(Deuteronomy 33:8-10, Psalm 110:1-4; Hebrews 4:14-5:10)
As the author of Hebrews has been building his case for the supremacy of Christ, he’s been gradually zeroing in on his key point. All the way along, he’s had his eye on the Jewish law; as we know, one of the main attacks on the early church was from those who insisted that even after Jesus, it was still necessary to keep the whole law in order to please God, and the author is concerned that his hearers might give in to that attack. He doesn’t want them to go back to putting their faith in the law—which is to say, in their own ability to keep the law—and so he’s writing to strengthen their conviction that not only do they need Jesus, they need only Jesus, with nothing else mixed in.
Having shown Jesus to be superior to the angels who delivered the law, to all other authorities including the law, and to the Sabbath which is the law’s greatest earthly blessing, he now arrives at his central point, one he’ll focus on (from a couple different angles) through the middle section of the book: Jesus replaces the core of the law. He’s not merely superior to it as an authority, he’s superior to it in its very essence; what the law could never fully accomplish, he accomplished. The Old Testament law can never be understood in the same way again, because Jesus has fulfilled the purpose for which it was created. It’s still the word of God, we still need to understand it and learn from it, but we don’t live under it anymore; we live under grace, in Christ.
This may sound strange, because we normally think of law as something which is designed to compel and control behavior, to make people do certain things and not do other things; you can find a great many churches that preach the Old Testament that way. For that matter, you can find a great many churches that preach the New Testament that way. That’s a very common form of religion, because it’s what we human beings keep trying to collapse our relationship with God down to—if I do enough good things and avoid enough bad things, God will be pleased with me and will give me what I want. That’s a very common form of religion, but it isn’t the gospel, and it isn’t what following Christ is about; and in fact, it isn’t what the Old Testament is about either, or ever was about. The core purpose of the Old Testament law was to provide salvation from sin to the people of God by providing a means by which the price for their sin could be paid and the holiness of God could be satisfied. That means was imperfect, and could only be temporary, but it was the main reason for which the law existed.
This can be hard for us to understand, because as I’ve said before, we Protestants don’t understand priests. We don’t really know who they are, or what they do, or even what the whole priesthood thing is about—the whole idea is unfamiliar to us. One reason for this, of course, is that we aren’t Catholic (though a few of us used to be), and so we don’t have priests. We know the Catholic church across town has a priest, but for most of us, that’s just external knowledge, not a matter of experience; we know that the pastor there has the title “priest” and is addressed as “Father,” but most of us don’t really know what that means, because it’s never been a meaningful part of our lives.
That being the case, though, it needs to be said that even that would only get you so far, because Catholics don’t understand priests the same way the Old Testament did either. There are similarities, but also some very real and significant differences, and especially the whole sacrificial system—to my knowledge, no Catholic priest has ever sacrificed so much as a pigeon, let alone a cow. As such, even understanding the Catholic priesthood is of limited value in understanding the Old Testament priesthood.
To understand the central focus of this book and its argument, we need to address that, because Hebrews puts considerable effort into showing that Christ is the new and greatest and final high priest, that he has replaced the entire human priesthood and the whole sacrificial system which they served; to get a handle on why the author does that and what he’s really trying to prove, we need at least a basic grasp on what the priests did and why, and how the system worked.
To get the essence of that, look at our passage from Deuteronomy—this is from Moses’ blessing on the tribe of Levi, from which the priests came; look specifically at verse 10, and you can see the two parts of the priest’s work, and the two directions in which that work moved. First, “They teach Jacob your ordinances, and Israel your law.” This is the work of representing God to Israel, of teaching them the will and the ways of God and proclaiming God’s word to them, and this part of the job, we’re familiar with.
But then look at the second half of that verse: “they place incense before you, and whole burnt offerings on your altar.” This is the work of representing Israel before God. The people of Israel couldn’t go directly to God to ask forgiveness, because their sin got in the way; they had to go through the priests. They would bring their offerings of animals and grain to the priests and the priests would then offer them to God on behalf of the people. Every sacrifice was a prayer, and it was a prayer you couldn’t pray yourself; the priests had to pray it for you. They were the only ones who were allowed to do so. They were sort of professional holy people—you might even call them professional pray-ers.
