Dear Editor,

According to the Bible, Jesus was preordained to die.

For, as I Peter 1:19-21 says, “But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by him do believe in God that raised him up from the dead and gave him glory that your faith and hope might be in God.

The book of Hebrews 9:26 also states, “For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world, but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.”

Moreover, Hebrews 9:22 states that, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” The writer also adds that the blood of Christ not only offers forgiveness of sin but also sanctification.

So, in contrast to the shedding of the blood of animals in the Old Testament for the remission or forgiveness of sins and for the appeasement of the wrath of God, God demanded that Jesus, who is said to be His only begotten son, shed his blood — to be mercilessly crucified — as an atonement for the sins of humanity, both corporate and individual sins.

However, this practice of human sacrifices to atone for sin and obtain the favour of an angry but a just God is not a new phenomenon, for in many ancient and even current religions and cultures human sacrifices, that is the ritualistic killing of one or more humans or animals for some sacred or profane purpose, have been taking place for a very long time.

Such human sacrifices are often designed to appease the gods or fulfil some social obligation (such as capital punishment) or appease the spirits of dead ancestors. Likewise, ritual killings function as a retainer sacrifice. That is to say, when a high official, such as an emperor or a monarch, dies it is required that his servants be killed in order to accompany him into the next life as his servants.

So Easter, which is arguably the most important and most sacred Christian celebration or commemoration, is the time when Christians remember Jesus’s shedding his blood on the cross on a Friday and resurrecting himself from the dead on a Sunday.

Christians further believe that the shedding of Jesus’s blood was necessary for a new covenant to be established between God and humanity. Such a new covenant or New Testament takes precedence over the Old Mosaic Covenant or Old Testament Covenant between God and the ancient Israelites.

But whereas the Jewish sacrificial rituals for sin were done once a year in the temple for themselves, Jesus’s sacrifice of himself was done for people’s sins outside the temple. But his sacrifice was not just a yearly event but a once-and-for-all time eternal event. Importantly also, Jesus now becomes the heavenly high priest who appears before God as the intercessor for all humanity, and he represents them without blemish before God.

Now, such a cosmic theological drama is still believed, experienced, practised, and accepted as factual history by Christians. But Christians must also understand that such theology of a dying-and-rising God or God-man has historical parallels in many ancient religions and cultures. That, also, the imagery of such a God-man has highly mythological, psychological, and salvific implications.

Such imagery or metaphoric expressions of the death and resurrection of Jesus serve as an antidote for the toxic effects of guilt and hopelessness that beset so many humans.

So then, the real message of Easter is, or ought to be, that despite guilt, shame, and sin, which are some of the primal make-up of our beings, the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus ironically offers us hope that we, like Jesus, can overcome adversities — hatred, fear, and death — and can arise with new and everlasting life.

George S Garwood

Student and teacher of world religions

merleneg@yahoo.com