About a hundred years ago, a farmer was plowing his field on the coast of Syria, the country north of Israel. His plow hit a stone, and under it was an old tomb. When diggers came, they found a whole buried city called Ugarit. Inside was a room full of clay tablets more than three thousand years old. They were full of prayers and poems about the gods the people there loved. For the first time, the people who prayed to those gods could speak for themselves.
The gods of the coast
The most loved god in the tablets is Baal, the god of storms and rain. The farmers on that coast had no big river, so every crop needed rain, and the rain was Baal's gift. Above him sat El, the oldest of the gods and the maker of all things, a wise old king with a gray beard. His name, El, is the old word for God. Beside El sat Asherah, the mother of the gods. Women prayed to her when they hoped for a child, and when they were afraid of the birth.
They cared how people lived
These people were not fools. One poem from Ugarit tells of a good king named Danel, who sat at the city gate where cases were heard. He stood up for the widow and the orphan, and the gods loved him for it. In Egypt, people believed that after death their heart would be weighed against a feather. So they would say out loud the wrongs they had never done. I have not killed. I have not let anyone go hungry. If you have ever lain awake hoping you did enough good, you know how they felt.
The blood
But in every one of these lands, the men in charge also killed for their gods. Ur was an old city in the south of what is now Iraq. In its royal tombs, diggers found dozens of servants who were put to death and buried with their king and queen.
The old books of Israel tell the same kind of story about their own leaders. A war leader named Joshua burned the town of Jericho, killed every person in it, and called it a gift to his God. A man named Jephthah, who led the people in war, promised his God a gift if he won a battle. When he won, he gave up his own daughter to keep that promise. In every land, people believed their god wanted blood. The ones who paid were servants, daughters and strangers.
Then Jesus came
Into that world Jesus came, and he did not tell one more story about a god who wants a sacrifice. Instead, he sat down to supper. The Gospel of Matthew tells how he asked a tax collector named Matthew to follow him. Tax collectors took money for Rome, the empire that ruled the land, and people hated them as cheats. That evening Jesus ate in a house full of tax collectors and people everyone called sinners. Some Pharisees, a group of strict religious teachers, asked why he would eat with people like that. Jesus answered with words from an old prophet named Hosea.
But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
Matthew 9:13 · King James VersionThe original Greek
πορευθέντες δὲ μάθετε τί ἐστιν· Ἔλεος θέλω καὶ οὐ θυσίαν· οὐ γὰρ ἦλθον καλέσαι δικαίους ἀλλὰ ἁμαρτωλούς.
Found in Codex Vaticanus (about AD 325), Codex Sinaiticus (about AD 350).
The words "to repentance" appear in later copies, not in the oldest ones.
Every god in this story wanted something on a fire or someone in a grave. Jesus said the Father wants mercy, not sacrifice. Then he showed what mercy looks like by eating with the very people the teachers would not touch.
The farmers of Ugarit already knew that God cared about the widow and the hungry child. What no one had told them was that this was all God ever wanted, and that he never wanted blood at all. If the angry God of the old stories ever made you feel afraid, that feeling was leading you somewhere good. You were looking for the Father Jesus showed, who sat down to supper with the people nobody wanted, and who would be glad to sit down with you.
Read the full teaching
This is the heart of the second lesson in the series Many gods before and after Jesus. The full teaching tells more of the tablets of Ugarit, the gods of Babylon and Egypt, and the old flood stories that came before the story of Noah.