Now, this was the system the Israelites had, and it was better than anything anybody else had; it enabled them, however imperfectly, to pray, and to come to know and serve the one true God, and that’s no small thing. Still, it wasn’t enough. The most it could do was address the symptoms—the outward sinful acts, and not even all of them, and certainly not the sinful attitudes and desires in the heart that were the true disease; and even for the symptoms, all it could offer was an endless series of temporary fixes, not any kind of cure. It was like dialysis for someone with kidney disease, or insulin for a severe diabetic—it was enough to keep going, but the real problem remained. And of course, the priests themselves were sinful, too, and had to offer sacrifices for themselves as well as for everyone else; that wasn’t all bad, because it meant they could understand the sins and failings of those who came to offer sacrifices for sin, but it meant that their work was inevitably imperfect, just as the sacrifices they offered were by nature limited. Something more was needed.
That something more came in Jesus; but it’s important we understand that it was something more, not something different. It’s easy to lose track of that, since the whole sacrificial system is so foreign to our experience. You all can pray for yourselves and for each other, by yourselves or together. When you sin against God, you don’t have to come to me and have me pray for you in order for you to be forgiven—you can do that yourself. When you have a need, I’m certainly glad to pray for you, but God will take care of you whether you ask me to pray or not—his action isn’t dependent on me one way or the other. I’m not a priest, I’m just a pastor. Or rather, I am a priest, but only in the same sense as each of you is a priest, that all of us who belong to Jesus are called to be priests to each other in the name of Christ. We’re called to intercede for one another, to speak truth to each other, to encourage one another, and so on. But at the same time, our relationship to God doesn’t run through someone else, it’s direct, one-to-one.
That does not mean, however, that we don’t still have a high priest, or need a high priest, and it doesn’t change the fact that a sacrifice was necessary to make that possible. Nor, indeed, does it change the fact that we need a high priest who is one of us, fully human, and thus fully able to understand the struggles we face; or that to finally solve the problem of human sin, we also needed a high priest who was more than human, someone who could offer a perfect sacrifice, and one which was sufficient to pay the price for all our sin, not just some of it. Whether we knew it or not, all those things were necessary. Jesus didn’t change any of that. He simply fulfilled the requirements.
Jesus, Hebrews says, is our great high priest, the highest priest, who has done everything necessary for our salvation; nothing and no one else can add anything to his accomplishment. He fulfilled every requirement. He knows what it is to be human, because he is one of us; he lived as one of us in this world, facing all our struggles and all our temptations. He knows our desires and our fears, from the inside out, and you can be very sure that the Devil hit him with every temptation possible. Indeed, as we noted a couple weeks ago, Jesus was tempted far, far worse than any of us ever are, because at the point where we give in to temptation, he kept right on resisting. Whatever we’re dealing with, Jesus understands; when we go to him to ask forgiveness, he knows what we’re talking about, because he’s been there. At the same time, though, because he never gave in to fear or desire, he was able to offer a perfect sacrifice, untainted by sin; and because he was God, he was able to offer a sacrifice of infinite value, sufficient once for all to bring full and permanent salvation to all who trust in him.
Therefore, Hebrews says, “Let us approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” We no longer need human priests to present our prayers to God, because we have Jesus, who is himself God, to do so. We pray, and the Holy Spirit carries our prayers to him, and he presents them to the Father, interceding on our behalf, pleading our case for us. When we pray, we aren’t praying alone, nor are we relying on our own merits and good works, any more than the ancient Israelites were; rather, Jesus prays with us and for us. We rely on his merits and his good work on our behalf. This is why we pray in Jesus’ name; indeed, this is what it means to pray in Jesus’ name.
Which, if we really stop and think about it, should move us to awe. We’re used to it, so we don’t stop and think about it, but prayer is no small, safe, domesticated thing. Annie Dillard puts this brilliantly in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk when she writes,
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
This thing that we do—we run as children into the throne room of all creation and climb up into the lap of the King of the universe and tell him everything, in the absolute assurance that he wants us to, and he’s listening with care to everything we say; and we do so because Jesus makes it possible, because he has opened the door for us and he’s the one who lifts us up to the Father to be heard.
It’s a shame when we take that for granted, because it’s a wonderful gift; and more, because when we take it for granted, we take it less seriously, like it’s no big thing. And that’s a problem, because there are times when we need a big thing, and we know it. There are times when we’re desperately in need, or desperately afraid or worried, or when we really feel guilt and shame for our sin, and we truly need something big; if we don’t realize just how big a thing Jesus did for us, and how big a gift he gave us, then when we get to those times, we go looking for more. If we don’t really understand that our acceptance into the presence of God isn’t dependent on whether we feel worthy to be there, then on those times when we don’t feel worthy, we go looking for some way to earn our way in. And we don’t need to. We don’t need to go back to the law, we don’t need to find some way to measure up, we don’t need to add anything to what Jesus has done; what he has done is enough. Jesus is enough. There is nothing more.