2. Sacrifice

Theologians have often remarked on the multiplicity of metaphors and motifs characterizing Christ’s atonement found in the NT. The biblical doctrine of the atonement may be aptly compared to a multifaceted jewel, each facet contributing to the beauty of the whole gem. The various facets of a gem are transparent to and refracted in one another, thereby increasing the brilliance and beauty of the whole. On this analogy, it would be an obvious mistake to try to reduce the doctrine of the atonement to just one of its many facets, as some theorists have done. If one’s theory of the atonement neglects or excludes any of the facets of the biblical doctrine, then it is not biblically adequate. If an atonement theory is merely incomplete, we might seek to enhance it further; but if it eliminates or precludes various facets of the biblical doctrine, then we may be spared pursuing such a theory further, since it fails to meet adequately our first criterion of a Christian theory of the atonement. In part 1 we want to survey some of the various facets that make up the biblical doctrine of the atonement.

Our interest in examining the biblical materials is not in tradition-historical analysis of the biblical text, seeking, for example, to determine the date and provenance of the priestly traditions concerning the Levitical sacrifices or to ascertain the authentic words of Jesus concerning his death. Rather, we shall adopt a canonical approach to our subject, taking the biblical text as we have it. The reason for so doing is not because such historical-critical questions are uninteresting or unimportant, but because the canonical text is, after all, the basis for the traditional theories of the atonement surveyed in part 2, which in turn serve as the springboard for our reflections in part 3, and because, having adopted biblical adequacy as a criterion for assessing atonement theories, we want to discover what guidelines and constraints the canonical text provides for a theory of the atonement.

In approaching the biblical teaching on the atonement, we must decide whether to approach the subject thematically or by author. This is no easy decision, for it is not without consequences. An authorial approach has the considerable advantage of giving a clearer picture of what a Paul or a John, for example, thought about the atonement, whereas a thematic approach is likely to blur these lines of distinction. However, an authorial approach does not so easily enable us to identify and explore common emphases of the biblical writers as does a thematic approach. Since our aim is to identify the various facets of the biblical doctrine of the atonement, a thematic approach is better suited to our goal. We shall, therefore, take a thematic approach to the biblical materials.

A multifaceted gemstone typically has a central, larger facet that gemologists call “the table.” It anchors the entire stone. On this analogy, the table of the biblical doctrine of the atonement is sacrifice. The predominant motif used in the NT to characterize the atonement is the portrayal of Christ’s death as a sacrificial offering to God on our behalf. Joel Green provides a pithy summary:

No other atonement motif is so abundantly attested. This is convincing evidence that the motif of sacrifice anchors the doctrine of the atonement in the NT.

The interpretation of Jesus’ death as a sacrificial offering was not, according to the Gospels, an ex post facto rationalization on the part of Christians of Jesus’ ignominious fate. Rather, Jesus himself had seen his impending death in this light. He predicted his death (Mark 10:33-34) and even provoked it by his messianic actions in Jerusalem (Mark 11:1-10, 13-18). As N. T. Wright has emphasized, Jesus’ selection of the Passover festival as the time of the climax of his ministry was no accident. “Jesus chose Passover as the explanatory setting for what he had to do.” For as he celebrated with his disciples his final Passover meal, “he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’” (Mark 14:22-24). Jesus saw his death symbolized in the elements of the Passover meal. It was the blood of the Passover lamb, smeared on the doorposts of Jewish homes, that had saved the Jewish people from God’s judgment. Jesus’ blood, soon to be poured out for many, would accomplish the same purpose. The fact that the disciples then share symbolically in partaking of his body and blood shows that his death is meant to encompass them; it is a death on their behalf.

Moreover, the expression “this is my blood of the covenant” recalls Moses’ words at the inauguration of the old covenant, “See the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you” (Exod 24:8). The only other OT passage that mentions “the blood of my covenant with you” is Zechariah 9:9-12, a proclamation of the advent of a Messianic King who will restore Israel’s fortunes. Jesus the Messiah is inaugurating by his death the new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah, which would bring restoration and forgiveness of sin:

Jesus saw his death as not merely averting God’s judgment but as expunging Israel’s sin and restoring fellowship with God.

