Intercessor
Hebrews 7:23-28
Click here to view the full sermon video for October 24, 2021 entitled “Intercessor.”
I was in my 20’s when I started going to church again for the first time in four years. That hiatus would make for a whole other sermon, but the point is that after an extended break I came back to church because I knew there was something there that I needed. It would be another couple of years before that something crystalized into something like a call to become a pastor. At that point, I was just eager to belong to a community of faith, and to grow spiritually. Simply attending the Sunday worship service wasn’t quite enough for me to do that, so I started attending Sunday school. If you really want to get to know other people in a church community, Sunday school is one of the best ways to do that. The space that it opens up for dialogue and exploration of scripture and belief are unmatched by a worship hour where often the only expectation is to sit and listen to someone else. It’s also the best place to have our assumptions challenged in ways that lead to new ideas and understanding of our faith. That’s what happened to me. I can still remember very clearly to this day sitting in one of the classrooms at Central Presbyterian Church in Denver as I said something to the effect of, “the covenant that God made with his people didn’t work, so God sent Jesus.” That’s what 20 some years attending Presbyterian, Catholic, Episcopal, Pentecostal and Evangelical churches had led me to conclude. An older man in the class simply said, “no.” He had been raised Jewish, and attended the church with his Christian wife. The pastor leading the class went on to explain that it was a common misunderstanding, but one that had done great harm over the centuries.
It wasn’t until I attended seminary that I learned that there was a name for what I had so unartfully articulated: supersessionism. I also learned that it is still very much alive and well and frequently advanced by a number of Christian traditions. In a nutshell, supersessionism asserts that the old covenants between God and the people of Israel have been eclipsed, or are superseded by the new covenant in Jesus Christ. What I didn’t realize when I opened my mouth that day in Sunday school, and what the Jewish man in the class was reacting to, was the painful way in which this simple idea had led to untold violence against Jewish people at the hands of Christians. It is an old theological saw that has justified centuries of anti-Semitism. And it is an idea, if we’re not careful, that we might come away with from this letter to the Hebrews. Particularly as the writer of this letter distinguishes the high priests of the Jerusalem temple and the practice of ritual sacrifice from Jesus as a high priest, and his sacrifice.
As the title suggests, this letter is addressed to a community of Jewish Christians, believers who have come to believe in Jesus, as the original twelve did, from the synagogues of the day and their own Jewish upbringings. But rather than negating the forms and practices with which they are most familiar as a supersessionist might, the writer of this letter is attempting to show how Jesus fills those forms and practices full with an expanded understanding that changes their relationship with them. In doing so, faith in Jesus leads us to see what has come before in a new way.
Perhaps what we come to see differently in Jesus is the religious practice of sacrifice. Sacrifice comes in many forms, the earliest is the idea of offering up something of value on an altar dedicated to God. One of the earliest examples comes in the mythic account of Cain and Abel, two brothers who each make a sacrifice to God. One sacrifice, we’re told, is accepted and found pleasing to God. The other is not. At the heart of the story is the human impulse that senses a need to draw close to God, but doesn’t want to do so empty-handed. It’s the same impulse that leads people to bring a bottle of wine when they’re invited to someone’s home. The wine is an offering of thanks to the person hosting the dinner party. In another way, it’s the impulse of the guilty spouse who brings home flowers as a kind of peace offering after a fight. There is something transactional about the very idea of sacrifice, that the offering is made in exchange for dinner, or forgiveness, or -in the case of the earliest religions- the ongoing favor of God in the form of rain to water the crops that feed the people that keep them alive, protection from hostile neighbors and animals, deliverance from danger and hardship. The continuing offer of sacrifices of gratitude, guilt, and downright bribery is not restricted to religion, and certainly not restricted to the practices of the Jerusalem temple. That was just the most prominent and immediate example of the time. To name Jesus as both high priest and perfect offering changes the dynamic altogether. It doesn’t just reframe one particular religious expression, it transforms altogether the way we see God and what constitutes our relationship with God.
When we live with a sacrificial mindset, we are primarily occupied with two overriding concerns. The first is named in this text. We always need new priests because we always need to be making new offerings. In the sacrificial mindset we fear that if we don’t keep performing, don’t keep offering sacrifices, the whole thing will fall apart and we’ll fall out of favor with God. Obviously this is problematic because it sort of implies that God is something of a jerk who needs to be constantly appeased in order to be nice to us. By the way, perhaps the most destructive form of this mindset is the idea of sacrificing ourselves, believing that we have to continually offer up our lives to satisfy the demands of a career, a job, a spouse, or a parent. To live like that is both relentless and exhausting. The second concern that the sacrificial mindset saddles us with is the one that plagued Cain. What if our offering isn’t accepted? What if it doesn’t find favor in God’s eyes? What if what we have to offer simply isn’t good enough to seal the deal? In such a scenario the offering simply becomes a stand-in for our own sense of self-worth. If what we sacrifice, if what we offer isn’t acceptable, then that must mean, by extension, we are unacceptable. Which is pretty messed up.
But if Jesus is both the only high priest we need, and also the one who offers himself up as holy, blameless, and undefiled once and for all, then we no longer need concern ourselves with this sacrificial mindset. Turns out. It’s not up to us. It’s not up to us to keep things between us and God good with whatever we have to give. That’s already a done deal. Jesus himself is God’s way of saying to us, “we’re all good.” It’s not our chief responsibility to be good enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, whatever enough for God. Earlier in this letter we were reminded that Jesus can sympathize with us in our weakness. Meaning, our weakness is no kind of obstacle for God. God knows our weakness. God knows better than to leave our salvation up to the best that we can do. Our best, as good as it is, may honor God as our creator, but it is our worst that elicits God’s love and salvation.
That’s why it makes no sense to pretend otherwise. Recently, the top administrator of the Carroll Independent school district in Texas came under fire when she advised teachers in a meeting to provide students with books that covered "opposing" perspectives of the Holocaust. These opposing perspectives would no doubt come from those who would deny such a genocide ever happened. It’s an extreme example of something that’s far too common. If we don’t like what something suggests about us, we call it into question as fake news. There are no more two sides to the destruction of 6 million Jewish lives than there are to the lynching of an unrecorded number of black people in the American south, or the attempts to systematically erase the heritage of native peoples in this country through programs of indoctrination. To pretend otherwise is in some ways the same sad attempt to save ourselves. It simply cannot be done. We can no more deny the depth of our sin than we can make up for it with an endless succession of sacrifices.
What we can do, is instead of bringing our best to Jesus, start by bringing our worst. Because that is how we are saved. We are saved by the one who sees, who knows, who intercedes always and takes our worst from us so that we can be set free to live as people made right not by what we have to bring, but by the love that God has to give in Jesus. As the Psalmist says, “the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit.” The act of offering our lives in faith is no longer about appeasing, or satisfying, or gaining God’s acceptance. That’s all good. We bring our lives to Jesus, so that they might be transformed. So that, just as was done on the cross, God might take our deadly worst and transform it into something entirely new and life giving. We bring our hurts and heartache, our crimes and misdemeanors to the one who is always ready to intercede on our behalf, confident that when we entrust that to Jesus, we can and will be healed and made whole.