Hilton Head Island, SC - December 17, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Hebrews 4:14-16; 7:23-2
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. – Hebrews 4:14
In these sermons about the identity of Jesus, we come today to one of the most unusual books in the Bible, the letter to the Hebrews. Hebrews was written by an un-named Jew to other un-named Jews. In the first-century of the Common Era, almost all of the first Christians were Jewish Christians. They were wondering whether Jesus was the Promised One of God, the Messiah. The writer of the letter says that he was, and is, and ever more shall be.
But more than that, Jesus is also, said the writer, the great high priest. Since Protestants don't have priests, let alone high priests or great high priests, what does that expression mean? In Latin, the word for priest is pontifex. It comes from two roots: pons (bridge) plus facere (to make or build or do). A factory is a place where people build or make things. Thus a pontifex is a bridge builder. And from what to what does he build his bridges? - From us to God. We cannot do it ourselves, so Jesus does it for us.
In the Bible, we are told that the Israelites had priests who offered sacrifices on their behalf. Every male from the tribe of Levi was automatically a priest. To this day any Jew whose name is Levy or Levin or Lewin or anything similar is probably descended from the original tribe of Levi. In Hebrew the word for priest is kohen, so anyone named Cohen or Cohn or Kahane was also a priest, although not necessarily a Levite. All Levites were priests, but not all priests were Levites. If you don't understand it, don't worry; it doesn’t affect Christians anyway.
The important thing to know about the concept of the priesthood is this: priests can do for ordinary people what ordinary people cannot do for themselves. And what is that? - They can't sacrifice on their own behalf. Only priests could do that. In biblical times only the priests and Levites could sacrifice animals in the temple. Today, only priests in those churches which have priests as their clergy can perform the sacrifice of the mass. In Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, no lay person is authorized to say the words and take the symbolic actions which is believed to result in the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ.
One of the main reasons Protestants don't have priests is that Luther and Calvin taught the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. They vociferously and unalterably rejected the notion of ordained clergy as priests, and said instead that every Christian is a priest to her or his neighbor. We are not priests for ourselves; we are priests for one another. In other words, we all need community if we are to become connected to God; we can’t do it on our own.
However germane or otherwise all that may be to the subject of this sermon, the important thing to remember is this: the purpose of a priest is to build a bridge from a broken and sinful humanity to God. None of us can do that for himself or herself; we can only have it done for us. And so, says biblical tradition, we need priests.
Well, as one century followed another in the history of Israel, there emerged a particular figure known as the high priest. The high priest was elected by the other priests to serve for a limited period of time. It was he, and he alone, who could perform the sacrifice in the small room in the center of the temple in Jerusalem known as the holy of holies (in Latin the sanctum sanctorum). The high priest performed this sacrifice only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It was a great honor and a grave responsibility to be the high priest. There was only one high priest, and as high priest he performed only one unique sacrifice, and it occurred only on that highest holy day of the year.
So then, do you see where the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is going when he calls Jesus the great high priest? He is not a great high priest; he is THE great high priest. And he is that for all time. There is no need for another high priest, ever, says the Jewish writer writing to Jewish Christians, because Jesus is THE GREAT high priest.
How can a mass murderer ever make it across the gulf between the excesses of his impulsive behavior and the pure and undefiled righteousness of his Creator? How can the Russian army officers who are ordering Russian soldiers to shell Ukrainian apartment buildings, schools, and churches make it across that bridge? How can any of us, whether Vladimir Putins or Kim Jong Uns, or Saints Peter or Paul, Mary or Clare, ever get from here to there?
The answer, says the writer of Hebrews, is found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Great High Priest. Jesus builds a bridge for us. He bridges the gulf, He does that for us which we can never do for ourselves. He is the Great High Priest. He alone can take the step without which none of us could ever be connected to God. You need to recognize that certainly not all people nor even all Christians believe this, but the writer of the letter to the Hebrews firmly believed it.
Later he declared, "(Jesus) has no need, like (other) high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered up himself" (7:27) Jesus Christ is both the sacrificer and the sacrificed. He makes the sacrifice, but He also IS the sacrifice, according to the letter to the Hebrews.
