“…the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”
– Hebrews 12:24
In Hebrews 12:18-24, the author contrasts two realities: the first is the earthly Sinai, from which YHWH speaks in fire and darkness (vv.18-21), the second is the heavenly Zion within which the sprinkled blood of Christ speaks of reconciliation between God and Man (vv.22-24).
At the heart of each of these visions is a VOICE—indeed, THE voice, the voice of God. In the first, that voice thunders from the mountain in fire and terror, in the second, that same voice speaks in and as the shed blood of Jesus.
Consider the wonder of this parallelism! The voice that shattered the rocks and engulfed Sinai in flames speaks its final and definitive word in the crimson stream pouring down from the pierced heart of Christ on Calvary; the voice of the Divine King, delivering the Law in terror and power now speaks the perfection of the Law in the redeeming blood that pools on the dust beneath the cross. The voice that blazed on Sinai pours from the veins of God on the Tree.
But there is even more to see, because the prophet Haggai anticipated a day when YHWH would dismantle the whole cosmic order and establish His temple as the glorious center of reality (Hag.2:6-7). Staggeringly, Hebrews 12 implies that this universe-dissolving voice of God is the very voice that now speaks in the blood of Christ (Heb 12:26).
The almighty roar before which Creation herself is consumed as by a fire and re-made in reconciliation to her Creator, the sovereign command by which space and time bow as clay beneath the hands of the Potter and are re-made—IS the blood of Jesus Christ, IS the life of God poured down from the opened heart of our Pierced Lord. Glory to God.
I’ve tried to communicate these things in today’s image. At the top are the clouds and flames of Sinai, with YHWH Himself pictured as the One in the midst of the fire. However, from the heart of this same fire extends the hand of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, from whose palm drops the sprinkled blood that is itself the true and final VOICE of God. With the outpouring of this blood, Sinai dissolves into a cosmic chalice—the old has passed away, behold, all things have become new.
The Old Creation of distance from God and other, of alienation and fear, of fire and darkness and clouds is replaced now by the open and radiant chalice of praise—of “Eucharist” (meaning, thanksgiving). Around this chalice, the whole of Creation (pictured in the seven planets and the twelve stars, which represent the gathered people of God) has become a Eucharistic chalice, raised up in praise to God and filled with His own vitalizing life as it pours down from the heart of Jesus Christ—that life which is simultaneously both the covenant voice of the Bridegroom by which the whole cosmos is made the wedding chamber of the divine marriage, and the nuptial wine of blessedness, set to the lips of the Bride for her ever-increasing gladness, world without end.