Just This Offering

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Our online study of Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ continued last night in my absence. I have had her book at the front of my mind as I travel through Turkey on pilgrimage. From the Hagia Sophia to the carved-out churches of Cappadocia— places lavished with iconography— I cannot help but notice a dearth of the image many Christians take to be central to the witness of the faith, the cross.

The disconnect between an absence of the crucifixion in ancient iconography and its preponderance in popular contemporary piety raises a question I first stumbled upon several years ago during an Ash Wednesday service.

Preaching on Psalm 51 several Lents ago, I noticed something as I followed along with the lector from the pew Bible open on my lap. David’s bracing, vulnerable confession of sin in the psalm concludes with this startling moment of recognition:

“…for you [God] have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give you a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is only a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Surely this is a stunning epiphany to anyone who knows the Old Testament. In Israel’s scriptures sacrifices are frequent, systematized, and not only a delight to the LORD but prescribed by God himself to Moses from atop Mt. Sinai. Consider even the remarkable dissonance— what I discovered on Ash Wednesday only because my pew Bible was opened, flat on my lap— of David’s confession of sin with the psalm that immediately precedes it in the Bible’s prayerbook.

‘Those who bring their thanksgiving sacrifice [as commanded in Leviticus] honor me,” the LORD declares.

In Psalm 50.

Israel’s prophets, who come after David, voicing God’s judgment upon the greed and false piety of David’s heirs, introduce an even more virulent strain into the Bible’s thinking about the necessity and merit of sacrifice. The Christian Old Testament closes with the prophet Malachi heaping scorn upon sacrifices offered in vain, and the angry prophet of the rural poor, Amos, most famously announces God’s wrath thusly:

“…you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground!

…the Lord is his name, who makes destruction flash out against the strong, so that destruction comes upon the fortress.

For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins—you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord!

Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake.

Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs. I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

We recognize those last lines abut justice thanks Dr. King’s sermon on the National Mall, yet excised from their original context, they lose their punch. And (I suspect for white Christians) the connection to King turns Amos from a prophet of judgment into a dispenser of vague liberal hope in the triumph of the human spirit.

The canon’s juxtaposition of Psalm 50 with Psalm 51 is not an outlier.

For anyone with ears to hear, there is precisely this unresolved tension running throughout the Old Testament as to whether sacrifice is something that God in any way desires or requires. What do Christians make of this ambivalence regarding sacrifice when we consider what we take to be the ultimate sacrifice, Christ’s expiatory offering of suffering and death upon the cross? Is God’s self-giving in the Son with their Spirit pleasing to the Father, as the poet of Psalm 50 might imagine? Or is the murder of an innocent scapegoat upon a cross but another example of what Amos decries as the status quo’s practice of turning justice into wormwood? Worse, would God look upon us, who turn such an injustice as the crucifixion into a pleasing, even necessary sacrifice, and thunder “I hate, I despise, your worship?”

What do Christians make of this ambivalence regarding sacrifice when we consider what we consider the ultimate sacrifice, Christ’s expiatory offering of suffering and death upon the cross?

Fleming Rutledge’s book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ has become a guide to which I turn every season of Lent. Rereading it recently, I recalled observations offered by the novelist Marilynne Robinson, whose keen theological mind nearly matches her peerless prose. In an essay entitled “Metaphysics,” from her book the Givenness of Things, Robinson writes:

“I know the Bible interprets Christ’s passion as expiatory, the world’s suffering as the consequence of sin, for which Christ is a guilt offering. I note as well that when God speaks through the prophets about sacrifice he treats it as the expression of a human need he tolerates rather than as anything he desires.

Certainly the death of Christ has been understood as expiation for human sin through the whole length of church history, and I defer with all possible sincerity to the central tenets of the Christian tradition, but as for myself, I confess that I struggle to understand the phenomenon of ritual sacrifice, and the Crucifixion when explicated in its terms. The concept is so central to the tradition that I have no desire to take issue with it, and so difficult for me that I leave it for others to interpret. If it answered to a deep human need at other times, and it answers now to other spirits than mine, then it is a great kindness of God toward them, and a great proof of God’s attentive grace toward his creatures.

I do not by any means doubt the gravity of human sin or question our radical indebtedness to God. I suppose it is my high Christology, my Trinitarianism, that makes me falter at the idea God could be in any sense repaid or satisfied by the death of his incarnate self.”

As we progress through Lent and Pascha looms ever nearer, I wonder:

Is our thinking that Christ’s cross is a necessary sacrifice for sin a kindness God permits?

Is it a kindness the LORD allows because, though God hates all devotion devoid of any concern for justice, it’s just this offering, needful or not, that every Good Friday, between noon and three, delivers what God most truly desires—a broken and contrite heart?

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