The tradition of the Church, which is echoed in this singular letter, is that Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross on our behalf. By dying, it has been believed, Jesus gave us a new kind of life that transcends ordinary life.
It may appear to you that historically the Church of Jesus Christ has emphasized too strongly the death of Jesus at the expense of his life. One third of all four Gospels is devoted to Holy Week and Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, while only two-thirds teel the story of his remarkable life and his three-year ministry before Holy Week.
It was not only by means of Jesus’ death that he gave us new life. He also displayed for us the new life by how he lived and what he said and what he did. He turned common fishermen and laborers into giants of faith. He gave sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf and health to the sick. He showed people who were spiritually dead how to come alive, and he bridged the gap between themselves and God. The bridge from us to God was in the course of being built by the foundations Jesus built during his lifetime, and not only by his death and resurrection.
We are going to die; that sober truth confronts us every now and then, but we try to put it out of our minds. Like Rosalyn Carter or Norman Lear or anyone or everyone else, whether very good or very bad or, far more likely, somewhere in between, we are all going to die. And no matter how good any of us might be, there is not sufficient goodness for the gap between us and God to be bridged by our own efforts. We need a bridge builder, someone who knows who and what we are and who and what God is, and who is able somehow to get us from over here to over there. That someone may be perceived in the man from Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, the man with the outstretched arms, welcoming everyone in.
A lady once asked a philosopher, "What do you think about the death penalty?" And the wise old man said, "Not much we can do about it." That was not the sort of answer the lady expected, so she asked, "What do you mean?" "We're born with it," said the philosopher. Indeed, we are born with the death penalty, although it is not a penalty, but is the natural conclusion to everything that has ever lived. Death is one of the few certainties in life. It is the inexorable visit which shall be made on each of us by the so-called Grim Reaper. It isn’t because of sin, or because of Adam and Eve's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. The death penalty comes because of life, because we live, because of the life penalty, not the death penalty! If we live, we shall die; it is the way of life, the only way that life can end!
But the seemingly infinite and eternal gulf between us and the one who made us has been bridged by the one sent to us by the One who made us. God did not create us with any possibility of ever losing us. Did you hear it? God did not create us with any possibility of ever losing of us. We cannot close the gap, but God can, and He has, once and for all, and this is made clear to us by the bridge constructed by the Great High Priest. Christ Jesus entered into the world in order that the world might know who God is, might know how deep and how broad and how high is the love of God.
And that's the truly amazing part. Why does God love like that? From what inexhaustible source does such love flow? How did God ever learn how to be God? And why does He love everyone?
This week we received a Christmas card and letter from a long-time friend. She came across the following poem among her keepsakes, and she decided to share it with us. I am very grateful she did, and I now share it with you. It is called Surprise in Heaven.
I dreamed death came the other night
And Heaven's gate swung wide.
An angel with a halo bright
Ushered me inside.
And there to my astonishment
Stood folks I'd judged and labelled
As "quite unfit" - "of little worth"
And "spiritually disabled."
Indignant words rose to my lips
But never were set free.
For every face showed stunned surprise -
No one expected ME!!!
If there is no great high priest, if none is able to bridge the gulf to get us to the other side, we are all lost. But we are not lost. We have a great high priest, the master bridge builder, Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. To know him is to know Him who sent him, and to know that One is to know all we need to know. It is to have the chasm bridged, it is to have the gap closed.
No one can live without experiencing suffering to one degree or another. There was one among us who learned that more fully than anyone else, and he observed it in a variety of people: a Roman centurion whose servant was gravely ill, a ruler of the synagogue whose daughter was near death, a mother whose son had died, a Canaanite woman whose daughter was thought to be demon-possessed, two sisters whose dead brother had been in the tomb four days. On the cross, Jesus endured unimaginable suffering himself. He had always felt obligated to do something to eliminate all human anguish. Therefore he built a bridge to God for everyone in their own deep sorrow. The bridge is also there for us.
"Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession" (Hebrews 4:14).