Photo credit: Carla J Roth
Hebrews 7: 23-28; Mark 10: 46-52
“[Christ] has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered himself.” – Hebrews 7: 27.
SOME YEARS AGO I was involved in a fascinating word-association exercise. The aim was to find out what a reasonable cross-section of people instinctively thought about a range of topics. We gave them a word, and then asked them to write down the next one that came into their minds without stopping to think.
In response to ‘Christianity’, unsurprisingly the most popular response was ‘church’. The next was ‘boring’. The fifth most cited word was ‘hypocrite’, and sandwiched in between ‘boring’ and ‘hypocrite’ were two others: ‘sin’ and ‘guilt’.
At the risk of vastly oversimplifying, it sometimes feels to me that one of the biggest divides within Christianity these days is between those who morbidly (and sometimes gleefully) make it about sin, guilt and little else, and those who try their best to avoid talking about either if at all possible!
Neither of these responses is useful. Indeed, quite the reverse. Morbid preoccupation with human depravity and a God eager to condemn and punish rapidly descends into pathology. But the idea that humanity is basically fine, and we just need more niceness or tolerance, rather than radical reformation, flounders on the rock of history and experience.
If you look at the world around you, there is a huge amount of creativity, decency and goodness out there. Let’s acknowledge and celebrate that. But there is also an ocean of conflict, abuse, selfishness, injustice and destruction, too. And the positive does not simply cancel the negative out. That’s not how the ecology of human behaviour works.
In an unprecedentedly wealthy world – one where a large proportion of the global population still remains on the brink of war, hunger and ecological disaster – the gap between human technological capacity and human moral awareness and agency seems larger than ever. And if we look into the depths of our own lives and relationships, we cannot but be aware of how things can go horribly wrong, to put it mildly.
So if ‘sin’ is about recognising our distance and separation from ultimate goodness (from God, as we would say), and if guilt (rather than being fearful paralysis) can come to be about acknowledging human failings and imperfections as blockages to the repair, restoration and change we all seek and need – well, then we are on a path of hope, not despair. In short, how we talk about these things is absolutely crucial, as our readings today illustrate.
In very different but overlapping ways, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark point towards how God in Christ breaks unhealthy cycles of condemnation, abasement and sacrifice. They show us that, on the contrary, divine love and forgiveness finally abolish guilt and sin, so that we can enter a liberating, alternative cycle: one of continually being healed (and becoming healers ourselves) on a shared journey towards wholeness in the divine life. A vicious cycle is replaced by a virtuous one – with profound consequences for how we see ourselves, each other and God, and how we act in the world.
While it may not be obvious at first, the story of Bartimaeus Bar-Timaeus in Mark, is highly relevant to all this. It highlights the fundamental tension between Jesus and the restrictive and exclusive elements in his own religious inheritance. So let’s look at the story more closely.
The likely Aramaic source of the family name Timaeus is “son of shame”. As a beggar, Bartimaeus will have been ritually impure, too. In crying out to the ‘Son of David’, a mere beggar appeals to kinship with the most highly honoured of lineages, which is why shocked onlookers immediately rebuke him. They want to deny the blind man a voice. Jesus does not. He turns the tables on the nay-sayers by getting them to affirm the courage of marginalised Bartimaeus. (“Take courage” is a far better rendition than “take heart” in verse 49).
The cloak Bartimaeus casts aside is, of course, his source of income. It is what he uses to collect money. It is also where he sleeps. He is literally abandoning everything in approaching Jesus. The cloak also foreshadows the very next scene in the drama, in chapter 11. This is Jesus’s challenge to imperial power in Jerusalem, when he enters on a donkey and the ordinary people line the road with their cloaks to honour him.
What does Bartimaeus want? He asks for his sight. He is given so much more. His trust (which is what faith means, rather than some sort of propositional claim) has made him not just ‘well’ (as the weak translation has it here), but whole. He is restored to the domain of the sighted, but much more to the whole community – socially, spiritually and economically. This is the key dimension of the healing stories in Mark. They are not just about physical restoration, but reintegration into society.
That done, Jesus tells Bartimaeus to go on his way. Note that he doesn’t make confession of sin a precondition for healing. He doesn’t tell him to report to the religious authorities, to seek ritual purification, and to offer sacrifice in the Temple. Which is what would have been expected. No, Jesus effectively bypasses the system of ritual purity, priestly power and sacrifice. He offers free healthcare outside the system to those designated ‘unclean’. This may be one reason why he often tells those who are restored not to speak about it: the so-called ‘messianic secret’. He knows that he will be accused of subversion, even though from his perspective he is being more not lessfaithful to the tradition.