Moreover, the words “poured out for many” hark back to Isaiah’s prophecy of the Servant of the LORD, who

yet he bore the sin of many,

In Luke 22:37 Jesus, on the night of his arrest, cites this very Scripture in application to himself. “For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless’; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.” The “many” whose sin the Servant bears include the Gentiles, to whom the Servant would be a light of salvation (Isa 42:6; 49:6). Jesus saw himself as the suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, who “makes himself an offering for sin” (Isa 53:10). Earlier Jesus had said of himself, “The Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The Son of Man is a divine-human figure from Daniel’s prophecy whom “all peoples, nations, and languages should serve” (Dan 7:14). In his paradoxical statement Jesus stands things on their head, declaring that the Son of Man has come in the role of a servant and, like the Servant of Isaiah 53, gives his life as a ransom for many. Only in Isaiah 53 do we find in the OT the complex idea of a “serving” figure who, in an eschatological context, gives his life for “the many.”

According to the Gospels, then, Jesus saw his death as a redemptive sacrifice, like the Passover sacrifice, and himself as a sin-bearer, like Isaiah’s Servant of the LORD, inaugurating, like the Mosaic sacrifice, a fresh covenant between God and the people.

We can gain deeper insight into Jesus’ death as a sacrificial offering by examining the function of the OT sacrifices that formed the interpretive framework for Jesus’ death. In doing so, it must be said, we enter a world that is utterly foreign to modern Western readers. Most of us have never seen an animal slaughtered, much less done it ourselves, and, accustomed as we are to buying our meat and poultry in antiseptically wrapped packaging in refrigerated bins, we are apt to find the animal sacrifices described in the OT revolting. Moreover, most of us have no familiarity with a world in which ritual practices fraught with symbolic meaning play a major role in one’s interactions with the spiritual realm, and so the OT cult may strike us as bizarre and opaque. If we are to understand these practices, we need to shed our Western sensibilities and try to enter sympathetically the primitive world of a bucolic society that was not squeamish about blood and guts and that had a highly developed ritual system in its approach to God.

The challenge of understanding these ancient texts is compounded by the fact that they often describe rituals without explaining their meaning, which was probably well known to their contemporary practitioners. Therefore, we must try as best we can to discern their proper interpretation based on the clues that we have. Fortunately, we have sufficient evidence to form some reliable ideas about what the sacrifices were intended to accomplish. Among their various functions the animal sacrifices filled the twin fundamental purposes of expiation of sin and propitiation of God. “To expiate” means to remove, annul, cancel; “to propitiate” means to appease, to placate, to satisfy. The object of expiation is sin; the object of propitiation is God.

Propitiation is also in view in various Levitical sacrifices offered in the Tabernacle (and later in the Temple). The careful regulations concerning the sacrificial offerings are to be understood against the background of God’s striking down Aaron’s sons for their unlawful offering of sacrifices in the Tabernacle precincts (Lev 10:1-2; 16:1). God was conceived to be specially present in the innermost sanctum of the Tabernacle, which therefore had to be approached with utmost care. It was a dangerous business to have a holy God dwelling in the midst of a sinful and impure people, as we see in God’s refusal to accompany the people into the promised land following their apostasy with the golden calf: “Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; but I will not go up among you, or I would consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people. . . . if for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you” (Exod 33:3, 5). The sacrificial system functioned to facilitate the juxtaposition of the holy and the unholy. It did this, not merely by purging the Tabernacle and its paraphernalia of impurity but also by propitiating God and so averting His wrath upon the people. The roasting of the sacrificial animals, in particular, is repeatedly said to produce “a pleasing odor to the LORD” (Lev 1:9, 13, 17; 2:2; 3:5; 4:31; 8:21, etc.), which implies that the sacrifices were accepted by God and helped to cultivate His favor (cf. Gen 8:21).

1. The worshipper “brings near”

4. The priest puts the blood

5. The priest burns on the altar

6. Disposal of the rest of the carcass

So, Milgrom advises, “Although the cult concentrates heavily on the purging of sanctuary impurity, it too recognizes that the ultimate source of impurity is human sin.” Sin must therefore be expiated. The continual purging and reconsecration of the altar “points to the singular function of the altar: it is the medium of God’s salvific expiation of the sins of Israel. Therefore, not only does it have to be purged of Israel’s sins; it must be a fit instrument for effecting expiation for Israel when sacrifices are offered up on it.” While repentance is a necessary condition of God’s forgiveness of a sin, “For the complete annulment of the sin, however, for the assurance of divine forgiveness (sālaḥ), sacrificial expiation (kippēr) is always required” in the Levitical system. Kippēr in its most abstract sense thus comes to mean “atone” or “expiate.” “The meaning here is that the offerer is cleansed of his impurities/sins and becomes reconciled, ‘at one,’ with God.”

