My last year at seminary, one of the theology professors taught a course called something like “Theories of the Atonement.”  Over centuries, theologians have presented different explanations regarding the atonement, that reconciliation between pure God and impure man that came about through Jesus Christ: atonement.  I didn’t take that class; I was taking classes that focused on the books of the Bible.  Many who took the theology class were quite taken with the theory, the explanation, of Christ as moral exemplar.  The gist is that Jesus shows us how to live, and as we strive and struggle to live up to the moral example of Jesus, we find, we receive, that reconciliation.  The example of his life purifies our lives.

The clean beauty of this theological theory is that it does away with the cross.  The cross, you see, is rather an embarrassment to people with more than a high school education—you did know that, didn’t you?  The notion that Christ’s death upon the cross was in any way redeeming or atoning, or reconciling, is just, well, frankly, uncivilized.  How could any decent human being worship, let alone love a God who demands blood, the blood of His own Son?

We should be shocked.  We should be staggered and aghast.  And what the Bible says, very consistently, very plainly, despite the theologians’ efforts to say something closer to their own delicate taste, is that Christ came to offer himself up on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for the sin of impure man, that we might be reconciled with God.  God arranged this.  God foreknew this.  We’re at the very heart of mystery, here, beloved.

And you are, indeed, loved, loved by God, who loves you so very much, that the Father sent the Son in the power, grace, and blessing of the Holy Spirit, sent Jesus to teach, work the works of his Father in heaven, proclaiming, healing, blessing, sent Jesus to make his way to Jerusalem, to the Temple, and to that hill, far away, there to die, die that we might live, live in the blessedness of a good conscience.

Christ’s blood purifies, purifies our conscience.  We can have a good conscience now, because of the blood of Christ.  When Jesus speaks with his beloved followers about the sacrifice he was making, he did so at a meal, around a table.  He told them to take the bread he had blessed and given them as his body, offered up for them, in place of them—Jesus would take their place for the punishment of their sin; eating this bread is a solemn, hopeful, holy, joyful sign of our new fellowship with God Himself, through Jesus Christ.  Where we ought to have been—the cross—there Jesus was.  He tells his beloved, God’s beloved, that the cup he gave them was his blood of the covenant, that solemn pact between Creator and created, that holy agreement for life.  The blood washes away the impurity, the sin.  Christ’s blood purifies.  When you drink, remember this: Christ purifies you, and the Holy Spirit is purifying you.

His flesh.  His blood.  Brutal?  Barbaric?  Profound!  Mysterious!  True!

Theologians produce volumes to tell us how Christ made atonement for us, how we are reconciled with God.  The Bible tells us we are reconciled through the cross.  No cross, no reconciliation.  No death, no atonement.  No blood, no cleansing.  By his wounds, we are healed.

The preacher of the sermon we call Hebrews understood this, and wanted his listeners to understand, too.  Jesus, our High Priest, because of whom we need no other priest, is now in the heavenly Tabernacle, the heavenly Temple.  He took blood with him, into the heavenly tent, into the presence of his Father.  He took his own blood that he poured out for us.  His own blood, for us.  Why?  Love.  The heart of the mystery.  God’s love for His own, His own people, the people He has called from the beginning.  From the beginning, God knew who would be His own: who would be after His own heart, in Christ, by the Spirit.

Throughout the Old Testament, animals are ritually slaughtered to make atonement.  Their blood, ritually, purified the bodies of the faithful from their ritual impurities.  There was one impurity, though, that no amount of bulls, or rams, or goats’ blood could wash away, and all the prophets knew it: the impurity of the heart, the impurity of the conscience.  The change we needed was not external.  The change we needed and could in no way achieve for ourselves was a change of mind, a change of heart.  The prophets tell us God will accomplish it.  John the Baptist proclaimed that God was even now accomplishing it.  Jesus Christ came to show us God accomplishing it.  The Holy Spirit is with us to remind and assure us that God has accomplished it and will accomplish that change in us: a change of mind, a change of heart.

Through his blood, poured out, in sacrifice, through his death on the cross, Jesus Christ has obtained, for us—for us—eternal salvation: peace with God: blessing, courage, grace, hope, patience, perseverance, love, life.

I read often that human beings have an innate craving for truth.  I hope that’s true; I like to think it is.  One of the charges most often leveled against Christians is that we are hypocrites: we do not live according to what we say we believe.  Unlike who?  Another way of putting this is that we are not living according to the truth we profess.  One of the biggest charges that philosophers in the twentieth century leveled against society was that we lived a lie, that we knew it and did nothing about it: we lived in bad conscience.

Beloved, this is not a revolutionary observation: we’ve been seeing it from the very beginning.  Eve listened to the serpent, who told her she could live a lie, and she believed the serpent because she wanted to.  She trusted the temptation more than she trusted God, who had told Adam the truth quite plainly.  People have been trusting lies rather than God ever since.  Oh, we may want God, some god, someway, and we want the lie, too.  God challenges us; the lie comforts and justifies us.  We who have said Yes to Jesus know what living with the truth of sin has gotten the world: we are heirs to a long legacy of violence, brutality, ugliness, hatred.  We know that living as God told us to would look nothing like any of that.

So, we come to this table, at the urging of the Holy Spirit, at the invitation of our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ.  We come, to eat his flesh and to drink his blood, to be reminded and assured that, in him, we are cleansed; that, in him, we have hope for a good conscience.  This good conscience is the knowledge that we are not living a lie.  We haven’t attained perfection and we will not, in this life.  This is why we confess, every Sunday, why we also confess in our daily praying.  It’s also why we forgive.  The good conscience Christ imparts is the sure belief that, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in us, we are learning more and more the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, true and false, holy and cursed.  We grow in truth; we grow in reality.  We become less confused, less addicted to lies: self-serving, self-justifying, self-blessing lies.

This good conscience being formed in us even today, in this very hour, through this Word proclaimed and this Word sealed upon us, points us always toward Jesus: our righteousness, our hope, and our life.  Through what he continues to do for us, every day, every hour, we are being purified from dead works, works of death—sin.  What this cleansing leaves behind is blessing, spiritual health, the vigor, the strength, the desire, the joy of doing righteousness, living for God, confidence that we will live as God created us to live, with one another and with our still fallen fellow human beings—to whom God sends us.

Receive Christ today, beloved, and know that you are being built up, in Christ, and know that you are being purified, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  And be glad, and be at peace.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.