Tracey Rowland on Jesus as Eternal High Priest and Sacrificial Victim

The wonderful Tracey Rowland reflects on Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection, by Benedict XVI:

The second volume of Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth covers the events in the life of Jesus from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem to his even more triumphal resurrection.

One emphasis which flows through the chapters like a watermark is the pivotal position of Christ bridging the Old and Testaments, bringing one to fulfilment and inaugurating the other.  In the mysteries of Holy Week Jesus is revealed as the eternal high priest and sacrificial victim as well as the King of his people.

In an address given in Jerusalem in 1994 at the invitation of Rabbi Rosen, Joseph Ratzinger described Christ’s crucifixion as an ‘act endured in innermost solidarity with the Law and with Israel’ and he noted that the crucifixion was the perfect realisation of what the signs of the Jewish Day of Atonement signify.  As he explained, all sacrifices are acts of representation, which, from being typological symbols in the Old Testament, become reality in the life of Christ, so that the symbols can be dropped without one iota being lost:

The universalising of the Torah by Jesus, as the New Testament understands it, is not the extraction of some universal moral prescriptions from the living whole of God’s revelation.  It preserves the unity of cult and ethos.  The ethos remains grounded and anchored in the cult, in the worship of God, in such a way that the entire cult is bound together in the Cross, indeed, for the first time it has become fully real.

Similarly, in an address to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in Paris he noted that both the Letter to the Hebrews and the Gospel of John go beyond the link of the Last Supper to the Pasch and view the Eucharist in connection with the Day of Atonement.  Christ, who makes an offering of himself on the Cross, is the true and eternal high priest anticipated symbolically by the Aaronic priesthood.  To borrow a phrase from the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill, this was ‘no bloodless myth’.

The Atonement of Christ as both the eternal high priest and sacrificial victim not only fulfils the Old Testament in the sense of transfiguring its symbols into a new reality it also gives rise to a new sovereignty, a new kingship.

Read the entire piece, "No Bloodless Myth: Jesus of Nazareth as the Eternal High Priest and Sacrificial Victim", on The Christocentric Life blog.