In the Pentateuch three broad categories of sin are recognized: unintentional sins, intentional sins short of apostasy, and intentional sins of apostasy. The Levitical personal sacrifices availed for expiation of sins only of the first two types; persons committing so-called high-handed sins were to be cut off from the people. The sacrifices had been given by the LORD to His covenant people to atone for their sins. Someone who committed a sin amounting to apostasy was, in effect, renouncing the covenant and so no longer a beneficiary of it. Nevertheless, his situation was not entirely hopeless: through repentance and the intercession of a mediator (such as Moses), God might pardon him (Exod 32:11-14; Num 11:2; 14:13-20; 16:22; 17:6-15; 25:8). The fact that sins could be thus pardoned without sacrifice underlines the fact that the animal sacrifices served a ritual or symbolic function (cf. Heb 10:1-4).

As intimated, one of the noteworthy features of these sacrificial offerings is that they were personal offerings in which the individual bringing the sacrifice was an active participant. In particular, the offerer was required to slay the animal himself. A telling hand-laying ritual accompanied the slaughter of the animal: the offerer was to lay his hand upon the animal’s head before slaying it (Lev 1:4). The Hebrew expression (sāmak yādô) indicates a forceful laying of the hand: one was to press his hand upon the head of the beast to be sacrificed. Although Milgrom has suggested that this “hand-leaning” ritual was meant merely to indicate ownership of the sacrificial animal, such an interpretation is implausible and trivializes an apparently important feature of the ceremony. Someone pulling an animal by a rope around its neck before the altar is just as obviously the person bringing his sacrifice as someone who carries in his hand a bird or grain for sacrifice, and if there were any doubt a verbal affirmation would suffice. Rather, this emphatic gesture of pressing one’s hand on the animal’s head is plausibly meant to indicate the identification of the offerer with the animal, so that the animal’s fate symbolizes his own. That is why “it shall be acceptable in your behalf as atonement for you” (Lev 1:4). Death is the penalty for sin, and the animal dies in place of the worshipper. This is not to say that the animal was punished in the place of the worshipper; rather, the animal suffered the death that would have been the worshipper’s punishment had it happened to him. This is at most a ritual punishment, a symbolic representation of what the offerer deserves. It was, in W. H. Moberly’s words, a “garish and arresting picture” of the fate of the sinner.

Following the slaughter of the animal, the priest carries out a blood rite, which involves splashing or applying the blood in some way, depending on what type of sacrifice were offered and for whom. The meaning of this blood rite is disputed. The key text in this regard is Leviticus 17:11: “The life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar; for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement.” According to Sklar, “It is commonly agreed that the atonement referred to by the verb [kippēr] in this verse is characterized by ransom.” For the expression translated “making atonement for your lives” (le kappēr ‘al napšōtêkem) is found elsewhere in the OT only twice, where it has the meaning “to ransom your lives”:

The use of money or valuables as payment in these passages clearly indicates the ransoming function of kippēr. Accordingly, Leviticus 17:11 may be rendered, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have assigned it to you on the altar to ransom your lives; for it is the blood that ransoms by means of life.” In Leviticus 4–5 the blood rite involves sprinkling or pouring the animal’s blood upon the altar, in line with Leviticus 17:11, indicating that the sacrificial blood serves to ransom the life of the offerer.

Some have claimed that what is important here is not the animal’s death but the life force represented by or contained in the blood. Wright, for example, asserts, “In the ancient Hebrew scriptures the death of the sacrificial animal was not the heart of the ritual; it was only the preliminary event. What mattered was that the blood, symbolizing the life which would ‘cover’ all impurities of whatever sort, would then be presented on the altar.”