The very essence of the gospel, the good news, is that God’s restoring love does not discriminate. It is offered to all, with the priority being the most excluded. So whereas some religious leaders – in Jesus’ day, as in ours – arrogate to themselves the idea that they have the authority to decide who is clean or unclean, who is acceptable and unacceptable to God, Jesus effectively declares in his actions and words that a religious system which restricts access to God in order to maintain its own power is false and damaging.
Which brings us to the Epistle. Hebrews is a complex book. It was probably written by an associate of Paul to Jewish Christians in Jerusalem around 40 to 60 years after Christ’s death. On the one hand, it is encouraging them in the face of the threat of persecution. On the other hand, it is an extended argument about the relationship of Christ to the Jewish Law. From our perspective, this is a bit like being invited into a philosophy discussion where some of the key terms of debate are strange or alien to us. But essentially, what the Epistle is saying is that the entire sacrificial system has now been replaced by Christ. In short, the death and resurrection of Christ is the end of sacrifice, the display of God’s perfect love, and the first fruits of the restoration of all things. Christ is the new High Priest.
Now, there are some difficulties here. One is the danger of interpreting this as Christian supercessionism, the idea that the new covenant expunges everything before it. Historically this turned into anti-Judaism and paved the way for anti-Jewish hatred with utterly horrific consequences. The Epistle is instead seeking to reconcile inherited faith and a new creation in Christ. It is therefore best read not as the end of a conversation, but as an invitation to continuing dialogue, to join and add to the communal narrative through our lives.
Second, is there not something contradictory about the idea that Christ’s death abolishes sacrifice. After all, isn’t it still a sacrifice, albeit “once and for all”? To address that knotty question, let’s listen a little to the French literary critic and philosopher of social anthropology, Rene Girard – who has been very influential on recent theological work, including that of Rowan Williams.
Girard says that humanity’s archetypal flaw (our sin) is our constant temptation to self-destructive conflict and violence, which we try to resolve through the scapegoat mechanism. That is, deep disagreements and anxieties within communities are addressed by uniting against an arbitrary ‘other’ who is blamed for all the chaos, excluded, and maybe even killed. Think about the hateful rhetoric around refugees and migrants on both sides of the Atlantic right now as a prime modern example of scapegoating.
The function of ancient religion is to turn this mimetic scapegoat mechanism into a sacrificial system in order to relocate social violence in ritual. In some religious cultures the resulting sacrifices have actually been human. In others, the brutality has been turned against animals. But the logic is the same. Blood is required to cleanse the community, to expel the threat, and to appease the gods.
But in re-reading the Passion narratives on his journey back to Catholic Christianity, Girard noticed to his shock and amazement that (unlike many early religious texts) these gospel stories are actually anti-sacrificial at their core. Jesus does not demand sacrifice. On the contrary, he himself becomes the scapegoat of religious and political fear and hatred, thereby exposing both its futility and its death-dealing character.
It is in this sense that he bears the sin of the world. That is, our continual construction of, and participation in, deadly scapegoating, blood sacrifices (think of what is happening in Gaza), and the imposition of sin and guilt as unpayable burdens on humanity. In return, Christ – the one who offers healing and wholeness to those excluded by society and its religious institutions – is vindicated in the act of divine restorative life-giving that we call resurrection.
Here is truly good news, gospel. God absorbs sin and death, and restores life and liberty. Divine love and forgiveness abolishes the vicious, religiously-perpetuated cycle of guilt, sin, scapegoating and sacrifice. This frees us to enter the new, truly liberating cycle I mentioned a little earlier: one of continually being healed (and becoming healers) on a shared journey towards wholeness.
The story of how Christianity managed to turn this extraordinary gift of liberation from retribution and condemnation into yet another guilt-inducing sacrificial religion is a much longer one. Sadly, too much of the history of Western Christendom has been about division and conquest performed in the name of the one who actually came to free and unite us.
But it is never too late to join Bartimaeus and all those who want to experience the wholeness Christ offers. The challenge is that instead of heading back to the old sacrificial ideology, we need to learn to walk tall and free in the community of healed and the healing, and to spread that possibility and hope far and wide.
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© Simon Barrow is a writer, researcher, activist, theologian and poet. He was co-director and then director of Ekklesia from 2005 – 2024. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum Publishing, January 2025). This is an address given at St James Episcopal Church, Leith, Edinburgh on 27 October 2024.