Sermon Audio
March 13, 2016 Passion Sunday
A Change of Raiment
Isaiah 1:10-20, Psalm 51, Hebrews 9:11-15, St. John 8:46-59
Seven days prior to the annual Day of Atonement, the high priest left his house in Jerusalem and moved into his chambers in the temple to begin to prepare himself. A substitute took up his normal duties.
On the third and seventh days of this week of separation, he was sprinkled with the ashes of the red heifer, the prescribed cleansing for one who had come in contact with a dead body. It was administered in this case on the chance that he had unwittingly become so polluted.
Because all of the priestly duties on that high holy day fell to him, and because not the slightest error could be countenanced, he spent the week practicing the various rituals he would employ: sprinkling the blood, burning the incense, lighting the lamp, offering the daily sacrifice and so on.
Over and over he rehearsed each movement, like a conductor preparing for a concert in which he would both lead and play.
Some of the elders of the Sanhedrin, or ruling council, appointed to the task interviewed the high priest to ensure he understood fully the significance of the service. If his knowledge of any detail was deficient, they were to instruct him in it.
On the eve of the holy day, the animal victims to be sacrificed were brought to him, bleating and mooing, so that he could be familiar with everything to be used in the service. The elders then bound him by a solemn oath to change nothing in the liturgy for the day.
He was allowed a light meal for supper and then began a vigil, hearing and expounding the Scriptures to remain awake. At midnight, the lot was cast to determine which priest would remove the ashes from the day’s sacrifices and prepare the altar.
To set this day apart from the other days, four fires rather than the customary three were lit on the great altar of burnt offering.
The Day of Atonement – Yom Kippur -- fell on the 10th day of the seventh, or sabbatical, month, which is Tishri. This sabbatical month closed the annual cycle of festivals, and the final one, the Feast of Tabernacles, the grand festival of the harvest, fell on the 15th of the month.
On the Day of Atonement, the people were reconciled to God, because only a people at peace with Him could come before Him to rejoice in the blessing with which He crowned the year. We detect an even higher significance in the Day of Atonement when we remember that the Feast of Tabernacles pictured the ultimate ingathering of all the nations.
When He called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees, God had appointed to Abraham this task, to bless the nations. It had remained Israel’s brief ever after, and atonement must go before mission.
The high priest – and he alone – would enter the Most Holy Place, that inner chamber in which rested the ark of the covenant with its mercy seat, where God resided. This was the only day of the year in which even he could enter.
He wore a white robe reserved for that day only. His cummerbund was also white, as was his hat, which was of the same shape but not the same material as the mitre he wore for normal use. This array of plain and simple white replaced the “golden garments” he wore on other days.
On this day, the high priest appeared not as “the bridegroom of Jehovah” but as an emblem of the perfect purity of which the Levitical rituals spoke. His attire pictured the removal of Joshua’s “filthy garments” to be replaced by a “change of raiment” in Zechariah’s prophecy, which denoted, “I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee” (3:3-4).
In the prophets as well, those who stand nearest God are always “arrayed in white.” Finally, because these were, in the highest sense, “holy garments,” the priest was required by the Levitical code to “wash his flesh in water, and so put them on” (Leviticus 16:4). On other days, he washed his hands and feet; on this day, he bathed his entire body.
By the time the first glint of light split the horizon, the people had assembled. The high priest, stepping behind a linen cloth that obscured him from public view, removed his usual, or layman’s, dress, bathed and put on his golden vestments, washed his hands and feet and performed the usual morning sacrifice.
In all, he would change his robes and bathe his entire body five times during the day and wash his hands and feet 10 times.
The sacrifices of the day consisted of the usual continual burnt offering of the morning and evening services and, besides, for the high priest and the priesthood, a ram, and for the people, one young bullock, one ram, seven lambs and one young goat.
Finally, there were the sin offerings peculiar to this day: a young bullock for the high priest, his family and the priesthood and two goats for the people. One goat was to be sacrificed and his blood sprinkled, the other released into the “land not inhabited” -- the wilderness-- after the high priest had laid upon him “all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins.”
This was the scapegoat, the substitute which bore away all the sins of God’s covenant people each year.