What shall we make of this claim? In Lev 17:11, which governs the use of kippēr in sacrificial contexts, kippēr has the sense of “to ransom,” in the sense “to rescue” or “to redeem.” Milgrom thinks that the ransoming function of kippēr involves substitution, in which case the animal’s death would be of crucial importance, since it dies in the place of the offerer. It is not clear, however, that the concept of ransom per se implies substitution. In cases involving monetary forms of ransoming, it seems more appropriate to conceive of the ransom in terms of payment rather than substitution. (Such a financial form of ransom may, indeed, be a substitute for an animal sacrifice by the worshipper, but that is not to say that the financial payment is a substitute for the worshipper himself.) Nonetheless, in cases of animal sacrifice, the ransoming function of kippēr does seem to involve substitution. The animal’s life is given instead of the sinner’s. The key difference between the cases lies in the fact that, in contrast to monetary payments, the animal’s life is forfeited. Thus, the animal’s death is of vital importance.

This conclusion is confirmed by the centrality of death in other Pentateuchal atonement narratives, such as Moses’ offer to die to make atonement for the sin of the people (Exod 30:30-34), Phineas’ making atonement for Israel’s sin by killing the malefactors (Num 25:7-13), and the prescription to make atonement for an unsolved murder in open country by breaking the neck of a heifer in the vicinity of the corpse (Deut 21:1-8). Sklar summarizes, “In short, the animal’s lifeblood was accepted as the ransom payment in place of the offeror’s: it served as a mitigated penalty on the offeror’s behalf, graciously accepted by the Lord (the offended party), in this way rescuing the offeror (the offending party) from due punishment and restoring peace to the relationship between the sinner and the Lord.”

Finally, Wright’s claim that the public slaughter of a goat or bull was just “a preliminary event” strains credulity. The blood rite carried out by the priest following the slaughter is more plausibly regarded not as the heart of the ritual but as the presentation to God of the animal’s life, symbolized by the blood, given in place of the offerer’s. On Wright’s view, if ancient Israel had practiced bloodletting of animals rather than sacrifice, merely drawing some of their blood and presenting it to God on the altar would have sufficed to atone for Israel’s sins.

However we decide the meaning of the blood rite, the priest’s distribution of the blood of the sacrificial animal on the altar indicates minimally that the animal’s life has been offered to God as a sacrifice to expiate the offerer’s sin and so to save his life.

This day featured an extraordinary ritual involving the presentation of a pair of goats, one of which was sacrificially killed and the other (the so-called scapegoat) driven out into the desert, bearing away the sins of the people, which had been symbolically laid on the goat through a hand-laying ritual performed by the priest. The priestly actions involving the pair of goats are best seen as two aspects of the same ritual rather than as separate rituals. The high priest is said to receive not three animals but rather two goats for a sin offering and one ram. The two goats form a unit. In a similar ritual involving two birds offered for the cleansing of impurity, the blood of the slain bird cleanses the person while the release of the other bird symbolizes the removal of his impurity:

The case of the two goats is analogous. The one goat is sacrificed and the other released, symbolically carrying away the people’s sins. The blood sacrifice is essential. If sin could be expiated simply by laying it on a goat and driving it away into the desert, then the whole sacrificial system would become pointless. Rather, as we have seen, a sacrificial death is necessary: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life” (Lev 17:11 RSV).

The description of the Yom Kippur ritual differentiates between “mak(ing) atonement for the sanctuary, and . . . for the tent of meeting and for the altar” and “mak(ing) atonement for the priests and for all the people” (Lev 16:33). Making atonement for inanimate objects is to purge them of ritual uncleanness; making atonement for persons is to expiate their sins. “For on this day shall atonement be made for you, to cleanse you; from all your sins you shall be clean before the LORD” (v. 30). The sprinkled blood of the goat, along with the blood of the bull sacrificed by the priest, shall not only “make atonement for the sanctuary” but also make “atonement for himself and for his house and for all the assembly of Israel” (vv. 16-17). Once the altar has also been suitably purged, the priest may then “offer his burnt offering and the burnt offering of the people, and make atonement for himself and for the people” (v. 24). Thus, the blood of the sacrificial goat atones for the sins of the people, while the driving out of the other symbolizes the efficacy of the sacrifice in expiating their sin.

The construal of Jesus’ death as a sacrificial offering pervades the NT. As mentioned, the Greek hilas- equivalents of the Hebrew atonement words appear in the NT. In 1 John 2:2, we read that Jesus Christ “is the atoning sacrifice [hilasmos] for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” Two chapters later we read again that God “sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice [hilasmos] for our sins” (1 John 4:10). In Hebrews the author characterizes Jesus as “a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement [hilaskesthai] for the sins of the people” (2:17). And Paul in his exposition of his doctrine of justification through faith states that God put Christ forward as “a sacrifice of atonement [hilastērion] by his blood” (Rom 3:25). Averbeck makes the interesting observation that if we take this last verse to refer to a place of atonement, then in these passages we have Jesus represented as a vicarious sacrifice, a vicarious sacrificer, and a vicarious place of sacrifice—a “combination of motifs which bears a great deal of meaning for Christian theology.”

