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| Strength for the Journey #8 Looking to Jesus: A Better Covenant |
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Looking to Jesus: A Better Covenant
Reading: Hebrews 8:1-12
Introduction: In the children’s story by C. S. Lewis, it was the magic of a wardrobe in an otherwise empty room. That’s how Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy discovered the Land of Narnia. Lewis told those wonderful stories about the land of Narnia and all its surrounding countries by having the children leave behind the bombings of London during WWII and travel to the safety of the professor’s house out in the country. There the children discovered the room with the wardrobe full of fur coats. But if you went into the wardrobe, there was no back wall. You came out the backside into the land of another dimension.
More recently there have been other writers with other means of getting the children into a different place at a different time. The “Polar Express” is a train that takes one to the magical world of the North Pole. Harry Potter also travels by train, but only after having passed through a brick wall from one train station into another of a different dimension.
For the lovers of science fiction, there is the Time Machine. Whether it was the original H. G. Wells story or its most recent remake, or one of those episodes of “Quantum Leap,” the hero had the means of jumping through time and space, forward and backward. The movie “Stargate” featured some ancient ruins that, when pieced back together, allowed one to pass into a whole other world. There are countless episodes from the several “Star Trek” series, and a number of other television shows and movies in which the heroes must contend with a “disruption in the space/time continuum.” The Enterprise would be flying along in space minding its own business when some space anomaly would send the ship into some odd predicament with its own past or future, often with the result that the characters met themselves in an earlier or later time. In some of the more inventive programming there were even shape shifters, beings whose lives were not necessarily eternal—but close to it—who could transform themselves into varieties of states of being. They had some superior powers of intellect, but their status as divine beings was always ambiguous.
One of the most recent movies, “Kate and Leopold,” features particular moments when, upon jumping from a sufficient height, one can leap back and forth through time. I love the first movie in the “Back to the Future” series because the time machine is a Delorean sports car. When the car gets to exactly 88 mph, the flux capacitor kicks in and they leap through time. Better yet is the way in which they carry those photographs around with them everywhere, and changes in their activity, either in the past or the future, cause the characters in the photographs to fade in and out. By changing a moment in the past, they threaten to erase the future, or at least radically change it.
Breaks in the space/time continuum seem almost commonplace in the world of science fiction and fantasy. But we know that such stories are just that, don’t we. People don’t go from one time period to another. We may send people into outer space and bring them back again; we may even figure out how to send them in space ships to the moon and calculate their travel so that they come back again. Only in science fiction and fantasy can one participate in time travel. Only in fantasy and science fiction can one traverse from one dimension to another, from our universe to a multiverse. Only in the world of fantasy could one leap into the past or the future to encounter the love of one’s life, or prevent some catastrophe, or encounter strange wonderful creatures like Aslan.
Our preacher in Hebrews knows nothing about Narnia or the fourth quadrant of the universe, but he does know all about some version of the space/time continuum. He spends much of his sermon arguing that a major break already has occurred. Creator God, the being beyond all time and space, has broken into it. Yes, before that in human history on this planet, he made himself known from time to time. He revealed himself to particular human beings; he called certain ones like Moses and the prophets to himself and gave them special instructions. But now, the preacher says, he has decidedly broken through in the Son.
The revelation of Jesus Christ changes everything. A salvation has arrived among humans that must not be neglected. It is a salvation from all of the restrictions humans otherwise face. In the midst of the often hectic, out-of-control lives that we humans live, in the midst of all of the human made distractions that keep us from focusing on anything but ourselves, in the midst of all that distracts us from the God who is beyond all time and space, God has offered rest to us through the in-breaking of the Son. What God has done in the Christ, the preacher argues, has brought completion, maturity, perfection to God’s offer of access and relationship with the humans created in his image. The Son, he says, is now seated in the throne room of God located out there—in some dimension of the heavens beyond our understanding—where he serves eternally as high priest in the order of Melchizedek. He is the pioneer, the author of this break in the space/time continuum that allows full access to the heavenlies for us earthlings.
In chapter 8, the preacher rehearses again what God did in the past when he initiated partial access to himself through Moses. Moses was called into the presence of God on top of a mountain. There God revealed to him specific instructions for creating sacred space through which humans might draw near to him. Creator God even made promises with humans by which they could live in harmony with the planet, with one another, and with God himself. But as the preacher explains it and compares the circumstances on earth to those in the dimension of space where God dwells, everything on earth was a copy of the real thing which exists in that other dimension.
