Twenty Third Sunday after Pentecost

Homily by: Dr. Deborah Wilson

The Episcopal Church has a program called EFM, which stands for Education for Ministry, and All Saints’ has an EFM group, mentored by Charlie Tyrone. It’s a 4-year program, and members in each year focus on different readings: year 1 is Old Testament, year 2 New Testament, year 3 the history of Christianity, and the final year a broad study of theology. At present, I am now in the 3 rd year, but I still have the books we read on the Old and New Testaments. The members of our current group know that my “favorite” (if that’s an appropriate term) book in the New Testament is Hebrews, from which we read last Sunday (I was the reader) and again today. When I looked back at Mark Allen Powell’s chapter on Hebrews, I was amused and delighted at his introductory comments. Powell said Hebrews is “a critic’s favorite,” a “masterpiece,” and that it “doesn’t top many popularity lists,” being considered “long and stodgy, intellectual and difficult to understand, or even boring” (443). Naturally, being the nerd that I am, I love Hebrews.

Powell goes on to say that the first 10 chapters seem “arcane” since they contain such subjects as “Jewish sacrifices, purification rituals, the priesthood.” And that therefore the question many readers pose is, “What does this have to do with us?” I will try to answer that, in part, today, with God’s help. As most of you know, my father was an Assemblies of God pastor, and his preaching and teaching for the decades he was MY pastor at times involved an approach to Biblical interpretation called TYPOLOGY. I offer a reductive description: the concept that the Old Testament presents types (events, people, places, statements) that prefigure or foreshadow what was to come in New Testament fulfillments of those precursors. Those types would then be recapitulated in the life of Christ, most specifically, as well as the life of the Church, more tangentially, and even the life of the individual Christian. Such a reading seems logical since the Biblical narrative is linear and teleological. It has a specific beginning, the creation, and what follows points and moves toward a particular goal: first, the birth and death of Jesus Christ, and ultimately forward to its final goal, Christ’s return to earth and the end of time.

I will try to clarify my concept of typology with a few examples. One of the earliest scriptures that lends itself to a typological reading is Genesis 3:15, when God curses the serpent in the Garden of Eden: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head and you will strike his heel.” This verse has been read as a foreshadowing of Christ crushing Satan but being wounded in the process of doing so. Romans 5:12-14 describes the one man, Adam, by whom sin and death came into the world, as a “TYPE of the one who was to come,” the second Adam, “who brings an abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness”: grace and righteousness will “exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.” One straightforward example occurs in Matthew 12:40. Jesus responds to scribes and Pharisees who ask for a sign by referring to Jonah: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.”

In the final chapter of Luke, after Jesus is risen and walking to Emmaus, he tells those walking with him that they are foolish for not believing what the prophets foretold about the Messiah: “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” After he reveals himself and they realize who he is, he says, “These are my words that I spoke to you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled” (24:27, 44). Jesus asserts that he is imprinted throughout Biblical history. That must mean that all that “arcane” stuff in the first 10 chapters of Hebrews matters.

Today’s reading from Hebrews offers a typological example. Earlier, in chapter 6, verse 20, the text refers to our forerunner, Jesus, who has entered beyond the veil, and to an Old Testament precursor, Melchizedek. Jesus is “made an high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” So who is this precursor priest? In the Old Testament, he is mentioned only in Genesis 14 and Psalm 100. Hebrews chapter 7 reminds us of his singular narrative: he was king of Salem, “priest of the Most High God, who met Abraham as he was returning from defeating the kings and blessed him.” Abraham gave this priest tithe, since this man was “king of righteousness” as well as “king of peace; without father, without mother, without geneaology, having neither beginning of days nor end of life; but resembling the Son of God.” Most significantly, he “remains a priest forever.” Melchizedek was not part of the Levitical priesthood established by Old Testament law. Nor was he descended of Aaron. He was a priest that predated the birth of Levi. He is a forerunner. He is a TYPE of Christ.

This narrative seems to be retold to make a significant point about the priesthood of Jesus, who came from the tribe of Judah (again, not Levi), and, like Melchizedek (in multiple ways), is not a priest by law, but rather by his endless life. Jesus’ priesthood is superior to the Levitical priesthood in every way, as he is superior to every type that precedes him. First, his is a perpetual priesthood, since he is immortal. But, far beyond that, Jesus is sinless, and therefore does not have to offer sacrifices as the Levitical priesthood did. They offered for themselves, AND for the people. Jesus has no need to offer for himself, since he IS the sacrifice for the people, a PERFECT sacrifice that eradicates the requirement of further sacrifices.

