “Never again!”