THE PRIESTHOOD OF MELCHIZEDEK

Transcription

1 1 THE PRIESTHOOD OF MELCHIZEDEK Before I launch into my presentation itself, I want to reiterate something Victor said. Kendra, Victor and I have been talking and praying for some time now about our belief that the Lord is in the process of renewing the call of the Fellowship. We strongly believe that this talk and others at this retreat are all part of that renewal. Kendra and Linda Wiltse s talk this evening was conceived as a continuation in many ways of this presentation. In fact, when I first approached Kendra and Victor about a joint presentation about the priesthood of all believers, Kendra had already talked with Linda about a presentation on intercession. We agreed immediately that intercession is at the heart of priesthood, and we decided that she and Linda would address that topic at much greater length in their talk tonight. Now, when whole books of the Old Testament are devoted to the priesthood of Aaron, why focus on Melchizedek? Did you know Melchizedek is mentioned only three times in Scripture? In Genesis, in the passage Victor discussed; in Psalm 110, when it is said of King David (and prophetically, of Jesus), You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizidek; and in the New Testament book of Hebrews. There is much to be learned about priesthood itself by examining the Aaronic or Levitical priesthood. However, as the book of Hebrews makes clear, that priesthood is now obsolete; it has been superceded by a new covenant and a new priesthood, presided over by our great high priest Jesus. When I was ordained last January as an Episcopal priest, I was ordained as a priest after the order of Melchizidek. It says so right on my certificate. The priesthood of Melchizedek is THE Christian priesthood. Even the Episcopal Church knows this! But why discuss priesthood at all? Except for a few wayward groups like the Episcopalians, we Protestants don t have priests, do we? Certainly that is true in the case of the institutional church. But the institutional church leaves out a lot of things, doesn t it? So I would call your attention to a couple of passages in the New Testament that we Protestants have not paid a lot of attention to. 1. I Peter 2:4-9: Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by men and precious in God s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God though Jesus Christ.... But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God s own people, in order that you many proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

2 2 2. Rev. 1: 4-7: To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever. 3. Rev. 5:10 They (the 4 living creatures and 24 elders before the throne) sing a new song You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth. The bottom line is that all followers of Christ are called to be priests. The Lutherans and others refer to this doctrine as the priesthood of all believers. The fact that very few Christians have entered into this priesthood as the Lord intended doesn t change the reality of the call. It has, I believe, been one of the main calls to the Fellowship from the beginning, although we have not called it that. Please note that this is not the ONLY call most of us have. It is quite normal in Scripture for other gifts and callings to be joined with priesthood. This is especially true in the case of prophecy. Among the Old Testament prophets, for example, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Hosea, Haggai, and Zachariah were all priests. Prophecy has been a particular gift to this Fellowship. [Remember: In the beginning the Lord told us we were to be a school for prophets. ] I believe we have pursued this prophetic calling much more faithfully than we have priesthood, which is why we need to talk about that call again. Today I am going to focus on the nature of the Melchizedekian priesthood as revealed in the letter to the Hebrews. As background, let me stress again what Victor said: The Melchizedekian priesthood pre-dated the priesthood of Aaron and it continued to function even after the Aaronic priesthood was established by Moses and those descended from Levi consolidated their power in the Temple in Jerusalem. Israel, you will recall, ceased to be a free and independent kingdom after the Babylonian captivity, although many of the captives were allowed to return to Jerusalem and build a smaller, much less impressive second temple in which sacrificial worship according to the Law of Moses resumed. After that point, except for a short period under the Maccabeeans, Judea (what was left of the once united kingdom of Israel) was ruled over by a series of powerful empires which exacted tribute from it and appointed its kings and high priests. These priests gradually ceased to have pure blood lines, a source of deep concern for most Jews, who came to see the existing priesthood as illegitimate and thus the offering of sacrifices in the Temple as unacceptable to God. In addition, these illegitimate priests began to ally themselves with the foreign rulers, becoming very wealthy in the process and part of the system that oppressed the people, especially under the Romans. These priests became principle targets of Jesus criticism during his earthly ministry, just as the priests in the First temple had been the object of denunciations by the Old Testament prophets.