While I doubt that the writer of Hebrews, or his original listeners for that matter, were people who consciously identified themselves as student’s of the Greek philosopher Plato, the ideas of Plato provided the preacher with some vocabulary just as fantasy and science fiction have provided me with some vocabulary this morning. Just as Plato talked about the material world being mere shadow or copy of the real, the true forms, the preacher uses those ideas to express the truth of God’s new activity in Christ. The shadows and copies previously known to humans through the activity of Moses and the Levitical priesthood could give one glimpses of reality on the other side of the space/time continuum but they were all earth bound and time bound. Listen to his description in the opening verses of chapter eight:
“Now the main point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent that the Lord, and not any mortal, has set up. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; hence it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They offer worship in a sanctuary that is a sketch and shadow of the heavenly one; for Moses, when he was about to erect the tent, was warned, ‘See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.’ But Jesus has now obtained a more excellent ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted through better promises.” (8:1-6)
Here is where this whole space/time continuum thing gets very interesting with the preacher. Jesus, the Son of God, who made an appearance on this planet and became completely human just like the rest of us, is now seated in that other dimension of time and space. The one who couldn’t even be a priest on earth offered a sacrifice on earth that actually serves as a gift on the altar in the other dimension. The gift on the altar in that dimension serves as a once-for-all-time sacrifice in this dimension of earth time and space.
In human form he was no priest because he was not a descendent of Aaron, but in the other dimension he is the high priest. Here on the earth side, in past and present times priests offer gifts according to the laws given by God to Moses. But they do so in a sanctuary that is just a sketch or shadow of the heavenly one. God allowed Moses to experience a pattern, a type of the sanctuary from the other side, but both the sanctuary and the promises attached to it suffered greatly from limitations of time and space in our world. Precisely because the promises and priesthood were bound by human capacities and limitations of earth time and space, their existence hinted of something better. Their shadowy character pointed toward that other dimension of reality that is better.
The preacher thus looks to the prophet Jeremiah where he finds justification for his conviction that God intended to break through the space/time continuum in a more effective way. When the people of Israel were exiled from their homeland and lost even the shadowy access available through the sanctuary, God spoke of new possibilities—a new covenant less bounded by human time and space.
“For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one. God finds fault with them when he says: ‘The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah; not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors, on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; for they did not continue in my covenant, and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord. This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.’ In speaking of ‘a new covenant,’ he has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.” (8:7-13)
Laws written not on the exterior but the interior of us humans. A covenant relationship less tied to the earthly contingencies. For the preacher who already believes his audience ought to be teaching one another, these words become exhortation. When this new reality is fully realized, they shall not need to teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for all will know the Lord. Even the distinctions of least and greatest will melt away when everyone knows God. The times of that old, shadowy existence are obsolete, and like those photographs in “Back to the Future,” the images are fading away. A disruption in the space/time continuum has changed everything. When Jesus broke through space and time and became human like us in every way and then broke back through into that other dimension where he sits at the right hand of God, present/past/future all changed on this planet.
We are not yet through hearing the preacher’s unfolding story of this break in the space/time continuum. But we know this is a wardrobe we can walk through, a DeLorean going 88 mph we can sit in. This is a promise offered not just to an audience sitting in Shadowland in the second half of the first century but a promise extended to us as we sit in Shadowland this morning. The preacher says that we can have full access to that other dimension of time and space. The one who could not serve as priest on this planet now serves as eternal high priest. While he could not offer priestly sacrifice in this dimension, somehow someway he sacrificed himself in this dimension and that opens the wardrobe door for us to enter the other dimension. Salvation!
Our preacher already said what we needed to hear back in chapter two:
“Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it. For if the message declared through angels was valid, and every transgression or disobedience received a just penalty, how can we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? It was declared at first through the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard him, while God added his testimony by signs and wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit, distributed according to his will.” (2:1-4)
The invitation to travel where one man has gone before. To explore space beyond the universe, to break the time barrier. To go beyond the twilight zone or the outer limits. To experience more than the shadows even now by the power of the Holy Spirit. The preacher says this is not magic or fantasy or science fiction—it’s REAL. The question is, are we true believers this morning?
Delivered at Woodmont Hills, October 13, 2002.
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