The theme of Holy Week is deliverance. It was last year, it is this year, it will be next year. In the midst of pandemic we might be inclined to ask, as does the psalmist, “Why are you cast down O my soul and why are you disquieted within me?” And then comes the answer, “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.”
The story of deliverance starts in the beginning with God doing a new thing: creating the universe and bringing life into it (Episcopalians have no problem with science, big bangs, and evolution). It continues with God doing new things on nearly every page of scripture. For all of it, God had long promised another new thing to come, something yet more astounding than anything before.
As Jesus rode into Jerusalem, humble, on a donkey, Zechariah’s prophecy was being acted out as an announcement that the new thing had arrived (Zech. 9). The servant of whom God had spoken through Isaiah was Jesus, and the promised new thing was about to be fully revealed (Isa. 42). It would be the sealing of the new covenant God had promised through the voice of Jeremiah so many centuries before (Jer. 31). It was to be a new covenant sealed in blood.
I have written before about the importance of blood as the symbol of a binding covenant. Hebrew scripture affirms that blood flowing through all living creatures is holy, the bringer of life that is God’s own gift. Therefore, something sealed in blood was holy and irrevocable. Other cultures have understood it in other ways. The custom of making blood brothers/sister by exchanging blood was common world wide, not just in old cowboy movies. It confirmed a seal that could not be broken. At God’s command, Moses took sacrificial blood, splattered it on the altar and then on the people as the seal of the covenant between God and God’s people (Exodus 24). It was the first covenant.
In Christian scripture, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews attested that Jesus is the mediator of the new covenant, not in the blood of an animal, but in his own blood, making us, in a sense, his blood brothers and sisters. We renew that covenant every time we participate in the Holy Eucharist (Holy Communion). It is a costly exchange. Not only was Jesus crucified, we are asked to surrender our very souls to him. We like to think we’re self sufficient and can earn our own way, but as the psalmist wrote, “Truly, no ransom avails for one’s life, there is no price one can give to God for it. For the ransom of life is costly, and can never suffice that one should live on forever and never see the grave” (Ps 49). Indeed, in Christ no ransom was paid. The new covenant in Christ’s blood is the fulfillment of God promise, that we are his by grace, not for today only, but for eternity. It is sealed.
It is a covenant of healing, reconciliation, justice, and peace. Our obligation as Christians is to live into it as best we can.
As we plunge ourselves into the “darkness” of Holy Week, I know we are journeying to “deliverance”,with His resurrection….mahalo for calling us to remember and hope for deliverance!
Amene…