As we look at the NT authors’ employment of the motif of sacrifice with respect to Jesus’ death, it is worth bearing in mind that what ultimately matters for the Christian doctrine of the atonement is not how the sacrifices may have been originally understood but how the NT authors understood them. For example, the author of Hebrews says flatly, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb 10:4). He thereby reveals his understanding of the OT sacrifices as expiatory in intention, if not in reality, and his view of Christ’s self-sacrifice as truly expiatory. The NT authors did not think of Christ on the analogy of a bloodless scapegoat or grain offering but focused on the animal sacrifices, the author of Hebrews going so far as to say that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb 9:22).

The NT writers think of Christ’s death as both expiatory and propitiatory. With regard to the expiation of sin, the author of Hebrews hammers home the point that in contrast to the OT sacrifices, which “can never take away sins” (10:11), Christ, “having been offered once to bear the sins of many” (9:28), “remove[d] sin by the sacrifice of himself” (9:26), so that “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:10). John presents Christ as a Passover lamb whose death, in contrast to the original Passover sacrifice, is expiatory: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Paul uses technical Levitical terminology to refer to Christ as “a sin offering” (peri hamartias) (Rom 8:3; cf. Heb 10:6, 8; LXX Isa 53:10; Lev 4:35; 5:6; 6:10), the function of which, as we have seen, was expiatory. Those who have believed in Christ, he says, “have been justified by his blood” (Rom 5:9). Christ’s righteous act of obedience “leads to justification and life for all. For . . . by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (5:18-19). Through Christ’s blood our guilt has been expunged.

With regard to propitiation, Christ’s atoning death delivers us from the judgment of God. John presents Christ in legal terms as our advocate before the divine Judge: “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 2:1-2; cf. 4:10). Christ expiates our sin and thereby carries our case before the divine tribunal, as if to answer the question, “Who will come before You to plead as an advocate for the unrighteous?” (Wis 12:12). The answer is Jesus Christ the righteous.

Paul similarly holds that Christ delivers us from the judgment and wrath of God. The protracted debate over the linguistic meaning of hilastērion in Romans 3:25, “whom God put forward as a hilastērion in his blood,” has unfortunately diverted attention from the conceptual necessity of propitiation in Paul’s thinking. We shall return to this debate in chapter 4 when we treat the motif of divine justice. For now we note merely that whatever word Paul might have used here—had he written, for example, peri hamartias, as in Romans 8:3, instead of hilastērion—the context would still require that Christ’s death provide the solution to the problem described in chapters 1–3. Paul’s crowning statement concerning Christ’s atoning death (Rom 3:21-26) comes against the backdrop of his exposition of God’s wrath upon and condemnation of mankind for its sin. Something in Paul’s ensuing exposition of Christ’s death must solve this problem, averting God’s wrath and rescuing us from the death sentence hanging over us. The solution is found in Christ, “whom God put forward as a hilastērion in his blood” (3:25).

For Paul Christ’s death is conceived to be both expiatory and propitiatory: “Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God” (5:9). The first clause expresses expiation, the second propitiation. Given the manifold effects of Christ’s blood, hilastērion is doubtlessly a multivalent metaphor in Paul’s usage, connoting both expiation and propitiation, so that a vague translation capturing the metaphor, for example, “place of propitiation,” is about the best one can give.

The table of the gem that is the biblical doctrine of the atonement is the motif of sacrifice. It predominates among all other biblical motifs used to interpret Jesus’ death and features in the way Jesus saw his own death. Christ’s death is interpreted by NT authors in terms of OT sacrifices such as the Passover sacrifice; the Levitical personal, animal sacrifices; and the Yom Kippur sacrifices. These sacrifices served the fundamental purposes of expunging sin/impurity and of appeasing God’s wrath. By securing divine forgiveness of sins, they served to reconcile God and sinners. Any biblically adequate theory of the atonement must, then, make good sense of Christ’s death as an expiatory and propitiatory sacrifice to God the Father.