The high priest stationed himself in the court of the priests, near the assembled worshipers, and placed both of his hands inside an urn, withdrawing the two lots within. The two goats stood with their backs to the people. The priest placed one lot on the head of each goat. One was labeled “la Jehovah” – for Jehovah, the one to be killed. The other was inscribed “la Azazel” – the precise translation is disputed, but this one was to be sent away.
This goat would be turned toward the people in anticipation of having their sins deposited upon him.
The high priest next entered the Most Holy Place three times. On the first, he flung incense into a censer filled with coals, glowing red. After smoke filled the compartment, he retreated through the veil into the Holy Place, and prayed. It was only now when they spied him alive that the people, who had been peering intently, knew God had accepted the offering.
On the second visit he sprinkled the blood of the bullock. On the third he sprinkled the blood of the goat and then mingled the blood of the two animals and sprinkled some more. In all, he sprinkled blood 43 times, taking care not to spot his white robe with the sin-laden blood.
When he finished, he had cleansed the altar of burnt offering, the altar of incense, the Holy Place, the veil and the Most Holy Place, lifting away the defilement of sinful people and priests alike. Their sins atoned for, they could continue in communion with God for another year.
They still retained, however, the guilt of their sins upon their consciences. The one remaining ritual – the sending away of the scapegoat – addressed that. As the goat faced the people waiting for the burden of their sins to be deposited upon him, the high priest placed both hands on his head and prayed.
His prayer concluded, “As it is written in the law of Moses, Thy servant, saying, ‘For on that day shall it be covered over for you to make you clean from all your sins before Jehovah ye shall be cleansed.’”
The high priest turned his face toward the prostrate multitudes worshiping at the name of Jehovah as he intoned the final words, “Ye shall be cleansed,” declaring the absolution and remission of their sins.
Priests led the goat through Solomon’s Porch, out of the walled city through the east gate, across a bridge that spanned the Valley Kidron and onto the Mount of Olives. There a designated man – a non-Israelite, a stranger – took custody of the goat and proceeded a predetermined distance to the place where the wilderness began.
Now leading the animal backward, he pushed it off of a rock ledge for the short fall into “a land not inhabited.” And the goat was gone, and with him the sins of the people.
Or were their sins removed?
The covenant people were scrupulously following a liturgy that God Himself had handed down to them. The daily temple sacrifices and their regular sin offerings kept the dark stain of their sins – and the separation from God their iniquity created – ever before their eyes.
The Day of Atonement provided the annual climax for this system of bloody sacrifice.
By the first century, when they worshiped in the second temple, built in the reign of King Herod, the Shekinah glory of God had long since fled the premises. No longer did the high priest encounter that glory on the mercy seat when he entered the Most Holy Place, as in the time of the tabernacle and then of Solomon’s temple.
Still, as long as they had a temple – which is to say until 70 A.D., when the Roman army razed it – they could offer sacrifices acceptable to God in atonement for their sins.
But the blood of bulls and goats, the author of Hebrews tells us, was never adequate for the remission of sins. He writes: “For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect” (10:1).
And perfection was the point of the entire enterprise, for only perfect purity could come into the divine presence.
The Mosaic law contained two fatal deficiencies with regard to atonement for sins: the blood and the high priest. The blood came from victims which were no more than surrogates for the sinners who offered them. Not created in the image of God, incapable of sin, they were poor substitutes for the poor sinners who led them to the altar.
And the high priest was himself a sinner, defiled by his transgressions and not fit to enter the God’s earthly dwelling place. Only on this one day each year, under these rigidly controlled conditions, could he set foot in the Most Holy Place – even after God had departed from it.
Only one being could serve as an acceptable sacrifice; only one man could offer that sacrifice to God for final and eternal remission of sins. You have heard our epistle lesson for today. Now that you have heard the old sacrificial system which gave way to the new expounded, hear the lesson again:
“But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.
“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
“Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant” (Hebrews 9:11-15, ESV).
The scapegoat, oddly the greatest sacrifice in the entire temple cultus – oddly because it did not die – was in fact only half of a sacrifice. It was regarded as one with the goat that was offered to God. But this offering could not shake itself free from the surly bonds of the natural realm.
