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| Strength for the Journey #7 Jesus: Eternal High Priest |
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Jesus: Eternal High Priest of the
Melchizedekan Order
Reading: Hebrews 7:1-28
Some of you share with me an appreciation for the story-telling of Garrison Keillor, the host of the two-hour radio broadcast, Prairie Home Companion, on National Public Radio every Saturday. Each week there is a twenty minute segment that almost always begins with these words: “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.” For those of you unfamiliar with Keillor, Lake Wobegon is his fictitious home town in Minnesota “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” Keillor is a master storyteller who invites us each week to escape the hectic, tumultuous world in which we live into the life and lives of this wonderful, imaginative little town. Along the way we see bits and pieces of ourselves as we laugh and cry—mostly laugh—with the circumstances of the people he describes.
Lake Wobegon is an inviting place to go not just because his characters are so lovable or the community so wonderful, but because it is a life we long to believe might once have existed but is no more. For most of us, there are no quiet weeks in Nashville or Franklin or any other town. Our women are not all strong and we men are not good looking, and our children come in all sizes and shapes and circumstances. The world we experienced this week, even in the most educated and economically resourced nation that has ever been on this planet, was another roller coaster ride. Our economy mirrors the stock market—and vice versa. There is constant conversation about war, terrorist arrests and imprisonments, political maneuvering and posturing in an election year, conversations about a nationwide vaccination for smallpox just in case biological warfare actually manifests itself. Those were the big-ticket items. Most of us didn’t spend much time thinking about those things, however, because there were far too many urgent responsibilities, too many daily tasks and activities, too many minor and major family crises to resolve, too many details to complete to pull off hosting 1000 people at a worship conference. The truth is, most of us didn’t have time to talk about the big national stuff, didn’t have time to pay attention to what once was known at the “national pastime,” except to catch the scores when the baseball games were over. Yes, we love to escape to athletic contests just like we love to escape to Lake Wobegon.
Every once in awhile we do stop ourselves, we back out of a few activities and discipline ourselves to skip a few others, and we slow down long enough to ask the real questions. Those “What’s the point?” questions. The “Why am I doing this and where is any of this leading?” questions. Personally, I don’t do that very often nor do I spend much time there because I get a splitting headache. I prefer the escape. I regret that I so seldom actually stop long enough to visit Lake Wobegon for 20 minutes on Satuday. Oh, yes, I have plenty of escape time; plenty of avoidance times. And in my religious moments, I have some of those meaning-of-life times.
But I also have a way of keeping the two worlds—my spiritual world and my physical world—categorized and separated. I know the religious answers to the big philosophical questions, but I also know the pragmatic answers to the practical questions. Like all of you, I live in a world that is dominated by the material and empirical. The real things in life have physicality, substance. What I experience as real and true is accessible through the senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch. My life is lived earning financial resources that enable me to buy the sustaining substances. The busyness of this week will be defined primarily by earthly, material stuff. What’s real, day-to-day, is the stuff of this life, not the imagination of a world “out there.” In this world, in this very physical world, what does give meaning and purpose to my existence? What is the goal? In these tumultuous times, why am I here? Am I doing or being anything that matters?
Those questions are just as haunting for the Christian mom whose kids have just left home as they are for the non-Christian. They are the same for the Christian and non-Christian man who just lost his job and must decide about entirely new career paths in order to survive financially. They are the same for the family dealing with emotional trauma and grief over death or disease or tragic accident. So why should we believe that followers of Jesus have access in such times to an anchor of the soul, to some sustaining hope that can make sense of it all?
That’s the question the writer of Hebrews tries to answer in our text today. Yes, his audience’s circumstances are not quite the same as these I have just mentioned. Their immediate suffering seems to be directly related to their faith claims. They have faced financial loss and physical persecution for the sake of their faith. Philosophically they are equipped to think about a reality that is beyond the tangible, experienced world in ways that we are not. They believed Plato was right, that there was a reality “out there” that was more real than the material world of their experience. It was no mental stretch for them to accept the idea that their earthly existence was only a shadow, a copy of some heavenly reality that was the real deal—the most authentic existence. For them the question, however, was whether or not the temporal losses of identity and place and material wealth were in actuality a trade-off for a superior “out there” reality.
So in chapter seven, the Hebrews writer takes up a claim that he already has made regarding the existence and identity of Jesus. Remember, our preacher in Hebrews is the only writer in the New Testament who is interested in the identity of Jesus as high priest. He is Son of God; he is Lord; he is Savior; he also is eternal high priest. He is the ultimate intercessor pleading our human cause before God. Prior to this chapter he has referred to Jesus as high priest six times (2:17; 3:1; 4:14; 5:5, 10, 6:20). Three times he has called him a priest after the order of Melchizedek. In chapter seven, he decides to expand and explain the comparison. The question is, why? After all, Melchizedek is this obscure, ambiguous Old Testament character who only appears twice in Scripture. Ah, but here is the preacher’s connection. One of those appearances is Psalm 110, a psalm widely recognized and used to speak of God’s Messiah. But while other New Testament writers quoted only the first verse of the Psalm, just as our preacher does in verse thirteen of chapter one, this preacher kept reading the Psalm. Verse 4 jumped off the page for him: “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.’”
