is meant
participation in the sacredness that pertains to the death and atonement
of Christ. The purpose of the writer is to teach the entire separateness
of Christ's atonement. It is true that Christians eat the body and drink
the blood of Christ.[405] But the words of our Lord and of St. Paul[406]
refer to the passover, whereas our author speaks of the sin-offering. In
the former the lamb was eaten;[407] in the latter the carcases of the
beasts whose blood was brought by the worshipper through his
representative,[408] the high-priest, into the holiest place on the day
of atonement, were carried forth without the camp and burned in the
fire.[409] Both sacrifices, the passover and the sin-offering, were
typical. The former typified our participation in Christ's death, the
latter the separateness of Christ's death.

Many expositors see a reference in the Apostle's words to the Lord's
Table, and some of them infer from the word "altar" that the Eucharist
is a continual offering of a propitiatory sacrifice to God. It is not
too much to say that this latter doctrine is the precise error which the
Apostle is here combating.

Two other interpretations of these verses have been suggested. Both are,
we think, untenable. The one is that we Christians have an altar of
which we have a right to eat, but of which the Jewish priests and all
who cling to Judaism have no right to eat; and, to prove that they have
not, the Apostle mentions the fact that they were not permitted to eat
the bodies of the beasts slain as a sin-offering under the old covenant.
There are several weighty objections to this view, but the following one
will be sufficient. The reference to the sin-offering in the eleventh
verse is made in order to show that it was a type of Christ's atoning
death. As the bodies of the slain beasts were carried outside the camp
and burned, so Christ suffered without the gate. But there is no real
resemblance between the two things unless the Apostle intends to teach
that the atonement of Christ stands apart and cannot be shared in by any
other person, which implies that the tenth verse does not convey the
notion that Christians have a right to eat of the altar.

The other interpretation is that we, Christians, have an altar of which
we who serve the ideal tabernacle have no right to eat, inasmuch as the
sacrifice is spiritual. "Our Christian altar supplies no flesh for
carnal food."[410] But if the reference is to carnal food,