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The Love That Kept the Shepherds

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
December 13, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Ezekiel 34:11-16
Revelation 5:6-14

“For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.”

“To thee, dread Lamb!” sang the shepherds in the ominous words of metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw, “Whose love must keep the shepherds while they feed the sheep.” How can we begin to speak of the love that came down at Christmas? What words wait to be borrowed from Scripture so that he might be born in us today? When will we be found at his stable not with lamb and turtle dove but with ourselves become our own best sacrifice?

I confess that Crashaw set me on a hard tack this week toward Bethlehem, for with each step I realized more and more how the love that kept the shepherds necessarily must turn us toward Christ’s sacrifice and death in order that we may truly behold his birth. When the shepherds hailed the dread lamb whose love must keep them in the fields where they abide, they beheld in the babe a first-born son who was surely set to die, and so at his birth confessed themselves to be their own best sacrifice if they should follow him. T.S. Eliot’s magi beheld the same and asked at the end of their journey if they had been led all that way for

Lurking behind the dread lamb of the shepherd’s hymn and the death the magi saw in Christ’s birth is the First Temple liturgy, according to Jesuit theologian James Alison, which for centuries had involved the sacrifice of a lamb to atone for human sins. Just how the lamb effected the reconciliation between God and mortals continues as a matter of debate to this day. The assumption of most Christians is this: the priest who kills the lamb and sprinkles its blood acts on behalf of sinners to appease God’s wrath at human sin, Christ being both priest and sacrifice. If asked in this presbytery how the atonement “works”, you had better be ready to answer that Christ was born to be sacrificed so that his blood would satisfy God’s righteous and wrathful need for our own because of our sin. The love that kept the shepherds in orthodox circles would be a sacrificial love that has paid the price for our sin and so reconciled us to God at great cost.

This, says Alison to my delight, is a pagan notion read into Scripture, a notion that completely mistakes the meaning of the atonement liturgy and so misses the magnitude of the love revealed in the manger and on the cross. To be grasped by the love that came down at Christmas, the love that keeps the shepherds, we must quit trying to grasp various wit hour minds theories concerning how things work between human beings and God; rather we must enter into the ancient Jewish enactment of the atonement as if it were something happening to us too.

The liturgy begins with the priest’s sacrifice of a bull or a calf for his own sins, after which he dons the perfectly white robe of an angel, “one of whose names was ‘the Son of God.’” Next he puts on the name of YHWH—four letters contained in the phylacteries either on his forehead or wrapped around his arms--that enable him to enter the Holy of Holies. As Alison puts it, “He was to be Yahweh for the day, an angelic emanation of God most high.” This is literally high drama!

Previously two lambs had been brought to the Temple, one being chosen by lot to be the Lord and to enter the Holy of Holies where God dwelt beyond time, matter and space. There the chosen lamb is sacrificed and the blood is first sprinkled on the Mercy seat of the One whose mercy is from everlasting to everlasting. The priest-turned-Yahweh for the day then prepares to emerge through the veil between earth and heaven into time, matter and space, into creation. Now he dons another robe that is of the same material as the veil separating the dwelling place of God from the beginning of creation and parts the veil. His reentry into the sanctuary is as though God were coming into the created world to undo the damage we have done, by sprinkling the blood of the same lamb [of the Lord] on the people.

“Here’s the interesting point,” says Alison. The congregation understood “the high priest at this stage was acting ‘in the person of Yahweh’, [understood that] it was the Lord’s blood that was being sprinkled. This was a divine movement to set people free. It was not as we so often imagine—a priest satisfying a divinity….The movement is not inward toward the Holy of Holies”: the movement is outwards from God’s dwelling toward the whole of creation!

But it gets better! After sprinkling the blood of the Lord on the people, the one bearing the people’s sin [the priest now robed in the garment of creation] places the accumulated sin on the head of the second sheep or goat—“what we call the ‘scapegoat’--which then would be driven out of town to the edge of a cliff and cast down where it would be killed, so that the people’s sins would be taken away.”

