Hebrews 10:5-10 (NRSV)
Read Hebrews 10:5-10 on biblegateway.com
Verse 5Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, "Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me; Verse 6in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.
Verse 7Then I said, 'See, God, I have come to do your will, O God' (in the scroll of the book it is written of me)." Verse 8When he said above, "You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings" (these are offered according to the law), Verse 9then he added, "See, I have come to do your will." He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. Verse 10And it is by God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
Devotion
During Advent it can be disconcerting to encounter Scripture passages that talk about Jesus’ death. After all, we are anticipating Jesus’s birth! Why ruin the mood with all this talk of sacrifices and sin offerings? But we know that the birth of Jesus necessarily carries with it both the brightness of his life and shadows of his death. In the words of the hymn “I Wonder as I Wander,” “Jesus the Savior did come for to die.”
In the same way, though, Jesus’s death is never a story we can tell without the hope born in his resurrection. Life, not death, will have the last word—in Jesus’s story and in our own. As the apostle Paul reminds us, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). When the shadows of death creep up around Christmas, remember and rejoice: Jesus’s birth points toward his death, and his death points us toward his—and our—resurrection.
Prayer
God, you are a maker of miracles: one who brings life out of death. Help us always to remain confident in your abiding presence and in your promises of abundant life. Amen.
Interested in digging deeper into today’s text?
Read more here.