Hebrews 5:1-10, October 16-22, Year B:

The writer of the epistle of Hebrews is addressing a group of Christians who had left their Jewish faith and been converted to Christianity.  He is dealing with certain questions and concerns of these Christians throughout this epistle and relating certain aspects of Christianity to Judaism, indicating in what ways Christianity is superior to Judaism.  In this passage, he is dealing first of all  with the matter of the priesthood.

 

There was something very magnificent and awe-inspiring about the Jewish priesthood.  The author of Hebrews is reminding the Jewish-Christians that in Christ, they have a superior Priest.  The priesthood represented by Christ is a special priesthood, "after the order of Melchisedec."  He was not encumbered by the sins or infirmities of an earthly priest--though, as we saw in Hebrews 4, he could identify in every way  with our weaknesses and temptations, yet without sin. 

 

This Sunday, we are nearing the final weekend in October, during which many Protestant churches will celebrate Reformation Sunday.  By the time of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, the earthly priesthood of men had reasserted itself.  Luther rediscovered the true nature of the Christian priesthood in the biblical concept of the "priesthood of all believers," as stated explicitly in 1 Peter 2.  The special qualities of our priesthood include the fact that it is not by heredity like the Old Testament Aaronic priesthood,  but appointed by God. It is not taken upon oneself or given by social standing or payment of money or as a political reward--as was often the case in the Middle Ages--but only as called by God.  Even today, a man or woman does not, strictly speaking, decide to be a minister of the Gospel.   It is a calling from God.  

 

And so in the celebration of the Protestant Reformation, we are celebrating the freedom from an institutional priesthood--a freedom that was bought by Christ with  the shedding of His blood on the cross.  For He was not only the priest, but He made the sacrifice that atoned for our sin.  Through Christ, there can be no more religious bondage or tyranny to laws made by man.  Our salvation comes not through obeying manmade laws, performing rituals, or claiming  many good works.  Our salvation comes through Christ.  Our prayers are offered, not through a priest or to the angels or the martyrs, but in the Name and through the mediation of Christ alone.  We are accountable to Christ alone.  He is our Advocate and Intercessor with the Father!

 

Yet, this passage also reminds us of something else.  Christ was the Perfect and Unchanging High Priest, making right all the failures of any human priestly system. Yet, in the latter part of this passage, we find that even Christ had His own lessons to learn on the cross.  What could it possibly mean that even the Son of God had to learn something as He was carrying out His ultimate role as High Priest?  

 

We know that He endured great agony in Gethsemane.  We know that at several points during His life and ministry, He wept openly for His people.  We know that He felt genuine sorrow because of His distance from God during those agonizing moments on the cross and His knowledge of the necessity for God to judge sin, as He took our sin on Himself.  With the ultimate objective always in view, however, Christ obeyed perfectly the will of His Heavenly Father.  He had to endure the full weight of human experiences of temptation and Experience in order perfectly to be able to identify in a divine way with the anguish of His Bride, the Church.  He was acquainted with grief; and it ever had to be so if He was to be one with us.  Perhaps He had to learn, in some mysterious divine way, what weakness feels like in His human nature.  He had to learn perfect obedience in the face of the torture of physical suffering and human sin.  Christ did not fear the physical pain; but He loathed the confrontation with evil itself in its fullest and most awful manifestation.  His confrontation with evil and temptation had to be total; and He had to prevail.  He faced the curse of the law, striking soul and body.  This is why the penal and substitutionary nature of His death is so vital for us to understand.  He obeyed the Father, not just because He should, as a matter of principle, but because it was His conscious desire, acted out to the Bitter End.  He learned the cost of obeying the Father in the midst of the human condition.  Three days later, there would be a resurrection; but as Christ hung there on the cross, there could be no supernatural deliverance.

 

This is a great truth to which neither I, nor any preacher, can hope to do justice.  The confrontation with evil, the pain and suffering, are so complete and so agonizing for Christ that our own struggles pale by comparison.  Yet, it is by Christ's sinless life, brutal death, and substitutionary atonement and sacrifice that He becomes, not only our High Priest, but the offering for our sins.  This is what the writer to the Hebrew Christians was teaching and proclaiming.  This is why we need no priest today.  This is one of the many reasons why the Protestant Reformation was such a high-water mark in the rediscovery of biblical Christianity.