The Church’s Pure Offering

So the offering of the church, which the Lord gave instructions to make throughout the whole world, is counted with God as a pure sacrifice, and it is acceptable to him. Not that he needs a sacrifice from us. It is that the one who makes the offering is himself honored in what he offers, if his gift is accepted. A gift shows both honor and affection toward the king. And the Lord, wanting us to make our offering in complete simplicity and innocence, put it this way: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar and remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come back and offer your gift.” We are bound, then, to offer God the firstfruits of what he has created, as Moses also says: “You must not appear before the Lord your God empty-handed.” In this way a person is counted grateful, and by the very things through which he has shown his gratitude he receives the honor that comes from God. [a]

Offerings as a class have not been set aside. There were offerings then, among the Jews, and there are offerings now, among Christians. There were sacrifices among that people; there are sacrifices in the church as well. Only the kind has changed, since the offering is now made not by slaves but by free people. For the Lord is one and the same; but an offering made by a slave has a character of its own, and so does an offering made by free people, so that liberty itself may be set out by the very offerings. With him nothing is pointless, nothing is without meaning, nothing is without design. This is why they had the tenth part of their goods set apart for him, while those who have received liberty set aside everything they own for the Lord’s purposes — giving gladly and freely, and not the cheaper part of what they have, since they have the hope of better things to come. That is how the poor widow acted, who put everything she had to live on into God’s treasury.

From the very beginning God had regard for Abel’s gifts, because he made his offering with a single heart and with righteousness; but he had no regard for Cain’s offering, because his heart was divided by envy and ill will, which he nursed against his brother. God says as much when he rebukes what was hidden in him: “Even if you offer rightly, have you not sinned if you do not divide rightly? Be at rest.” For God is not won over by a sacrifice. Suppose someone sets out to make a sacrifice that is faultless to look at, done in due order and by the rule, while in his soul he does not grant his neighbor the fellowship that is his neighbor’s due, and has no fear of God. A man who keeps sin hidden like that does not fool God with a sacrifice that is correct on the outside; nor will such an offering do him any good. What would do him good is letting go of the evil conceived inside him, so that sin does not, through the pretended act, make him all the more the murderer of himself.

That is why the Lord also said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you are like whitewashed tombs. A tomb looks beautiful on the outside, but inside it is full of dead men’s bones and every kind of uncleanness. In the same way you too look righteous to people on the outside, but inside you are full of wickedness and hypocrisy.” While they were thought to offer correctly as far as outward appearance went, they had inside them the same jealousy Cain had. That is why they killed the Just One, brushing aside the counsel of the Word, exactly as Cain did. God said to Cain, “Be at rest,” and he would not agree. And what is “being at rest” but giving up the violence you have planned? Saying much the same to these men, the Lord declares: “You blind Pharisee, clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside may be clean too.” And they did not listen to him.

Jeremiah says: “Look — your eyes and your heart are not good. They are set on your own greed, and on shedding innocent blood, and on injustice, and on killing, to get it done.” And Isaiah again says: “You have made a plan, but not from me; you have made agreements, but not by my Spirit.” So then, in order that their inward wish and thought might be brought into the open and show that God is blameless and works no evil — the God who uncovers what is hidden in the heart, but who works no evil — when Cain would not be at rest at all, God says to him: “His desire will be toward you, and you will rule over him.” In the same way he spoke to Pilate: “You would have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above.” God always hands the righteous man over, so that, having been tested by what he has suffered and endured, he may at last be accepted; while the evildoer, judged by the things he has done, is rejected. Sacrifices, then, do not make a man holy, for God has no need of sacrifice. It is the conscience of the one who offers that makes the sacrifice holy, when that conscience is clean, and so moves God to accept the offering as from a friend. “But the sinner,” he says, “who kills a calf in sacrifice to me is like a man who kills a dog.”

Since, then, the church makes its offering with a single heart, its gift is rightly counted a pure sacrifice with God. Paul says as much to the Philippians: “I have plenty, now that I have received from Epaphroditus what you sent — a fragrant aroma, a sacrifice that is acceptable and pleasing to God.” For we ought to make an offering to God, and to be found grateful in everything to God our Maker, with a clean mind, with faith free of pretense, with firm hope, with burning love, offering the firstfruits of the things he himself created. And the church alone makes this pure offering to the Creator, offering him, with thanksgiving, what comes from his own creation.

But the Jews do not offer in this way, for their hands are full of blood; they have not received the Word, through whom the offering is made to God. Nor do any of the heretics’ own gatherings offer it. Some of them hold that the Father is other than the Creator, and so, when they offer him what belongs to this creation of ours, they present him as greedy for someone else’s property and hungry for what is not his own. Others hold that the things around us came from a falling away, from ignorance and from passion; and so, while offering him the fruits of ignorance, passion and falling away, they sin against their Father, insulting him rather than thanking him. And how can they be consistent with themselves when they say that the bread over which thanks have been given is the body of their Lord, and the cup his blood, if they do not call him the Son of the Creator of the world — that is, the Creator’s Word — through whom the wood bears fruit, and the springs gush out, and the earth yields “first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear”?

