Christ The High Priest
Our Passiontide begins today with a reading from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews in which the apostle outlines the whole reason why there ever had to be a Passion and Divine Sacrifice in the first place. It’s a simple outline, and even if you’ve heard it before, remains a useful reminder of the essential reasons why our Lord suffered and died as he did.
It all begins with the very act of Creation in which God created man out of love. He loved us before we even existed in time, and he wanted to create beings with free will who would love him in return. Stars and planets could not love him, nor trees and mountains, nor even the birds and fishes and animals who roam the earth. Animals may love instinctively, but it is not a love that is rationalized and has the full and voluntary assent of their will. Dogs, for example, do not act out of logical reason, but always out of instinct. Even when they sometimes perform amazing acts of courage to protect a member of our family, it is out of a very different kind of love than we should have for God and our neighbor. A dog’s love is one of instinct, something as natural to them as chewing a bone when they’re hungry.
God demands a higher form of love, a love that we freely choose to give him. It is the love that comes from sacrifice and results in sacrifice. As Abraham Lincoln expressed it, sacrifice is the last full measure of devotion, it is the measure of love. The natural yet divinely inspired aspiration of man has always been to give back our love to God in the form of sacrifice. But what should we sacrifice? The two sons of Adam, Cain and Abel, each offered up their own sacrifices to God, Abel offering up the best lamb of his flock, and Cain making do with a handful of fruit and vegetables. One sacrifice was accepted by God, the other was not. Why? Because animals are superior to vegetables, steak is superior to broccoli, ask any child! But actually it goes beyond the banal accident of taste—animals are higher lifeforms. They have the ability to move from one place to another, while plants are rooted in the ground and rely on external factors like wind or animals for pollination and seed dispersal. Additionally, animals have complex organ systems and sensory organs, enabling them to respond to their environment, whereas plants lack these specialized structures. If we want to give God the best of what we have, we sacrifice animals, not plants to him, and so it was through the ages—we offered up the best of what we had, the first-born and unblemished of our flocks, spilling their blood and presenting it to our almighty Father.
However, God’s love for us is infinite. Our offences against him are thus infinite in their effect. How can the sacrifice of a created being, a mere animal, be sufficient to make reparation for an infinite offence? The ignorant pagans who knew not God, still understood that human beings are superior to animals. They concluded, mistakenly, that human sacrifice would logically be better than animal sacrifice. Think of the natives of Skull Island in the movie King Kong: they tried to appease their god Kong by offering him one of their best-looking maidens; but when they saw a blonde for the first time, they immediately untied the native girl and kidnapped Fay Wray, perceiving her as somehow superior and therefore a more suitable sacrifice to Kong. Where they failed of course, was in their lack of knowledge and understanding of the one true God, the God of Abraham, who does not require or desire human sacrifice. To prove to mankind once and for all that human sacrifice was abhorrent to him, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice, or at least be willing to sacrifice, this higher lifeform, a human being, his first-born son, Isaac. But then, as we know, God stopped the hand of Abraham, even as he was prepared to sacrifice his son in order to obey what he thought was the divine will. God’s angel pointed out a nearby ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. Abraham sacrificed this animal instead, and so the chosen people of God continued to offer animal sacrifice from that time on.
God demands the best. But even though man, who has the use of reason, is thereby superior to the other animals, God did not want us to sacrifice each other to him. He loved man too much for that. Besides, the whole idea of sacrifice to God was based not on the idea of appeasing God, as the pagans believed, but on making reparation for our own offences against him. We sacrifice to God, not to ward off tornadoes and earthquakes, war, pestilence or famine, but because we are truly devastated at the thought that we have offended God, who is all-good and deserving of all our love. How many times have we offended God? When we add up all the sins of every man who has ever lived or ever will live, we arrive at a number that can never be counted or imagined. What kind of sacrifice could possibly satisfy for such a huge number of crimes? What makes it more impossible is that God is infinite, so any offence against him, no matter how small, is also infinite in its gravity. When God is offended, it’s an infinite offence. Finite man can never make sufficient reparation for the infinitely irreparable.
The gates of heaven had been closed since Adam’s first sin condemned him and his descendants. We were banished not only from the Garden of Eden, but from any human possibility of attaining heaven. It was truly Paradise Lost. We could not make reparation—animal sacrifice was not enough, even human sacrifice was insufficient, as well as being abhorrent. This is where the divine Providence of God intervened in this impossible state of human affairs. It was really the only solution to the problem and only God could accomplish it. The infinite satisfaction required for the infinite offences against God could only be accomplished by that one infinite divine Being. And so, out of his pure love for the treacherous mankind that had betrayed that love, God sent his only-begotten and immaculate Son as High Priest to offer up himself for our sins. We owe him infinite gratitude for this act of sacrifice Christ made for us, and yet, that’s something beyond our power to give. Nevertheless, it gives us some small idea of how much we owe to our blessed Lord and Saviour, some tiny inkling of the kind of imperfect sacrifices we should be willing to make.
As we enter upon the most holy season of Passiontide, let us remind ourselves that the Son of God actually did give us the means and the possibility to offer up that infinite and perfect sacrifice to his Father in heaven. The Jewish priesthood with their animal sacrifices was now abolished, and a new priesthood established at the Last Supper. Because the Passion and Death of Christ was truly an infinite sacrifice, it is one not confined to a mere moment in history. It was to be continuously renewed in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The sacrifice of Christ the High Priest would now be offered daily by his priests of the new and everlasting covenant. Today, we are able to partake of the graces of Calvary at that same Mass offered here today. Our union with God, the reason we were created, can be realized in our own souls here and now at this altar. Let us not neglect our Lord’s invitation to do so. We are not dogs who love their master because it is part of their nature to do so. Our human nature allows us to choose whether we will love our Master or not. It’s up to us to make the right choice.