Not in the temple

FOURTH WEEK OF LENT Friday

From a homily by Saint John Chrysostom
(Homily de cruce et latrone, 1, 1-2: PG 49,400).

This homily was given at Antioch on Good Friday sometime between 386 and 397. The present extract explains that Christ was both priest and victim and that the cross was an altar. The sacrifice offered on it was for the whole world.

Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us, and if you ask where he was sacrificed, it was upon a high scaffold.

This was a new kind of altar of sacrifice because the sacrifice itself was new and amazing.

The victim and the priest were the same. Victim in his humanity, priest in his divinity, Christ both offered and in his human nature was offered.

Listen to Paul's explanation of both these truths. He says: Every high priest taken from among the people is appointed to act on their behalf. This high priest too must have something to offer, then, and so he offers himself. But in another place Paul says: Christ, having been offered once for all to take away the sins of many, will appear to those who await him to save them.

Perhaps you will ask why the sacrifice was offered outside the city walls and not in the temple. It was to fulfill the text of Scripture that says: He was reckoned among the wicked. It was offered outside the walls to show you the universal nature of the sacrifice. The purification was not for only a few as with the Jews, but for everyone. God had commanded the Jews to offer sacrifice and prayer in one place on earth to the exclusion of all others, because the whole world was polluted by the smoke and fat of burnt offerings and all the other defilements of pagan sacrifice. But for us the whole world has been purified by the Coming of Christ, so that every place has become a place of prayer. And so Paul boldly urges us to feel free to pray everywhere. In every place, he says, I want the men to lift up reverent hands in prayer.

Do you not see then how the world has been purified? We are able in every place reverently to raise our hands to God because the whole world has become holy, holier than the inmost shrine of the temple. The sacrifice offered in the temple was an irrational beast but that offered on the cross was divine, and the more perfect the victim the more perfect too is the sanctification

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