Incredibly, the understanding of atonement that presumes God to be angry and in need of appeasement turns out to be a pre-Jewish, pre-Christian pagan notion. In the liturgy of the First Temple, atonement was a gift of God offered to the people. This is the same God who came to the sheep scattered in exile and acted out of the same love saying, “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.” And it is the same Son of God “who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human likeness he emptied himself and become obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Clearly the writers of the New Testament saw Jesus as the one true high priest, coming out from the Holy Place, and entering time, matter and space to offer himself as the repairer of the breach, as an embodiment of the love that would go to the ends of the earth to right what we had wronged, mend what we had broken, rescue our lonely lost selves and thus redeem the whole creation. This indeed was the love that kept the shepherds!

But the New Testament writers saw more. If you consider the history of the sacrificial system, most agree that the more primitive the society, the more likely the preferred sacrifice was a human being. To keep the human sacrificial machine running, at some point, war alone becomes necessary to provide enough victims. Then when human beings wake to the reality of the other being human too, animals are substituted for people [some say this shift in sacrificial practice is the point of the sacrifice of Isaac], a system easier to carry out because unlike human beings, animals do not fight back. They go dumb to their slaughter. Even more sophisticated societies make money the substitute to be offered instead of lambs or goats or bulls or calves. Still others elevate symbols such as wine and bread.

“The interesting thing,” says Alison, “is that Jesus takes exactly the inverse route….He says at the last supper, ‘Instead of the bread and wine, this is the lamb, and the lamb is a human being.’ In other words, Jesus substitutes a human being back into the centre of the sacrificial system and in so doing reveals the mendacious [and murderous] principle that is [at the centre] of the world.” That is to say, he substitutes himself at the centre of what the liturgical tradition was both remembering and covering up, namely human sacrifice, a sacrifice he now makes “once for all”, a sacrifice that ultimately defeats death and frees us to live no longer sacrificing one another. When we break bread and drink from the cup, we remember the sacrifice that has denied death its victory and has taken from death its sting.

But we do more. We look forward to the time beyond time, says Scripture, when we will sing with myriads and myriads and thousands of thousands, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” Gathered at last in the Holy of Holies, we behold the lamb face to face—the creature “not meant for destiny” writes New Testament scholar Paul Achtemeier, but for slaughter. “A lamb,” he says, “is a transitory thing. Gamboling in the fresh springtime of its life, a lamb is destined to disappear.” But not, writes John, for “I saw the Lamb standing, as though it had been slain.” Slain indeed, but death is finally not the destiny this lamb reveals. He stands alive, restored from death and thus its conqueror.

Now to tell you the truth, I step back from this incredibly dense reading of sacrifice in Scripture on the third Sunday of Advent and long for a few sweet carols, some mistletoe and mulled cider, a tree to trim, maybe even another breakfast with Santa. But I know the sentiment of love cannot begin to crack open my heart and make way for love’s architecture to erect a stable for his birth. Only by way of his death do you and I behold with the shepherds and the magi the Son who left the Holy of Holies, who quit the dwelling place of God to enter creation and dwell with us. Here his readiness to rub shoulders with the outcasts, to dine with sinners, to touch the unclean takes on significance as he makes his way to Golgotha, bearing in his body the accumulated sins of the whole world. I cannot help but think that he is both “the lamb as Lord” in the eye of God and “the lamb as scapegoat” in the eyes of society. The blood of his sacrifice has been sprinkled upon the whole creation as the Lord of creation while the sins of the whole world have been placed on the head of him who was driven outside the city walls to be killed, so that human violence could claim one last victim.

“We will tell you two terrible things,” said the magi as they left the manger according to preacher Frederick Buechner. “What we saw on the face of the newborn child was his death. A fool could have seen it as well. It sat on his head like a crown or a bat, this death he would die. And we saw as sure as the earth beneath our feet, that to bow in submission before Him would be to share that death. And now brothers and sisters, [we] will ask you a terrible question, and God knows [we] ask it also of [ourselves]. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him is the only life?” Thus the shepherds sang at the last:

Thanks be to God for this dread lamb in whose death we are born to life eternal, at whose birth we die to life without him and in whose love we are kept, now and forever. Amen.

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