Even it was not truly adequate to the purging of the conscience, which resided in a man’s spirit. Natural means could achieve only natural ends. Animal sacrifice fell short of transcendence, leaving the worshiper’s spirit polluted by sin.
Now comes Jesus Christ, the God-man, at home in heaven and on earth – in every crevice of His creation. As the great High Priest who contaminates nothing He touches with defilement of His own, He will present an offering acceptable to His Father on high.
The blood of Christ, without corruption of any taint of transgression, will wash away the sins of those who are called, His fellow heirs. The wages of sin is death. Now, 1,500 years after Abraham erected his first altar to offer sacrifices to God, appears One who has lived a perfect life He surrenders as compensation for sin.
His death and resurrection on earth and His entrance into the Father’s presence in heaven to present His shed blood are of a piece. The “greater and more perfect tent” through which He passed is the heavenly Holy Place, the ideal on which the earthly copy was based.
It afforded passage to Christ, and after Him His people, into the divine presence. Our Lord arrived there carrying not the blood of beasts, whose sacrifice was passive and involuntary, but the blood He Himself gave actively and willingly for the eradication of the sins of His people.
Because the perfect High Priest offered the perfect sacrifice, it was an act without need of annual repetition but a once-for-all full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It removes every impediment to our worship of God.
The blood of goats and bulls, the ashes of a heifer, accomplished only external and symbolic cleansing. If those were effective to that extent, how much more does the blood of Christ, who offered Himself through the Spirit, purge the conscience that resides within our spirit of the dead works that lead to death.
The conscience is the human organ by which we apprehend God in His holiness. When a human heart is diseased, it cannot pump blood efficiently through the body. When the conscience is afflicted, the spirit cannot engage fully in free-flowing worship.
God had promised His chosen people a new and better covenant through His prophet Jeremiah. Behold it. Behold Him! Christ, whose life freely offered in obedience cancels the former covenant, has come as Mediator of the latter.
Because of His death, those who are united with Him receive the promised inheritance, life everlasting. Our perfect High Priest has offered the perfect sacrifice, rendering us perfect in the sight of our heavenly Father. Praise His holy name! Amen.
A Change of Raiment
Isaiah 1:10-20, Psalm 51, Hebrews 9:11-15, St. John 8:46-59
Seven days prior to the annual Day of Atonement, the high priest left his house in Jerusalem and moved into his chambers in the temple to begin to prepare himself. A substitute took up his normal duties.
On the third and seventh days of this week of separation, he was sprinkled with the ashes of the red heifer, the prescribed cleansing for one who had come in contact with a dead body. It was administered in this case on the chance that he had unwittingly become so polluted.
Because all of the priestly duties on that high holy day fell to him, and because not the slightest error could be countenanced, he spent the week practicing the various rituals he would employ: sprinkling the blood, burning the incense, lighting the lamp, offering the daily sacrifice and so on.
Over and over he rehearsed each movement, like a conductor preparing for a concert in which he would both lead and play.
Some of the elders of the Sanhedrin, or ruling council, appointed to the task interviewed the high priest to ensure he understood fully the significance of the service. If his knowledge of any detail was deficient, they were to instruct him in it.
On the eve of the holy day, the animal victims to be sacrificed were brought to him, bleating and mooing, so that he could be familiar with everything to be used in the service. The elders then bound him by a solemn oath to change nothing in the liturgy for the day.
He was allowed a light meal for supper and then began a vigil, hearing and expounding the Scriptures to remain awake. At midnight, the lot was cast to determine which priest would remove the ashes from the day’s sacrifices and prepare the altar.
To set this day apart from the other days, four fires rather than the customary three were lit on the great altar of burnt offering.
The Day of Atonement – Yom Kippur -- fell on the 10th day of the seventh, or sabbatical, month, which is Tishri. This sabbatical month closed the annual cycle of festivals, and the final one, the Feast of Tabernacles, the grand festival of the harvest, fell on the 15th of the month.
On the Day of Atonement, the people were reconciled to God, because only a people at peace with Him could come before Him to rejoice in the blessing with which He crowned the year. We detect an even higher significance in the Day of Atonement when we remember that the Feast of Tabernacles pictured the ultimate ingathering of all the nations.
