Happy Belated Yom Kippur

Last Thursday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. This is a day for seeking forgiveness from God, and from others that you have wronged.

The date went along quite well with something I had been reading from N.T. Wright, an Anglican bishop and one of my favorite authors. In “Following Jesus,” a collection of sermons and lectures on the broad theme of discipleship, he discusses the idea of sacrifice.

We modern Westerners, he says, have our own notions of sacrifice – a term used generally when people are encouraged to give up something for the sake of something else. But we are pretty far removed from what most humans through history have thought of sacrifice – the shedding of the blood of an animal, and sometimes people, for a religious purpose. Yom Kippur was a day of blood sacrifice for most of Jewish history, for instance.

The religious reasons for such a thing, Wright proposes, are two-fold.
1) By offering a symbol of creation to the creator, we remind ourselves of our place in the grand scheme of things. That is, we are below God and above creation, though still connected with both. The temptation to elevate ourselves to the place of God, and to use creation for our own selfish ends, is fought by offering a piece of creation to God.

2) The second thing is deeply rooted in humanity. We sense that something is wrong, and that in order to set it right, a price must be paid – a blood price.

The utmost sacrifice, of course, is to offer up ourselves, or own lives.

And then Wright makes a powerful statement: “The sacrifice of Jesus is the moment when the human race, in the person of a single man, offers itself to the creator.”

A Day of Atonement indeed.