Sin and Sacrifice


 In the Old Testament God relates to his earthly children as would a strict father, telling them "thou shall not" do this, that, or the other and making them fear the consequences if they did. Thus God is feared and placated by sacrifice. Jesus marks a change of approach in that God now takes on the role of a loving father telling us what we should do and rewarding us when we do. "Love God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself, and you will live [inherit eternal life]" "there is no law greater than these", "on these hang all the law and the prophets". The basic rules didn't change. If you love your neighbour, you are not going to kill him, or steal from him, or tell lies about him or hop into bed with his wife. Those rules, intended to prevent people being nasty to each other, are replaced with a new goal - to be actively nice to each other. Jesus promotes a more personal relationship with God. Each person will be judged individually not the community as a whole. Jesus teaches that if you repent - are sorry for what you have done or neglected to do - and if you forgive others the wrongs they have done you, God will forgive you. 

In the Old Testament there is a strange idea that sin was not merely an act by an individual who may be punished, but that a sin once created took on a life of its own and would contaminate a whole community. Thus you have the idea of communal sin.  The Chief priest had to undertake ritual cleansing before entering the holy part of the temple - not because he had done something sinful but to remove any stray sins which might have attached themselves to him. It also appears in the idea of the "scape goat" where a community transferred its sins to a goat and drove the goat into the desert taking the community's sins with it. Thus a sin became a pseudo physical entity which can be transferred to, and taken away by a goat. 

    The communal view of sin leads to the interpretation that it is no use an individual following the teachings of God if the rest of the community does not, as the sins of others will contaminate him and he will be condemned along with the rest. This has been the source of much suffering in the world where typically a organisation of zealots, certain that it knows what God wants, ruthlessly imposes its will on the society; forcing people to conform, punishing and killing those who don't. That has punctuated the bloody history of the Church, it is the justification used today by repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia and is the justification used by ISIS, and the Taliban for its atrocious behaviour.

Jesus overthrew this idea of sin. He tells the parable of the wheat and the weeds where the instruction is to let the good and bad co-exist - it will be sorted at harvest time. (Matthew 13:24-30,37-40 ) So sin is firmly associated with the individual, not the community and God, not man, will judge and deal with sinners.

Sacrifice does not figure strongly in his ministry but while in the OT sacrifice is about the right quality of animal and the precise ritual methodology of sacrifice, Jesus teaches that what is important is what it means to the individual - as in the "widows mite" - her sacrifice was greater than any other in that she gave all that she had. Sacrifice today is giving your time to help others and giving to those in need or to good causes.  God has no need for "gifts".

Some people search the Old Testament for things with which to condemn others but Jesus replaced those rules with his message. He says. (Luke 5:37) "no one pours new wine into old wine skins". It defines the relationship between Jesus' teaching and traditional Judaism as defined in the Old Testament: Leviticus et al. Basically they don't mix. Either Jesus replaces Old Testament teaching or he doesn't. It is unacceptable to "cherry pick" bits from the OT.

The Sixth Problem -  It did nothing for the Church's image that it reluctantly gave women equal rights about a century after secular society did.  Its present attitude to Homosexuality is very damaging. There are 76 things banned in Leviticus so why has the Church "cherry picked" the one banning homosexualty? Any clergyman who has short hair, or is clean shaven, or isn’t circumcised who criticises someone for being gay is a hypocrite, made so by the teaching of the church he serves because he is not obeying the rules in Leviticus himself.  Secular society is now more compassionate, and stronger on human rights that the Christian Church!

Sin can be defined as doing things contrary to Jesus' message 'to love your neighbour as you love yourself' and I could not put it better than Sister Wendy did when she said:

  "... really there is only one sin, misusing your fellow man".


If you want to know if something is wrong don't trawl though Leviticus. Leviticus says it is OK to own slaves! Ask yourself - is someone being misused as a result of this? Could someone end up a victim?

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