Parental Sacrifices, a devotional thought

I was reading Leviticus the other night and this half-baked thought occurred to me.  If you're not used to Leviticus, you need to understand that in the ancient world, animal sacrifice was just a regular part of worship and wouldn't have even raised an eyebrow for anyone; and as Christians we believe that all of the requirements for sacrifice are fulfilled and satisfied in Christ. So don't let the fact of animal sacrifice trouble you too much.  You just have to draw out its meaning for us, today, as followers of Jesus.

And here's where the half-baked thoughts started to rise in the oven: because in Leviticus 12, it's explaining what a woman's supposed to do when she gives birth, and it says, she's to offer a lamb for a burnt offering (burnt offerings are sort of "celebration / thanksgiving" offerings, so that makes sense: "Thanks, God for bringing this new life into the world").  But then it says that she's to offer a pigeon or a dove for a sin offering. And that's the one that's always troubled me, because, really, why would a woman have to offer a sin offering after giving birth? Surely it's not because there's something sinful about parenthood. And surely it's not because there's something sinful about the fact of giving birth. The OT through and through consistently sees children as only a gift and blessing from God. So I never really knew what to do with this one.

But then, like I say, it occurred to me: new mothers (and elsewhere, fathers, though for different reasons and at different times) needed to make a sin offering, not because they've sinned by becoming new parents, but because children need godly parents. Inasmuch as the sin offering was the Old Testament's mechanism whereby a right relationship with God was established and maintained and deepened and strengthened, the "maternal sin offering," I think, is more for the sake of the new child than it is for the new mother.

When I think of myself, for instance, and how self-centred and spiritually immature and unworthy to be a dad I was when my children were born—and how Christ graciously met me in that and helped me to grow—when I put it in that context, the idea of needing a "sin offering" upon becoming a new parent starts to make a lot of sense. After all: what could be better for kids, really, than if every parent took seriously their need to deal with their own sin through Christ, in order to be the kind of parent their kids most need?