At our remove of two thousand years, it seems natural for us to look upon Jesus' crucifixion as a sacrifice. Christians are heirs to a long tradition of talking that way, praying that way, thinking that way. But first-century Jews who witnessed the event would not and could not have seen the crucifixion as a sacrifice. It bore none of the marks of a sacrifice in the ancient world. On Calvary there was no altar and no credentialed priest. There was indeed a death, but it took place apart from the Temple, which was the only valid place of sacrifice in Judaism, and even outside the walls of the holy city.
The New Testament makes the sacrificial nature of Christ's death explicit. Paul, for example, emphasizes this fact in his letters to the Corinthians. We can understand why this was necessary, given the ease with which it could have been overlooked or misunderstood. Richard Lenski writes:
According to the ancient Jewish rite a lamb was slain, and that slain lamb was made (for each family or for a similar group) the Passover. In a similar way Christ was slain to be our Passover Lamb. The connection of this lamb with Paul's admonition is implied yet is evident and clear: the Passover Lamb slain, and the Passover Feast thus begun, and yet the old leaven not cleaned out of the house - what a contradiction! If such a thing would frightful in the case of the Jews who slew and ate only lambs which were merely types, how much worse is it for us Christians who have our divine Lamb, the antitype, slain once for the deliverance of the world!
This paradox is yet another cause for the misunderstanding of Christ's sacrifice: although it atoned for all sin at once, the world remains in a fallen state. Paul's discussion of sacrifice naturally includes an allusion to the Last Supper, which was, after all, a Passover celebration. Hahn writes:
it was that first Eucharist that transformed Jesus' death from an execution to an offering. At the Last Supper he gave his body to be broken, his blood to be poured out, as if on an altar.
This leads to the words spoken by Moses about "the blood of the covenant" in Exodus. The direct parallel to the words of Jesus are startling - the room in which the Last Supper was eaten is linked, despite the intervening centuries, in an intimate way to the newly-freed slaves, escaping from Egypt, learning more about the God who saved them and loved them. Franz Delitzsch and Carl Keil write about this
sacrificial blood, in which animal life was offered instead of human life, making expiation as a pure life for sinful man, and by virtue of this expiation restoring the fellowship between God and man which had been destroyed by sin.
Like the blood of Jesus, the "blood of the covenant" at the time of Moses brought humans
into the fellowship of the divine grace manifested upon the altar, in order that, through the power of this sin-forgiving and sin-destroying grace, it might be sanctified to a new and holy life. In this way the sacrificial blood acquired the signification of a vital principle endued with the power of divine grace.
In the misunderstood or overlooked sacrifice, a new testament was embodied, as the old testament was embodied in the old "blood of the covenant" in the time of Moses.