The link to Messiah in Psalm 110 then led him back to Genesis 14 where the silence and ambiguity of the story allowed him to find the many ways in which Melchizedek was an earthy copy of the heavenly reality. He was like Jesus; Jesus was a priest like Melchizedek. The preacher thus draws the comparisons. Just as Jesus was royal, the promised son of David, so Melchizedek was king—king of peace and king of righteousness (Hebrews 7:2). But here is where the story gets really interesting for us modern readers. The preacher interprets the silence of Genesis regarding both the background and foreground of Melchizedek’s life—he has no genealogy; he disappears from the pages of Scripture as quickly as he appears—to argue that Melchizedek had no beginning or end. He interprets the silence of Scripture to mean that Melchizedek is eternal, and thus a shadow, a prototype, of the ultimate heavenly high priest. Plus, he says that Abraham, the ancestor of Levi and the whole Levitical priesthood, paid a tithe to Melchizedek. One could even argue, he says, that Levi himself paid a tithe to Melchizedek through his great-grandfather Abraham. Thus, the priesthood of Melchizedek is superior to that of the descendents of Levi and Aaron.
The preacher then proceeds to argue the superiority of Jesus as priest in the order of Melchizedek over against the Biblical stories of the priesthood of Aaron. He makes this point, I think, not because his audience is considering a return to Judaism, but because this is the story within Scripture that he can use to illustrate the superiority of God’s latest revelation in Christ. Just as the Son is superior to other heavenly beings and superior to Moses and Joshua, he is superior to the priesthood of Aaron. Why? The preacher adds to the reasons he already has given. Those priests commit sins themselves. Those priests, the descendents of Aaron, all live and die and have to be replaced. Those priests were chosen by other humans without any divine oath. His most powerful argument in favor of the high priesthood of Jesus is the claim that no one ever reached perfection—no one ever reached the goal—through the priesthood and covenant associated with Aaron. That system of sacrifices for sin, in which the high priest had to make sacrifices for himself as well as the people, did not, could not bring people to the goal of life lived in the presence of God. Sins could be forgiven but SIN remained as a barrier between humans and God. But the perfect high priest offered the perfect once-for-all sacrifice—himself. In the Son, in the high priest in the order of Melchizedek, we humans now had a perfect, eternal high priest of whom Scripture says, “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.’”
This is the same Jesus who had to be made like us in every respect, the preacher told us back in chapter two:
“Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested” (2:17-18).
This is the same Jesus who now sits at the right hand of Creator God constantly serving as our high priest, our intercessor—the one pleading our case before God. The preacher believes that people whose lives are in turmoil, whose faith is wavering under the load of suffering and shame and identity crisis, need to know that the work of God’s messiah was not finished at the Cross; it was not finished at the resurrection; it was not finished when he departed this earth and rose again into the heavenlies. He was not merely restored to his place in heaven beside Creator God, he returned to the throne room as the perfect high priest—our perfect high priest. He sits there in the throne room even at this moment, pleading our case, making intercession on our behalf. He is eternal. He is the pioneer and completer of our faith.
That’s why we pray “in Jesus’ name.” It’s not the ‘sincerely yours’ ending tagged on at the end of our speech to God (or to ourselves or whomever we think is listening). It is the conviction that we have a heavenly high priest, an eternal intercessor who sits at the right hand of God, who now understands our humanity completely and understands our needs completely and only he can fully intercede before Creator God on our behalf. He really does know what is best for our lives and what we most need in order to attain the prize—the ultimate goal of our existence on this planet-which is eternity spent in the presence of God.
Even when we take time out and spend 20 minutes listening to Prairie Home Companion, we know there really aren’t any quiet weeks in Lake Wobegon. We can escape into the story mentally and emotionally for 20 minutes each week, but we can’t live there. We can escape for two hours at the movie theater, or three hours at the ballgame, but we can’t live there either. We can escape for two or three days to a worship conference and share in the joy of our salvation in ways and moments that actually feel transcendent. But Monday is coming. We can’t live here.
No, there are other days; there is work tomorrow. There is the unexpected tragedy—the suffering when and where we least expect it, the economic disaster when we least can afford it. There are all of the reminders that human existence on this planet is vulnerable, unstable, unpredictable. Even if lived to full length, human life is still incredibly short in contrast with the eternal.
There, out there where we cannot hide or escape even for 20 minutes, the preacher of Hebrews tells us we can have hope that anchors our souls, that sees us through to the goal. Hope that there is some existence that is authentic through and through, assurance that our lives do have meaning and purpose and direction and promise. The Son of God, our Savior, our King, our Redeemer, our Lord, our High Priest, has passed through the heavenlies and lived among us. He experienced everything human that we experience. He even endured an ugly, humiliating, worst-case-scenario human death. But he conquered it all—conquered death, not just for himself but for us as well—and now is restored to the heavenlies. Now he sits on the throne as high priest forever. The LORD has sworn with an oath. This cannot be changed. He is our eternal intercessor. He is the one Job longed for in the midst of his suffering when he cried out in his lament for some one in heaven to plead his case before God. You and I have that gift—that promise—one pleading your cause and mine at this very moment. He is our strength for the journey in real time, without escape, inside or outside our spiritual highs and lows. Hope to see us through. Strength for the journey that leads to the real prize, the ultimate goal of our existence. Life in the throne room with God—FOREVER!
Delivered at Woodmont Hills, October 6, 2002
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