There's something deeply unsettling about the persistence of religious middlemen in a faith founded on their very abolition. When Jesus repeatedly declared, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," he wasn't offering a mild suggestion for liturgical reform. He was dismantling an entire economy of spiritual brokerage that had inserted itself between the divine and the human. Consider the strangeness of it all. God, who counts the hairs on our heads and notes the fall of every sparrow, apparently needs someone to explain our needs to him. God, who knows our thoughts before we think them and our needs before we voice them, requires elaborate rituals and institutional procedures to be moved to compassion.
Jesus addressed this directly when he said that the Father knows what we need before we ask. This wasn't poetic flourish. It was a radical statement about the nature of divine awareness and the needlessness of human mediation. If God already knows, then what precisely is the priest negotiating? What information is being conveyed that hasn't already been received? What sacrifice is being offered that adds anything to divine understanding? The uncomfortable answer is: nothing. Or worse than nothing—a kind of spiritual theatre that replaces genuine relationship with procedural correctness.
The call for mercy rather than sacrifice appears throughout Jesus's teaching, and it cuts to the heart of what religion had become versus what it was meant to be. Sacrifice is transactional. It assumes a distance that must be bridged, a debt that must be paid, a god who must be appeased through the proper channels. Mercy, on the other hand, is relational. It flows from proximity, from understanding, from love that requires no intermediary because it recognises no fundamental separation.
When we live mercy—when we become mercy—we're not performing rituals on behalf of others or offering sacrifices in their stead. We're embodying the very nature of God in the world. We're collapsing the distance that institutional religion has worked so hard to maintain, because there's profit in distance, both material and political. Every middleman depends on the gap between parties. Close the gap, and the middleman becomes redundant.
This is why Jesus's message was so threatening. He wasn't merely reforming temple practice; he was declaring the temple obsolete. Not because buildings or gatherings are wrong, but because any system that positions itself as necessary for God to hear us or us to reach God has fundamentally misunderstood the incarnation. God became human precisely to eliminate that distance, not to create new bureaucracies to manage it.
The question then becomes almost comically simple: do we trust what Jesus said or don't we? If God knows what we need before we ask, then intercessory systems that claim to make our needs known to God are either redundant or they suggest that God doesn't, in fact, know—which rather undermines the entire premise. If Jesus truly desires mercy and not sacrifice, then structures built primarily around sacrifice, offering, and priestly mediation are working against his explicit instructions.
The curtain in the temple tore from top to bottom—not from bottom to top, as if we had stormed heaven, but from top to bottom, as if God had ripped it open himself, insisting on access. We're told we need priests because we're unworthy to approach God directly, because our prayers aren't eloquent enough, because we don't know the proper procedures. But this is precisely the unworthiness that Jesus came to abolish. He ate with sinners without priestly permission. He forgave sins without sacrificial procedure. He welcomed the unclean without ritual purification. He was, in every meaningful sense, the end of the middleman.
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