Hebrews 9:11-14
Proper 26 (31) - Year B
There are a lot of footnotes in this section indicating alternative translations.
Does this give permission to also question what it means to come to the temple with one's own blood?
One picture is that of carrying on the sacrifices, so we are talking about our own blood spilt.
Another picture is that of transforming the old sacrifices, so we are talking about living blood flowing freely within. If, as some translate, "...he bypassed the old tent and its trappings in this created world and went straight into heaven's tent....", The sacrificial trimmings could be done without.
It is difficult to get out of the sacrificial mindset with all its trappings, but it is not impossible to move in a different direction.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/november2003.html
Hebrews 9:11-14
Ruth 1:1-18 or Deuteronomy 6:1-9
Psalm 146 or Psalm 119:1-8
Mark 12:28-34
Why continue running in the same circle of people? Why leave for another circle?
Inasmuch as we have multiple options of where to be and with whom, these are on-going questions. We also have differing needs, some of which come to the fore for a time and some that wait for another occasion. Sometimes we respond with very practical considerations of income and retirement? Sometimes our emotional well-being overrides any other issue. There are times when an internal hope or conversation with G*D will move us past either or these or anything else we have previously used to decide. Always there is inertia or lack of imagination that can come into play.
Whether practical, emotional, hopeful, or habitual, we are responding to where we see the nearness of the "freedom" of G*D and whether we are a part of a freedom to invest in life, to love, here or there, this circumstance or that, these ones or those. The more basic our freedom, the easier it is to say "both" at the same time or sequentially.
- - -
moments of import
heighten all our senses
hearts hearing calls
mind's eyes seeing options
ties that bind touch our soulssuch moments
come one per lifetime
and several
are present right now
for amusement and signifyingin this moment
we honor our ancestresses
Orpah and Ruth
both doing their best
in their every-day days
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html
"There are many ways of helping people to this confidence [that they are a people loved and forgiven by God]. Hebrews offers one very complicated way. The idea that a sacrifice or a symbolic reminder of blood kept God in touch with the validity of love might strike us as odd if not bizarre, but it must have worked for some. We are not committed to using the same methods, but we are committed to the same message - if that is our faith. We are today more sensitive to different religious traditions than our author, but we also need to come to terms critically with our own. We might even seek to emulate the level of creativity our author has shown when we face the challenge of speaking this same message to people in our day who live in a different symbolic world but face substantially the same needs." [from William Loader]
I appreciate the challenge for us to speak of love and forgiveness in a creative manner in our context. For the physicists among us we might speak of Jesus giving up his Higgs boson. For others of us this brings a big, "Huh?".
When it comes to the blood sacrifice imagery, I am in the "Huh?" category. If Jesus can bypass the sacrifice of goats and bulls, why limit him to a simple blood substitution as though Jesus was religiously type O-negative. In today's world we might also wonder about hematopoietic stem cells being a new image regarding Jesus' on-going experimentation and creativity rather than repeating a past out of touch with today's and tomorrow's realities.
Perhaps it is enough to ask what the "new covenant" is and how it might be symbolized. If it is redemption from the past, then we may need to find images that will walk into a new future rather than repeat past patterns.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html