When He called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees, God had appointed to Abraham this task, to bless the nations. It had remained Israel’s brief ever after, and atonement must go before mission.
The high priest – and he alone – would enter the Most Holy Place, that inner chamber in which rested the ark of the covenant with its mercy seat, where God resided. This was the only day of the year in which even he could enter.
He wore a white robe reserved for that day only. His cummerbund was also white, as was his hat, which was of the same shape but not the same material as the mitre he wore for normal use. This array of plain and simple white replaced the “golden garments” he wore on other days.
On this day, the high priest appeared not as “the bridegroom of Jehovah” but as an emblem of the perfect purity of which the Levitical rituals spoke. His attire pictured the removal of Joshua’s “filthy garments” to be replaced by a “change of raiment” in Zechariah’s prophecy, which denoted, “I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee” (3:3-4).
In the prophets as well, those who stand nearest God are always “arrayed in white.” Finally, because these were, in the highest sense, “holy garments,” the priest was required by the Levitical code to “wash his flesh in water, and so put them on” (Leviticus 16:4). On other days, he washed his hands and feet; on this day, he bathed his entire body.
By the time the first glint of light split the horizon, the people had assembled. The high priest, stepping behind a linen cloth that obscured him from public view, removed his usual, or layman’s, dress, bathed and put on his golden vestments, washed his hands and feet and performed the usual morning sacrifice.
In all, he would change his robes and bathe his entire body five times during the day and wash his hands and feet 10 times.
The sacrifices of the day consisted of the usual continual burnt offering of the morning and evening services and, besides, for the high priest and the priesthood, a ram, and for the people, one young bullock, one ram, seven lambs and one young goat.
Finally, there were the sin offerings peculiar to this day: a young bullock for the high priest, his family and the priesthood and two goats for the people. One goat was to be sacrificed and his blood sprinkled, the other released into the “land not inhabited” -- the wilderness-- after the high priest had laid upon him “all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins.”
This was the scapegoat, the substitute which bore away all the sins of God’s covenant people each year.
The high priest stationed himself in the court of the priests, near the assembled worshipers, and placed both of his hands inside an urn, withdrawing the two lots within. The two goats stood with their backs to the people. The priest placed one lot on the head of each goat. One was labeled “la Jehovah” – for Jehovah, the one to be killed. The other was inscribed “la Azazel” – the precise translation is disputed, but this one was to be sent away.
This goat would be turned toward the people in anticipation of having their sins deposited upon him.
The high priest next entered the Most Holy Place three times. On the first, he flung incense into a censer filled with coals, glowing red. After smoke filled the compartment, he retreated through the veil into the Holy Place, and prayed. It was only now when they spied him alive that the people, who had been peering intently, knew God had accepted the offering.
On the second visit he sprinkled the blood of the bullock. On the third he sprinkled the blood of the goat and then mingled the blood of the two animals and sprinkled some more. In all, he sprinkled blood 43 times, taking care not to spot his white robe with the sin-laden blood.
When he finished, he had cleansed the altar of burnt offering, the altar of incense, the Holy Place, the veil and the Most Holy Place, lifting away the defilement of sinful people and priests alike. Their sins atoned for, they could continue in communion with God for another year.
They still retained, however, the guilt of their sins upon their consciences. The one remaining ritual – the sending away of the scapegoat – addressed that. As the goat faced the people waiting for the burden of their sins to be deposited upon him, the high priest placed both hands on his head and prayed.
His prayer concluded, “As it is written in the law of Moses, Thy servant, saying, ‘For on that day shall it be covered over for you to make you clean from all your sins before Jehovah ye shall be cleansed.’”
The high priest turned his face toward the prostrate multitudes worshiping at the name of Jehovah as he intoned the final words, “Ye shall be cleansed,” declaring the absolution and remission of their sins.
Priests led the goat through Solomon’s Porch, out of the walled city through the east gate, across a bridge that spanned the Valley Kidron and onto the Mount of Olives. There a designated man – a non-Israelite, a stranger – took custody of the goat and proceeded a predetermined distance to the place where the wilderness began.
Now leading the animal backward, he pushed it off of a rock ledge for the short fall into “a land not inhabited.” And the goat was gone, and with him the sins of the people.