And then, how can they say that the flesh, which is fed with the body of the Lord and with his blood, goes to decay and has no share in life? Either let them change their opinion, or let them stop making the offerings just mentioned. Our teaching agrees with the thanksgiving, and the thanksgiving in turn confirms our teaching. For we offer him what is his own, announcing consistently the fellowship and union of flesh and Spirit. For as the bread that comes from the earth, once it has received the invocation of God, is no longer ordinary bread but the thanksgiving — made up of two things, one earthly and one heavenly — so too our bodies, once they have received the thanksgiving, are no longer perishable, since they have the hope of the resurrection forever.

Now we make our offering to him not as though he needed it, but rendering thanks for his gift and so making holy what he created. For just as God does not need what we possess, we do need to offer something to God. As Solomon says: “Whoever has pity on the poor lends to the Lord.” God, who needs nothing, takes our good works to himself for this purpose: that he may give us a return out of his own good things. As our Lord says: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; naked, and you clothed me; sick, and you visited me; in prison, and you came to me.” So although he does not need these services, he does want us to render them for our own good, so that we may not be fruitless. And in the same way the Word gave that people the command about making offerings, though he had no need of them, so that they might learn to serve God. It is his will in the same way that we too should bring a gift at the altar, often and without a break. The altar, then, is in heaven — for it is toward that place that our prayers and offerings are directed — and the temple is there as well, as John says in the Revelation: “And the temple of God was opened.” And the tabernacle is there too: “For look,” he says, “the tabernacle of God, in which he will live with people.”

Now the gifts, the offerings and all the sacrifices were received by that people as a figure, on the pattern shown to Moses on the mountain, and from one and the same God, whose name is now glorified in the church among all the nations. It fits well enough that these earthly things spread out all around us should be figures of the heavenly ones, since both were made by the same God. There was no other way for him to make an image of spiritual things that we could take in. But to claim that the things above the heavens — spiritual things, and, as far as we are concerned, invisible and beyond speech — are themselves in turn figures of other heavenly things and of another Pleroma, and to say that God is the image of another Father, is to play the part of men who have wandered off from the truth, and of men who are utterly foolish and dull. For, as I have shown again and again, people like this will find themselves forced to keep on discovering figures of figures and images of images, and they will never be able to settle their minds on the one true God. Their imaginations range out past God. In their hearts they have gone beyond the Master himself, puffed up and lifted above him in their thinking, while in fact they are turning away from the true God. [ab]

To such people one may fairly say — Scripture itself suggests the words — how far above God are you lifting your imaginations, you rashly conceited men? You have heard that “the heavens are measured out in the palm of his hand.” Tell me the measurement. Count off its endless length, foot by foot. Explain to me its fullness, its breadth, its length, its height, the beginning and the end of the measuring — things the heart of man does not grasp and cannot take in. For the heavenly storehouses are indeed great. God cannot be measured by the heart and cannot be taken in by the mind, he who holds the earth in the hollow of his hand. Who can make out the measure of his right hand? Who knows his finger? Who understands his hand — the hand that measures what has no measure; the hand that by its own measure spreads out the measure of the heavens, and holds in its hollow the earth with its depths; the hand that contains in itself the breadth and the length and the deep below and the height above of the whole creation, both the part that is seen and heard and understood, and the part that is invisible?

This is why God is “above every rule and authority and dominion and every name that is named,” above all things that have been created and established. He is the one who fills the heavens and looks into the depths, and who is also present with every one of us. For he says: “Am I a God near at hand, and not a God far off? If anyone hides himself in secret places, will I not see him?” His hand takes hold of all things. It is his hand that lights up the heavens and lights what is under the heavens as well; that tests the inmost feelings and the heart; that is present in hidden things and in our secret thoughts; and that openly feeds us and keeps us.

But if a man cannot take in the fullness and the greatness of God’s hand, how will anyone be able to understand or know in his heart so great a God? Yet these people, as though by now they had measured him and searched him through and gone over him from every side, invent beyond him another Pleroma of Aeons and another Father. They are certainly not looking up toward heavenly things; they are going down into a bottomless deep of madness. They hold that their Father reaches only as far as the boundary of the things that lie outside the Pleroma, while the Demiurge, on the other side, does not reach as far as the Pleroma; and so they present neither of the two as perfect or as containing all things. The first will fall short in regard to the whole world formed outside the Pleroma, and the second in regard to that world which was formed inside it; and therefore neither of them can be the God of all. That no one can fully set out the goodness of God from the things he has made is a point plain to everyone. And that his greatness falls short in nothing, but contains all things, and reaches even to us, and is with us — that will be admitted by everyone who holds thoughts of God worthy of him.