Jesus' obedience and ours

For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page, which includes Canipe's current Living by the Word column as well as past magazine and blog content. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century.

Opening the book of Hebrews is a bit like stepping into Transporter Room on the starship Enterprise. A few verses are all it takes to beam us suddenly down into an alien world filled with angels, sacrificial purification rites and Melchizedek. There’s very little about Hebrews that looks, sounds or feels familiar to 21st-century people, all of which makes dealing with this letter a challenge (and explains why so many of us avoid it).

I remember teaching a youth Sunday school class comparing the Levitical system of annual atonement sacrifices with the once-and-for-all sacrifice that, according to Hebrews, Jesus has made for our sins. Wrapping up the lesson, attempting to drive the main points home, I was firing questions at the kids and getting answers, call-and-response style. We were on a roll until I got to the final question. “And why,” I asked, “don’t we sacrifice animals anymore?”