Or were their sins removed?
The covenant people were scrupulously following a liturgy that God Himself had handed down to them. The daily temple sacrifices and their regular sin offerings kept the dark stain of their sins – and the separation from God their iniquity created – ever before their eyes.
The Day of Atonement provided the annual climax for this system of bloody sacrifice.
By the first century, when they worshiped in the second temple, built in the reign of King Herod, the Shekinah glory of God had long since fled the premises. No longer did the high priest encounter that glory on the mercy seat when he entered the Most Holy Place, as in the time of the tabernacle and then of Solomon’s temple.
Still, as long as they had a temple – which is to say until 70 A.D., when the Roman army razed it – they could offer sacrifices acceptable to God in atonement for their sins.
But the blood of bulls and goats, the author of Hebrews tells us, was never adequate for the remission of sins. He writes: “For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect” (10:1).
And perfection was the point of the entire enterprise, for only perfect purity could come into the divine presence.
The Mosaic law contained two fatal deficiencies with regard to atonement for sins: the blood and the high priest. The blood came from victims which were no more than surrogates for the sinners who offered them. Not created in the image of God, incapable of sin, they were poor substitutes for the poor sinners who led them to the altar.
And the high priest was himself a sinner, defiled by his transgressions and not fit to enter the God’s earthly dwelling place. Only on this one day each year, under these rigidly controlled conditions, could he set foot in the Most Holy Place – even after God had departed from it.
Only one being could serve as an acceptable sacrifice; only one man could offer that sacrifice to God for final and eternal remission of sins. You have heard our epistle lesson for today. Now that you have heard the old sacrificial system which gave way to the new expounded, hear the lesson again:
“But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.
“For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
“Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant” (Hebrews 9:11-15, ESV).
The scapegoat, oddly the greatest sacrifice in the entire temple cultus – oddly because it did not die – was in fact only half of a sacrifice. It was regarded as one with the goat that was offered to God. But this offering could not shake itself free from the surly bonds of the natural realm.
Even it was not truly adequate to the purging of the conscience, which resided in a man’s spirit. Natural means could achieve only natural ends. Animal sacrifice fell short of transcendence, leaving the worshiper’s spirit polluted by sin.
Now comes Jesus Christ, the God-man, at home in heaven and on earth – in every crevice of His creation. As the great High Priest who contaminates nothing He touches with defilement of His own, He will present an offering acceptable to His Father on high.
The blood of Christ, without corruption of any taint of transgression, will wash away the sins of those who are called, His fellow heirs. The wages of sin is death. Now, 1,500 years after Abraham erected his first altar to offer sacrifices to God, appears One who has lived a perfect life He surrenders as compensation for sin.
His death and resurrection on earth and His entrance into the Father’s presence in heaven to present His shed blood are of a piece. The “greater and more perfect tent” through which He passed is the heavenly Holy Place, the ideal on which the earthly copy was based.
It afforded passage to Christ, and after Him His people, into the divine presence. Our Lord arrived there carrying not the blood of beasts, whose sacrifice was passive and involuntary, but the blood He Himself gave actively and willingly for the eradication of the sins of His people.
Because the perfect High Priest offered the perfect sacrifice, it was an act without need of annual repetition but a once-for-all full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It removes every impediment to our worship of God.
The blood of goats and bulls, the ashes of a heifer, accomplished only external and symbolic cleansing. If those were effective to that extent, how much more does the blood of Christ, who offered Himself through the Spirit, purge the conscience that resides within our spirit of the dead works that lead to death.
The conscience is the human organ by which we apprehend God in His holiness. When a human heart is diseased, it cannot pump blood efficiently through the body. When the conscience is afflicted, the spirit cannot engage fully in free-flowing worship.
God had promised His chosen people a new and better covenant through His prophet Jeremiah. Behold it. Behold Him! Christ, whose life freely offered in obedience cancels the former covenant, has come as Mediator of the latter.
Because of His death, those who are united with Him receive the promised inheritance, life everlasting. Our perfect High Priest has offered the perfect sacrifice, rendering us perfect in the sight of our heavenly Father. Praise His holy name! Amen.