3 3 Nevertheless, all along there had been this other sort of priesthood operating apart from the Levitical priesthood. Its operation is largely hidden from us, although, as Victor indicated, we do get glimpses of it here and there in Samuel for example, and in David and David s sons. King David is of particular importance. If you remember, he was not of the tribe of Levi, but from the tribe of Judah. Nevertheless, Psalm 110 refers to him as a priest not a levitical priest, but a priest after an entirely different and more ancient order, the order of Melchizedek. It was unusual in Hebrew history for the kingship to be united with the priesthood. The usual pattern of rulers in Israel after David was for there to be a king and a high priest who, in some sense, ruled together. It is precisely because David was both priest and king that contemporaries apparently conferred on him the title of a priest after the order of Melchizedek. Sometime after the Babylonian captivity, climaxing near the time of Jesus, a tradition came to exist among the Jews that in the latter days, God would send a messiah, a descendant of David s royal line, who would again sit on the throne of David that is, that this messiah would make the nation free and independent again, and restore it to its former glory. This was especially desired because the Jewish rulers then sitting on the throne, the Hasmodeans, descendants of the Maccabees, were not of the royal bloodline of David. Rather, they were of a priestly lineage, but one that had become corrupt and compromised by intermarriage with foreigners and by affiliation with the occupying oppressors. Accordingly, because of the lack of true legitimacy among the priestly caste, there was much concern and conflict over the priesthood and Temple worship. In this context, there arose another tradition; that the messiah would be a priest, someone who would restore right worship to the Temple in Jerusalem. Scholars, for example, have discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls a scroll known as the Melchizedek Book. It was written about 50 BC and it predicts that in the latter days, Melchizedek will return and declare the year of Jubilee, thereby releasing them from all the debt of their sins. This same scroll declares that this Melchizedek is a divine being indeed, it says, Your Divine Being Reigns.... Your divine being is Melchizidek, who will deliver them from the power of Belial. Thus, when the writer of Hebrews describes Jesus as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, he was not plucking something out of thin air, building a doctrine on one very obscure story in the book of Genesis that no one else had noticed. Instead, there had been a long tradition of thinking about this mysterious kingly priest, and the thinking had heated up dramatically just around the time of Jesus. Most Jews felt that they had neither a legitimate ruler nor a legitimate priesthood, although much of the speculation about the messiah centered around the idea that perhaps there would be two messiahs, ruling together, one of the royal line of David and one of the priestly line of Levi. Few thought of a single figure who would combine the lineage of both in himself.

4 4 It is the writer of Hebrews who puts the two together, who realizes the significance of Melchizedek and of David as both king and priest and applies them to Jesus. Jesus, of course, did combine both of the legally required blood lines according to the flesh. Mary s line combined both as she could trace her lineage back to King David and to Levi s son Nathan. But none of this mattered, for as the writer of Hebrews proclaimed, Jesus did not owe his designation as High Priest to the flesh, but to the power of an indestructible life. Thus begins the writer s argument concerning the superiority of the Melchizedekian priesthood over the Aaronic, the main subject of the letter. I am not going to trace all of the writer s arguments. You can read the book for that. I am going to assume that at this point in time, all of us here know and believe that the priesthood of Jesus is superior to that of Moses and Aaron. I do want to point out, however, several big-picture things concerning this Melchizedekian priesthood just to be sure we get them and give them their proper weight. The first thing is that, as we can gather from Melchizedek s association with Abram, this priesthood did not operate under or concern the Law; rather, it has to do with faith. And, as Melchizedek s blessing of Abram shows us, it has to do with blessing, not with the curse of the law. It has to do with grace, not condemnation. That is what priests after the order of Melchizedek are to minister grace, blessing, and reconciliation. One of the most startling things about the description of this new priesthood in the book of Hebrews is that Jesus is able to serve as our High Priest not just because of his divinity, but also because of his humanity. Like us He knew weakness, like He suffered, like us He was tempted, like us He died. Because He too is human, He is able to identify with our humanness and sympathize with our weakness. Thus, when we approach the throne of grace, we can be assured of His understanding and know that we will find help in time of need. Indeed, according to Hebrews, He lives now to make constant intercession for us in heaven. As priests after the order of Melchizedek, we are not only to intercede for others as Jesus does for us, but are to do so with the same compassion and sympathy. The problem is, many of us approach God expecting criticism, rejection, and rebuke. Many of us try to hide or leave behind our humanness when we pray, forgetting that we can and should come to Him always just as we are, without pretense, knowing that we need not be ashamed of our weakness. Instead of approaching God with such trust, however, many of us secretly despise ourselves, our own humanness, and for this reason despise the humanness of others. Thus, we pray for ourselves as well as others either in the mode of false pride and condemnation (I am better than those I am praying for) or in the mode of self-loathing and shame. This is not how Jesus feels about human beings. He loves our whole selves, body, soul and spirit. That is

5 5 why He promises us a Full salvation, including the redemption of our bodies, restoring in us what Satan has marred. Another big-picture thing is that while the levitical priesthood operated only on earth, in a Temple made with hands that was only the sketch or shadow of the heavenly temple, Melchizidekian priesthood operates in the heavenlies. Every time I stand on earth before the physical altar of my church, I am able to operate as a priest before the very mercy seat of God, because of the way into the Holy of Holies opened for me by Jesus in the heavenlies. That does not mean all priests do it that way. Some continue to do things by rote or in the flesh. But it doesn t have to be that way. The way is open for us to do our work in the heavenlies. Another way of saying this is, even tho its results are in the physical as well as spiritual world, the Melchizedekian priesthood finds its source in the spiritual world. Entering into the real Holy of Holies in the heavenlies is not something super mysterious or mystical; we all do it, hopefully, whenever we pray. In fact, it is or should be so normal for us that we almost take it for granted. We shouldn t. It is a stupendous, mind-blowing thing when you really grasp what Hebrews is saying. It is here, in the heavenlies, that the real action takes place. Behind the scenes, as it were. It is there we can meet God face-to-face. It is there that we are called to be priests. One of the implications of the spiritual nature of the Melchizedekian priesthood is the greater effectiveness of the once-only sacrifice of Jesus under the New Covenant than the repeated sacrifices of levitical priests under the Old Covenant. The sacrifices offered by Levitical priests could deal only with the outer or physical man; thus they were able to cleanse only the body. It is impossible, says the writer of Hebrews, for the blood of goats and bulls to actually take away sins. If these sacrifices had been able to do so, the author says, people living under the Old Covenant would no longer have had a consciousness of sin. [Heb. 10: 2] In contrast, the blood of Jesus deals with the inner or spiritual man. Through the Holy Spirit, it reaches down into the innermost being of each person to bring new life and true transformation. It cleanses the consciousness and takes away sin forever as far as the east is from the west ). In the New Covenant, God declares, I will remember their sins and lawless deeds no more. And as the writer of Hebrews concludes, Where there is forgiveness of sins, there is no longer any offering for sin. The salvation wrought by Jesus death on the cross, a death which took place before the foundation of the world, thus is full and complete a perfect offering for the whole world. As far-reaching in time and space as the darkness and death brought upon the world by the sin of Adam, so far-reaching is the life and light that now are ours because of Jesus obedience unto death. God s forgiveness of me, you and everybody else stretches as far backward as the mind can comprehend and as far

6 6 forward. Here we approach the very heart of the priesthood of Melchizedek and the very heart of what I have to say today. If I understand it, what the Lord is saying is that if I continue to have a consciousness of guilt or of shame, I have not yet experienced the fullness of the salvation available to me under the New Covenant of grace. There is now NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, None. To lay hold of this really lay hold of it-- is to enter into God s Sabbath rest. This is the message and ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation God wants us to be part of as priests after the order of Melchizidek. The great priestly moment in all of Scripture is Jesus hanging on the cross, praying for the very ones who are putting Him to death: Father, forgive them; they know not what they do. That is the priesthood of Melchizedek. But we are not able to forgive like that or pray and minister like that until we have first heard those words spoken to us, until we have entered deeply into the fullness of he forgiveness offered us. If, when we approach God, we hear only a voice whose words make us beg that not another word be spoken to us, as the Hebrews did at Mt. Sinai, if it is fear and condemnation we experience, it is not the voice of God we are hearing. As He has shown me, many of us continue to be burdened with a sense of shame or false responsibility that we don t need to go on bearing. I have realized, for example, that I have continued to feel shame about my marriage. When we were talking recently Kendra told me she continues to feel a sense of responsibility for something that happened in her medical practice because it occurred under her watch. For some of us, the inner shame and sense of personal inadequacy go back to childhood. Some of us are weighed down by a sense of failure or shame, the origins of which we don t even comprehend. Others are buried under a sense of responsibility as parents for things our children have done. We all suffer from the wounds and the damage life inflicts or that we inflict on ourselves and each other. The Lord invites us to come to the cross for healing. By His wounds we are healed. It is never too late. The Lord is here at this retreat to set us free. This is necessary preparation for us to do in order to be able to minister in power as God s priests. It also is impossible for us to enter fully into this priestly ministry unless we are willing to pursue an ever increasing intimacy with God. In a very sense, the whole of Scripture is a love story, the most appropriate symbol for which is marriage. God simply want us to let Him love us, even though we might feel unworthy. Scripture gives us other images too. Hebrews says we have become partners of Christ. (Heb. 3:14). In His last discourse before He was arrested, Jesus told His disciples, I call you servants no longer because the master does not know what the servant is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made everything known to you that I have heard from my Father. [John ] Get that? God wants to make known to us His secrets!