Today’s reading makes that all clear. Jesus is “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens,” and he need not make further sacrifice. Yes, he has redeemed us by his singular sacrifice. Our redemption is his greatest gift. There is no greater praise that we can offer him than for that grace. But I want to talk about another part of his ongoing ministry to us that we may tend to forget and forego. He ever lives to make intercession for us. We can read that as Christ defending us before God for our sins, as a defense lawyer defending us before the legal bar, perpetually, in a sense, arguing against the penalties for the laws we continue to break, the sins we continue to commit. But that role does not make theological sense, since the payment for our sins is already made, once and for all. Nor is he a mediator in the traditional interpretation of that term. As F. F. Bruce writes, He is no “go-between who places his good offices at the disposal of two parties in the hope of bringing them to agreement. He is the unique Mediator between God and man because He combines the Godhead and manhood perfectly in His own person; in Him God draws near to men and in Him men may draw near to God, with the assurance of constant and immediate access” (153-54). And as H. B. Swete asserts, He is not “pleading our cause in the presence of a reluctant God; but as a THRONED Priest-King, asking what he will from a father who always hears and grants his request. Our Lord’s life in heaven is his prayer” (quoted in Bruce 155). Furthermore, as Bruce adds, “His once-completed self-offering is utterly acceptable and efficacious; his contact with the father is immediate and unbroken; his priestly ministry on his people’s behalf is never-ending, and therefore the salvation which he secures to them is absolute” (155).

Beyond Christ’s eternal presence as redeemer and intercessor, what He has given us, what is always available to us, is ACCESS to the presence of God, something the earthly priesthood could never offer. Returning to the comparison of the Old Testament priesthood and the superior priesthood of Christ, we must also return to the precursors of the Tabernacle and the Temple, the workplaces of the Levitical priesthood. Those spaces make God’s inaccessibility clear. Explicit and extensive instructions for the Tabernacle are included in Exodus, but I want to focus on the two rooms referred to as the “holy place” and the “holy of holies,” which contained the Ark of the Covenant. The two rooms were separated by a thick double veil. Only the priests (Aaron, his descendants, and the Levites) could enter the Tabernacle proper. Only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies, and even he only once a year on the Day of Atonement, when he sprinkled sacrificial animal blood for his own sins and the sins of the people. The rebuilt Solomon’s Temple included the division between the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, and the same restrictions for entry applied.

Hebrews chapter 5, which also refers to Christ as a high priest “according to the order of Melchizedek,” is followed by, in chapter 6, a significant assertion about the importance of what that priesthood accomplished for the first time: “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered, having become a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.” JESUS WENT BEHIND THE VEIL, BEHIND THE CURTAIN THAT SEPARATED US FROM THE HOLY OF HOLIES, THE INNER SHRINE. HE ENTERED THE PRESENCE OF GOD, not just as his sinless self, but as a FORERUNNER ON OUR BEHALF.

There is, in the gospels, a literal link between Jesus’ sacrifice of his physical body, of his death on the cross, and our access, through that sacrifice, beyond the veil, into the presence of God. In Matthew 27, when Jesus cried with a loud voice and breathed his last, “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom” (51; see also Mark 15:38 and Luke 23:45). Just before today’s reading, in verses 18-19 of Hebrews 7, we read of the “abrogation” of the earlier, ineffectual law that established the earthly priesthood, for that law and that priesthood provided no immediate access to God. We now have a “better hope, through which we approach God.” At the beginning of chapter 8, we are told the MAIN POINT of all this preamble: Christ, our eternal high priest, sits 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. In chapter 9, after once again comparing the earthly tabernacle and its priesthood to the fulfillment of those types in Christ, who “entered once for all into the Holy Place,” we come to the culmination of everything: HE SAT DOWN at the right hand of God (10:12). He is forever in the divine presence.

From that moment on, WE have free access to the divine presence in a new and profoundly miraculous way. “Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, LET US APPROACH!”

As we come to the table this day in this sanctuary, may we be aware that we freely approach and enter into the presence of God in Christ.