Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s Epistle reading is a beautiful and rhetorically powerful description of Christ’s sacrifice. 

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes how Jesus has become “the mediator of a new covenant,” for even as the blood of “calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop” were sprinkled “on the scroll and on the people,” on: “the tent and all the vessels used in worship.” We are reminded that under the law “almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”

Christ, however, “did not entered into a sanctuary made with human hands,” but rather, he ascended into heaven itself. Therefore, reasons the author, the “heavenly things need better sacrifices” than the aforementioned “sketches of heavenly things.”

In Christ’s perfect sacrifice, offered “once for all,” he removes the sins of the world. In the future, Christ will return, “not to deal with sin”—that’s already been done—but “to save those who eagerly wait for him.”

We might neatly fuse this teaching with St. John’s theology of Jesus as the Lamb of God: Jesus as the perfect Paschal sacrifice, the “Lamb that was slain” that appears throughout the book of Revelation.

This is the sacrifice we proclaim every Sunday in the Paschal Mystery of the Eucharistic liturgy— 

Christ has died,
Christ is risen,
Christ will come again.

 —as well as the final Ordinary of the Mass (sung here in Latin by the ever moving and immaculate Choir of Westminster Cathedral, London, in William Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices):

O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin