“Someone Must Die

“Someone Must Die!”

Text: Hebrews 9:24-28

Did you ever play kickball? Among the kids that come for our one after-school program called Adventure Group, that’s one of their most favorite games. On Tuesday afternoons, when those 4^th-6^th graders come to the church, if the weather is nice, one of the things they really like to do is walk over as a group to the playground at the elementary school a couple blocks away and play kickball. Now, those kickball games aren’t exactly pitchers’ duels. In fact, they tend to be rather high-scoring affairs, with scores like 26-24.

And usually all the kids have a great time…that is, until someone breaks a rule. Then everything changes. Maybe someone kicks out of turn, or maybe someone starts running from first base to second base before the ball is pitched – in any case, someone has broken a rule, and the entire game comes to a complete stop until something is done about it. In the past, when something like that happened, I’ve tried to calm the kids down and said, “Don’t worry about it. Just forgive them. Forget about it.”

But if you’re in elementary school and someone breaks a rule, you can’t not worry about it, you can’t forgive them, you can’t forget about it. No, if you’re in elementary school and someone breaks a rule on the playground, as far as you’re concerned, someone must die! Someone, the rule breaker, must be punished for their sins. And until that happens, until the rule breaker is kicked out of the game, or sent to the principal’s office, or at least yelled at, the game isn’t going to continue. No, a rule has been broken, and someone must die!

But that mindset isn’t something that you just find on playgrounds at elementary schools. No, you find that very same mindset in the highest halls of power. After all, when there’s some problem, when it looks like someone has broken some rule, what happens in Congress? The lawmakers start pointing fingers and saying, “Someone is responsible! Someone must be punished! Someone must die!”

Congress did that sort of thing after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and after the Enron debacle and after the space shuttle explosion. Congress appointed special committees to look into what went wrong, not so much so that they could help fix the problem – although that’s what they usually say is the official purpose of those special committees. Rather Congress appoints those special committees to search for someone to blame. Because it seems that as soon as we know who should be blamed for something, as soon as we know who must die, then we’re happy – whether the actual problem ever gets solved or not, that’s almost beside the point. Much of the time, to our way of thinking, what’s most important is being able to point at the offender and making sure that we never forget that that’s a person who must be punished for what they’ve done.

Right from the earliest pages of the Bible we find the same thing. You remember Adam and Eve, of course, and their children Cain and Abel. Well, Cain had a grandson named Lamech. And apparently one day Lamech got into some kind of argument, some kind of fight with a younger man, and that younger man hit Lamech. Well, Lamech was very much of the mindset that if anything bad ever happened to him, then someone would have to die. And quite literally, Lamech went out and killed that fellow who had struck him. And on top of that, Lamech let it be known that if anyone else dared to mess with him in the future, the same thing would happen to them. As Lamech put it: “If someone messes with me, I’ll pay them back 77 times. If someone messes with me, someone’s going to die.”

And that idea that someone must die when a wrong has been committed was a central part of the religion for the people in the Old Testament. If you’ve ever read the Old Testament, particularly the book of Leviticus, then you know that sacrifices were at the heart of the Hebrew religion. The thinking was that the sins we commit are an offense against God. And because of our sins, God would have every right to kill us for what we’ve done. But instead of requiring that we die for our own sins, God allowed certain kinds of animals to be killed instead, as sacrifices – in essence, to die in our place.

But I think that for a lot of us, we have a hard time really picturing what sacrifices were like. After all, nowadays, unless you live on a farm, you’ve probably never even seen an animal get killed. When we buy some beef at the grocery store for dinner, all we see is a piece of meat sitting on a Styrofoam tray and wrapped with plastic. It doesn’t even occur to us that until a couple days before, that meat had been part of a living, breathing cow that had to be killed in order for us to make that purchase.

Back when I was in the Boy Scouts, one weekend we had a survival theme campout. And for dinner the one night, the scoutmaster gave us a map that he said would lead us to our meal. And so for about a half hour we followed that map and made our way through the woods until we eventually came to where X marked the spot. But we were puzzled that what we found there was a live chicken sitting inside a little cage. So the six of us in my patrol carried the chicken back to the scoutmaster and asked him what we were supposed to do with it. To our horror, he said we were supposed to kill it, cook it, and eat it.

And so he proceeded to hold out a hatchet and asked, “Who doesn’t want to kill the chicken?” Well, five of us in the patrol were smart enough to see where that question was headed, and so we just stood there, not saying a word. But poor Scotty Patterson was dumb enough to raise his hand and say, “I don’t want to kill the chicken.” Well, immediately Mr. Goodwin shoved the hatchet into Scotty’s hand and ordered him to behead the chicken.

Well, poor Scotty almost passed out. He started crying and breathing heavy and looked like he was going to faint. But Mr. Goodwin wasn’t going to let him get out of it. So finally, Scotty closed his eyes – not exactly a good thing to do when you’re swinging a hatchet – and swung for the chicken’s head. And if you ever want to know where the expression – “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” – comes from, you have to see it for yourself. At that point in my life, that was probably the most horrifying sight I had ever seen – a headless chicken running around like crazy, blood splattering everywhere, and Scotty Patterson passed out on the ground, almost in a coma. In fact, when he finally came to, Scotty vowed that, from that day on, he would never eat chicken again as long as he lived.

There’s something about watching the death of another living thing that’s supposed to shock us. And so when they offered those sacrifices in Old Testament times, the hope was that the people would be shocked and horrified by what they saw. The hope was that the people would be shocked and horrified that those animals were being killed because of their sins.

But what a passage like we listened to today from book of Hebrews in the New Testament forces us to realize is that even though the Old Testament people participated in all those sacrifices, even though they dealt with all that blood, where did it get them? Year after year, they would slaughter all those animals, but wrongdoing didn’t go away. Year after year, they would splatter blood all around, but that didn’t bring an end to sin.

And so what the letter of Hebrews forces us to realize is that a religion that’s based on the idea that the only way to deal with someone’s sin is that someone or something must die – a religion that’s based on that kind of thinking, Hebrews says, is ultimately doomed to failure – it just doesn’t work.

And so what a passage like this in the New Testament, in the book of Hebrews, does is it asks us: what if there’s another way? What if God offered us another option, so that if someone sinned against us, there’d be somewhere else to turn than the old standby: someone must die.

Someone must die. Even though that’s the first thing that comes to many people’s minds when they’ve been sinned against in some way, the good news of the gospel is that there is another way. When Jesus died on the cross, that was God’s way of saying, “Enough!” Jesus’ death on the cross was the ultimate sacrifice, a sacrifice that no other sacrifice could ever begin to compare to. Jesus’ death on the cross was the ultimate sacrifice, a sacrifice so large and so costly, involving the death of God’s own Son, that no other sacrifice ever needs to be made again.

And so even though we live in a world where the desire for revenge is very much a part of the air that we breathe – even though when someone sins against us, we’re tempted to think, “Someone must die!” – Jesus offers us another way. Because God agrees with us: sin is serious, and when there is an offense committed against us or when there is an offense committed against God, someone does need to die. But the good news of the gospel is that that someone has already died. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus has already died, and has already been raised. And that sacrifice, that sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, is God’s way of dealing with every sin that has ever taken place in the past and with every sin that will ever take place in the future. So believe the good news: our sin – my sin, your sin, the sin of the world – in Jesus Christ our sin is forgiven. Thanks be to God!