Living sacrifice.

A Sermon for Passion Sunday

April 6, 2025 at Holy Communion

Hebrews 9:11–15

“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable worship” (Romans 12:1). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

Not all Christian jargon has aged equally well as society has become less religious. Words like “grace” and “blessedness” have done fine, but others have had a tough go. Words like “propitiation” or “atonement” no longer mean anything to anyone, because no one understands them. And other words like “evangelism” now give people the heebee-geebees because encouraging others you join you in your own beliefs is a no-no in a society where everybody gets to do their own thing.

So here’s another phrase, present in our second reading today, that hasn’t aged well in secular society: “being washed in the blood of the Lamb” or “washed in the blood of Jesus.” If you ever wanted to convince your neighbours that the Christian faith ancient, foreign, or rather morbid, just ask them what the old hymn does, “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

This morning, I want to lead you through two thoughts. The first is simply to explain what this language about being “washed in blood” means to us as Christians. The second thought is that the real essence of sacrifice isn’t bloody at all.

Later in the same chapter from which our Epistle reading comes, the Book of Hebrews quotes the Old Testament (Leviticus 17:11), which says that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22). It’s making an observation about the Old Testament Temple rituals—every ritual whose purpose is to forgive sins involves the shedding of animal blood. The question is “why”? Why does God need blood to forgive?

Actually, he doesn’t. The Bible nowhere suggests that God needs bloodshed to dispense forgiveness. God does not delight in death or suffering. And that’s not what Hebrews said: it says that there is no forgiveness without bloodshed. The shedding of blood must always accompany forgiveness, but the bloodshed doesn’t “earn” that forgiveness. So no we have a better question: why must bloodshed accompany forgiveness?

Think of what it is to ask forgiveness from someone. You have done that person wrong, and you know it. So you present yourself and say, “I’ve done you wrong, and you would be right to be angry. I am not in the right, what I did was unjustifiable, and all I can hope is that you will forgive me.” You put yourself at that person’s disposal, to do with you as they will. If they want to tear a strip off you, you’re admitting that they would be in the right to do so. If there’s restitution to be made, you are willing to work or to give whatever is necessary.

This is sacrifice for sin: to lay yourself down before the one you’ve wronged. You pour out your life at your neighbour’s feet, forfeiting your own life to contribute back what you have away taken from him.

So animal sacrifice—a nearly universal feature of human culture—emerges naturally from our need for forgiveness. We kill an animal from our household as our representative, expressing to God that we pour out our life to him in acknowledgement of the wrong we have done. And so we get to go on living—but, if the sacrifice has meant anything to us, we now live as those who have given our lives over to God through our representative. We have died with our lamb and yet we live, and so we live no longer for ourselves but for the one to whom we made a sacrifice. We get a second start. All that dirty blood shed on the ground washes us clean.

Now we have everything in place to understand what it means to be “washed in the blood of Jesus” or “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” Jesus takes on himself the role of representing the whole human race to the Father. Humanity has done wrong, and the way back into relationship is to lay down our whole selves—body and soul—at the Father’s feet. Standing for all of us, Jesus makes himself a perfect sacrifice by giving up his life. His blood is the sign and sacrament of perfect humility before the God to whom every person needs to be reconciled. Jesus choses to become the Lamb humanity needs.

And that means that we are washed—washed in his blood. The reconciliation we need to make with God has been made. Before we even became aware of our need for reconciliation, Jesus had already offered our bodies and souls to his Father by offering his own as our representative. The key to spiritual freedom is simply to accept that this has been done on our behalf. When you wake up to the fact that the Lamb of God has made the necessary sacrifice to the Father, that’s when you are washed in his blood.

So, more briefly, here’s the second thought about sacrifice: living sacrificially as a Christian usually won’t involve shedding your blood, but that doesn’t make it any less sacrificial. Sacrifice is the essence of Christian life. There is no Christian faith which doesn’t involve handing over your life to God.

Jesus didn’t sacrifice himself instead of us, making a sacrifice himself so that we get to live un-sacrificially. He sacrificed himself as our representative, embodying our intention toward God of dying to ourselves and contributing everything that we are and have to him. We live, but we live as people who have been sacrificed. We, with Jesus, are the Lamb in the Book of Revelation, who, although it was slain, yet lives, and lives as though it were slain (Revelation 5:6).

And this thought is the underground spring from which so much language for the Christian life flows. We have it from St Paul in Romans: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice to God” (Romans 12:1). Living, but sacrificed; sacrificing ourselves, but living. We have it in a phrase which became traditional in the church, that we daily offer God an “unbloody sacrifice.” Early in this phrase’s history (in the Apostolic Constitutions of the fourth century) it refers to the sacrifices Christians make daily, specifically “prayers, and intercessions, and thanksgivings.” Over time the “unbloody sacrifice” would come more narrowly to mean the offering of the thanksgiving sacrifice of the Eucharist. But then our Book of Common Prayer would open it up again: at every Eucharist, including today, we pray that God would accept, through Jesus our representative, the offering of “ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice.”

Today offer everything you are in spiritual sacrifice: let every thought be prayer, every deed an act of stewardship and care, every word as a breath from the Almighty.