The High Priest Who Understands
A sermon by Andrew Colman on Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Words from the Letter or rather the Sermon to the Hebrews. In case you weren’t here last week, the letter to the Hebrews is larely considered to be a sermon. So it is meant to speak into and communicate the Glory and Goodness of God in a particualy moving way. One that seeks to unpack the goodness of God in a way that builds up and strengthens our faith. It struck me that this section of Hebrews might well have been preached on the stories heard, as they hadn’t been written down yet, of tonights Gospel reading, among others. It truly is a wonderful text.
Anyways, from the Letter/Sermon to the Hebrews, "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Remember, in the book of Matthew, when Jesus said "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
The preacher in Hebrews seemed to have this in mind and takes hold of what Jesus was said and shifted it from the perspective of separating family to a separation within oneself—not unlike from what Jesus said when we heard about removing our various appendages that cause us to sin, which we read a couple of weeks ago.
Except seeking to unpack and build up, they go deeper, saying. "Piercing until it divides soul from Spirit”—which sounds very strange. Because both soul and Spirit are good things, if we look at the Greek words, they are both always used with a positive connotation: the soul as life, and Spirit as in the Holy Spirit.
The following line speaks of joints and marrow being serperated. But it is not the joints being separated from the marrow but rather the joints themselves being separated and the marrow itself being separated. Both good and necessary things are being pierced by this active Word of God as the two-edged sword.
We rarely think of these things being separated because, in our mind, they are a whole.
The separating of something that is whole reveals to us what is inside. If we think of what soul and spirit, joints and marrow do for one moment, we'll see how deep the preacher is probing.
The soul and Spirit image the preacher is speaking about here stands in for how we think of our mind - where we take in and work through - the way we think about life. It's the place from which inspiration is given by the Holy Spirit and the place where all of our thoughts are worked out and given form.
Marrow is where our blood is produced, and our joints are the pivot point of our movement.
One could not consume the blood of an animal in the Hebrew tradition because it contained the very /life/ of that creature.
I'm not sure whether the preacher knew it or not back then, but they were saying that the Word of God would pierce the very place where a creature's life is produced. Symbolically, if the marrow is corrupted, so will the blood that it creates, and so will the life that is lived.
And then, lives are lived through movement in one way or another. And the point of movement is the joint.
The preacher is speaking to /us/ that the word of God sees right through to the earliest glimmers, the production, to the very mechanic of our being in the world.
They continue, "Before him, no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account." The deeper we understand this, the deeper we feel the vulnerability.
And yet as true as that is - it is not but one sentence later that we hear, "We do not have a high priest who is /unable/ to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us, therefore, approach the throne of grace with boldness so that we may receive mercy.”
In other words, we /do/ have a high priest, Jesus, who gets it. Who gets what it means to live in a world where things are unclear, hard, violent, and uncertain? And the fact that all of those things seep into our own way of living. Our desire to protect ourselves and our kin and the ones we care about might mean that we make choices we wouldn't make if the world were clear, easy, peaceful, and certain.
These things change the way we think, live, and act, and often not for the better.
But we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness.
We do have a high priest who understands -
We sang this in our opening song tonight, "God in his mercy." God, in his mercy, looks down on his Children. He understands.
Maybe this is why Jesus is saying to love the poor rich man.
The Rich Man is, in fact, the only person in the Gospel of Mark that Jesus is said to have loved.
This rich man has been subjected to many variations in his approach to Jesus. Did he come in from a place of piety? Good Teacher? Did he come with hubris? Did he come confused? Good Teacher?
It could very well have been any of them, all of which are worth considering because we all come to God from one of those postures from time to time and are utterly challenged.
So what really matters is that here we see what the book of Hebrews calls the living and active Word of God piercing into the rich man's thoughts, life, and movement. His accumulation of wealth guided him more than the commandments he claimed to have been following his whole life.
You see, he thought he was a Torah-following Jew who had no idols, that he was following God - until Jesus pointed out the pattern of his life that exposed what he was doing to be the contrary.
But that was not not before it was said that Jesus Loved him.
Not before we were told that Jesus, as the great high priest, in his love, understood what he was about to say, how he was about to pierce, loved him.
Exposing and making this poor, rich man feel naked and vulnerable was God's perfect love.
After all, what God desires is that we be drawn as close to God as possible. That inevitably means cutting away or clearing away the things that are between us and God. And so God, through the scriptures, through loving members of the Body of Christ, through the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives, will be the one to clear the path between you and me and him.
God will be the One to do the work, active, piercing, and loving.
Jesus cut to it and said, "The things that are weighing you down, literally preventing you from following me because you cannot bear to leave them, you must be rid of.”
So the story continues - "When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving.”
This story is much like the parable of the prodigal son; we don't actually know how it ends. The story in the Gospel we see of the rich man is but one moment in his life. Albeit the moment when he meets God, in Jesus Christ, the one through whom all things we made, so it is an important moment.
But it is only one moment. He still had the rest of his life to live. And after an encounter with the all mighty laying him bare, one could assume that something changed.
Being the incorrigible optimist that I am, I look at his grief as a good thing. We grieve when we lose someone or something we love.
So, this reaction is indeed one of loss. Maybe, and again, we don't know how the story ends - maybe his question was an earnest one, and he just came to the realization that the wealth that he loved on earth had just died to him so that he might follow Jesus.
He is human, after all - change takes time - and change always comes with some kind of loss. So grief is inevitable.
But when the change is toward a closer relationship with God, with each other, and with creation, the blessing that follows will be incalculable.
So, at the end of the reading from Hebrews tonight, we read, "Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
Let us approach Jesus like the rich man, asking, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Or rather, what must I do, what must I let go of, to draw nearer to you, God? God, pierce me in two and lay me bare so that I might know the things that are keeping me from you and all the blessings therein.
But not without remembering that Jesus is the high priest who understands what it means to be laid bare and utterly vulnerable. Not without remembering that he did the work of making us right with God no matter what we've done, and like the rich man, he loves us no matter how we come to him.
