“The author of life you put to death,

but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses.

…God has thus brought to fulfillment

what he had announced beforehand

through the mouth of all the prophets,

that his Christ would suffer.

Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away.”

“But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father,

Jesus Christ the righteous one.

He is expiation for our sins,

and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world.”

“‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,

that everything written about me in the law of Moses

and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.’

Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

And he said to them,

‘Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer

and rise from the dead on the third day

and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins,

would be preached in his name

to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’”

The Law of Moses, after the golden calf incident, established a sacrificial system for the Israelites. Offerings were made to God of agricultural products or animals in atonement for sins, as a memorial of God’s past saving actions, as a gift of what God had given, for acceptance by the Lord God Almighty, or as a symbol of one’s self being given to God. Many of these sacrifices were bloody. They involved the offerer slaughtering the animal themselves by twisting and removing a head (as for birds) or slitting a throat before giving the animal to the priests for the ritual portions of the sacrifice (such as sprinkling, pouring, or smearing blood on the altar and burning carcasses). In either case, blood was drained and used, as a symbol of life itself. The offerer would also press their hand into the head of the victim to signify the transference of sins or the identification of one’s life with the life to be given. This system, occasionally critiqued by the prophets for its legalism or transference of responsibility for actually living a just and merciful life, was much in place in Jesus’s day. Hundreds or thousands of such sacrifices were done daily at the Temple. This required significant logistics, from supplying enough wood to burn to special drainage systems for all of the blood. It is this sacrificial system, however, that gives context and meaning to Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross. 

While the original sacrificial system had an immediate and practical purpose for the Israelites, it also prefigured Jesus’s own self giving of his life for ours. The psalmists and the prophets further developed the expectation of a messiah, a savior, who, especially in Isaiah, would suffer and die for our sins and for our healing. In the prophets, the lens would focus, so to speak, on the fulfillment of the sacrificial system. Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment. He sacrificed himself for us. The bloody sacrifice of Christ on Calvary is truly present in the unbloody and sacramental sacrifice of the Eucharist. In this season of resurrection, it is through Jesus’s death that we pass to new life. It is through his sacrifice that we are made whole. What God has given for us, his very life, we now give to God, our very lives. If we die with him, we rise with him. Alleluia!