friend:

Saw this. Did you find that Luke’s approach was different from other gospel writers?

self:

Yes, although this video makes a soteriological mountain out of a textual molehill. In Luke, the temple curtain is torn literally the verse immediately before Jesus is reported to breathe his last. Besides, elsewhere in Mark, repentance is quite explicitly tied to forgiveness in Mark: That’s how Mark starts.

As for Matthew, I agree that the connection is not as explicit. For instance, Matthew does elide the repentance condition for interpersonal forgiveness that Luke makes explicit). Nevertheless, the connection underpins the anti-beatitudes of chapter 11 as well as the the sign of Jonah pericope of chapter 12. And while it’s true that at the Last Supper, Luke does skip the “for forgiveness of sins” that Matthew has Jesus include in the words of invocation, Mark also omits the same! And it’s in Matthew where we twice read Jesus quoting Hosea’s word about God wanting compassion/mercy/loyalty and not sacrifice.

Sacrifice properly rendered is repentance tokenized, that is, it is a form of symbolic amends offered as a pledge of repentance not yet actualized—because actual repentance cannot be proven except with the passage of time. Apologies and gifts are other forms of such symbolic amends. Since it’s impossible to prove repentance immediately, the impulse to make sacrifices to God as a way of recognizing our errors, acknowledging God’s importance to us, and pledging our allegiance to Him is a good one. It’s just one that, as the Hosea quotation (and big tranches of the Bible, really) suggests, runs the risk of becoming emptily ritualized and thus of masking the absence of true repentance, which is what really matters in the end. (If you think about it, the same is true of apologies and compensatory gifts.) That risk is so high that God knew He’d sooner or later officially declare it extraneous. That’s precisely what He did in the Messiah’s crucifixion (and the subsequent destruction of the Temple).

Jesus shed His blood for the forgiveness of our sins (Matthew 26:28; see also 1 Corinthians 15:3, Galatians 1:4, and Hebrews 5:1, along with Leviticus 5–7 and 16 and Isaiah 53) in that His cross gives us the ultimate symbolic amends to point to when we are guilty (1 John 1:7–2:2). What’s more, that this amends is not only quite grave, but also performed vicariously and accepted despite its vicariousness, inspires the very actualized repentance that makes for a truly just forgiveness and whose importance Luke does indeed have John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, and Paul all reiterate.