The 2 Goats and Christ

 In the great liturgy of the atonement, in the first and great temple of King Solomon, there were 2 goats. Both became extensions of the priest-king who became the Son of God when he assumed the divine name. As it says in the Chronicles and Psalms, he became God and King. He was symbolically God’s presence and representation within the Creation, he was a man and God. As for the goats, the first goat, which bore the divine name by lot, became the extension of the king’s divinity and the other was the extension of his humanity.

The first goat was sacrificed. Its blood was used for atonement. It was not a means of payment. It was not a way to pay off an angry God as it became in the 2nd temple traditions and in modern theology. Blood was a symbol of life. As the blood of God, it renewed and purified the creation. This blood was sprinkled on the people and on the places in the temple. The temple in its symbolism was the icon of Creation. The ritual in essence made the people and the Creation new again, it made it holy.

The blood of this god-man also acted like a sponge. As it purified it absorbed into the king’s body everything that caused the Creation’s impurity. This is where the 2^nd goat comes in. The king would put his hand on the goat’s head and transmit into it all the impurities he absorbed. This was all the Sin. Sin in this sense is not to be understood here as just a moral failing or a way that we made God angry. For example, touching a dead body would be considered a sin. Anything that caused impurity was a sin, not just doing bad things. The king was putting into the goat the essence of sin, that which causes it, which is the power of death and decay.

The one who had this power of death and decay was Azazel, Satan, the leader of the fallen angels. He was the one ultimately responsible for the corruption of the Creation. The King would place his hand upon this goat, this extension of his humanity, and place in it all that belongs to Azazel and then send it off to this being’s realm. It would be sent out of the Holy Place and go into the desert wilderness, the symbolic domain of the fallen beings and there the goat was destroyed and taking with it in its destruction all that belongs to the fallen beings.

This great liturgy and its goats were the symbolism of what was to come in Christ. He is the god-king and Priest, the true Son of God, and he is also the goats. Like the first goat, his blood purifies the people and the Creation, and like the second goat he takes into his body all that belongs to Satan, all that causes death and decay in us and in Creation, and takes it to the throne of the being who had this power over us, he takes it to hades, the place of death. As it says in 1 Peter 3:19-20, Christ went to the domain of the fallen angels taking into his body all that belongs to them, and proclaimed their defeat. In his body, he destroyed Satan’s hold over us and Creation.  As some of the Byzantine Church Fathers have said, when Satan came to claim what belonged to him, he got a surprise, he gets defeated. His defeat is in the resurrected body of our Lord. As we say during Pascha, Christ is risen from the dead, by death he trampled death and to those in the tombs he granted life.