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21 Chapter 2 The Sacrificial Praise of the Eucharist A Meditation Aquarrel over a sacrifice disturbs the peace of the postlapsarian world of the Bible very early in its history, in the disastrous, second-generation exchange between Cain and his brother Abel (Genesis 4). The cultic offering of sacrifices, usually involving the slaughter of animals, is present everywhere in the Hebrew Bible, but not always seen by biblical authors in a positive light. For example , the prophetic writer of the first chapters of the book of Isaiah denounces the obsessive cultic practices and blood sacrifices, indeed the religiosity, including liturgical sacrifices, of his people and calls them instead to pursue more practically useful, ethical activities in the care for orphans and widows and the general maintenance of the wellbeing of society. Not the offering of burnt sacrifices but the sacrifice and offering of a pure heart is God’s desire.1 Sacrifice—sacrament—sacred: the root word means that which is set apart, separated out for God rather than for human use. It is the giving back to God of a portion (a tithe, or a tenth) of that which he has given us for our use, but which remains his, and which ensures a right relationship—at-onement—between God and the people he has blessed with good things. The church itself—the “ecclesia”—is the community that is called out to be “sacred” or distinct from the rest of the world and to be offered back to God that good order is maintained and “human life is preserved and honoured by God.”2 Properly, the service of the church, therefore, is to God and then only through God and his purposes, to the world. 22 The Sacred Community At the same time, there is the related sense in the root word that has come to predominate in the meaning of sacrifice in broad modern usage: that is, the sense of “giving something up”—that which is set apart is costly and involves loss and perhaps pain, both to those who have “sacrificed” something valuable and to the “victim,” that which is sacrificed and is therefore cut away and lost from the rest of the world. In Leviticus 16 is described the fate of the “scapegoat,” the sin eater on whom all the sins of the community are placed, so that the animal released alone into the wilderness to die carries away all the sins of the people with it, in a sense offering them to the Lord. “But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness” (Lev 16:10). The Pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt’s painting, The Scapegoat (1854), which was painted by the very shores of the Dead Sea, captures the desolation and agony of the poor, innocent animal on whom sins are heaped—a desolation that is both internal and external (see plate 1).3 Hunt brings to bear his developing theory of painting to a relentless and distressing accuracy of detail in his work, so that to see this picture is actually to see the desolation of the sins of the people, the desert a hell, the red garland on the goat’s head a savage reminder of the transgressions it bears. The innocence of the poor goat is crucial, for it bears away the sins of others. And so the cultic tradition is never finally eradicated by the rational common sense of the ethical revisionism of the prophetic tradition. For it is the offering of the body of the innocent victim, and the offering of the lifeblood back to God, that effects not simply the rebalance of society, but, far more importantly, the covenantal balance of the relationship between the divine and the human, between God and his people. That which is innocent and pure is given back to God and is given up to him to effect an atonement—a making one and whole of the fundamental and necessary relationship between the human and the divine upon which all else depends. It is upon this theological tradition that the Christian Eucharist is founded, its roots in the Jewish festival of the Passover and the sacrifice of the lamb as an anamnesis, an enactment as a memorial of the passage of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, through the waters of the Red Sea and the...

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