7 7 In Exodus, it is said that Moses talked with God face-to-face, as a friend. This is the kind of relationship God offered to all the Hebrew people, but they were too afraid and preferred to have someone who would hear God for them and act on their behalf before God. At Sinai, God spoke of how he desired to call the whole nation as a nation of priests. The purpose, I believe, was for them to serve as priests to the nations, bringing them to the one true God. However, when they lacked the faith to enter a faceto-face relationship with Him, He had Moses establish instead a much more limited priesthood under Aaron and the other sons of Levi. It was a substitute a weak copy, if you will--of the heavenly priesthood of Melchizedek based on faith that they might have had. A similar thing happened when the people demanded a king other than God. The people wanted a king like other people and they wanted priests like other people. Under the New Covenant, however, God has renewed His call to us to enter a direct, face-to-face friendship with Him. Under the New Covenant, He says, I will put my laws in their minds; and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. [Heb. 8:10-11] The need for priests willing to minister to the nations is as great today as it was in Moses time. He wants to send us to the nations, but unless we ourselves have the face-to face relationship Jesus had, we are of little use to Him. We need to cultivate intimacy with God, so He can share with us His concerns and His secrets. If we are to enter into this priestly ministry, we also need to be willing to suffer. If we want to be His disciples, Jesus says, we are to take up our cross and follow Him. The daily sacrifices and offerings in the Temple under the Levitical priesthood ceased with the institution of the New Covenant written in the blood of Jesus. However, the New Testament speaks of the kind of offerings God now desires. Our sacrifices today are our thanksgiving and praises which we offer before Him. In addition, we are told, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, wholly and acceptable to God, which is you spiritual worship. [Romans 12:1] By telling us to present our bodies as living sacrifices and to take up our cross and follow, the Spirit is speaking to us about abandoning ourselves wholly to God for His use, being willing to say by faith as Paul did, It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. This kind of surrender letting go of ourselves enough to let Jesus fill us completely- is, I believe, possible only when we have experienced His love to such a degree that we know we can trust Him. The book of Hebrews tells us that even Jesus learned obedience by what He suffered. What the author is saying is that Jesus, through all the sorrows and tribulations of His life, walked with God so closely that He experienced God s faithfulness and love to such a degree that he knew He could trust Him no matter what and so was able to obey even in the face of death. Through personal experience, I have come to believe that we can learn to rely on God that way only through suffering.

8 8 And for me at least, experiencing how God carried me through suffering is the way I finally came to believe that He really loves me. Unfortunately, most of us, even as Christians, spend our lives doing everything we can to avoid suffering. Of course, we are not to seek out suffering for the sake of suffering. But in this life, suffering is the inevitable lot of humans. Sooner or later, we all will encounter suffering, some much more than others. Scripture tells us that Jesus was a man of suffering and acquainted with grief. If our Lord so suffered, it is incumbent upon us to suffer as He did--not by denying our own suffering or resisting it or merely surrendering to it. Instead as the great German theologian Dorothy Soelle has written, we can see suffering as something that fits somehow into the incomprehensible love of God and embrace it as participation in the suffering of God. Thus suffering becomes not just tolerated but freely accepted, the way of the passion becomes therefore part of the disciple s way of life. In other words, we can suffer as unto God. Such suffering, suffering joined to the suffering of Christ, is powerfully redemptive. A funny thing happens when we suffer in this way; as the old hymn says, God sanctifies to us our deepest distress. Not only does His presence, which is there in the midst of every suffering, manage in some mysterious way to see us through, but the very wounds left in us by suffering become, like Jesus wounds, the source of blessing for others. The Lord wants to make our lives like deep wells out of which healing streams flow, wells at which others may drink. For this to happen, however, we first have to learn to drink of the living water ourselves, especially in times of trouble. As priests, we are called to bear witness to the suffering of others with lamentation, particularly the suffering of those for whom nobody else cares. And we are called as priests to enter into the suffering of others and even at times to bear that suffering ourselves. I know the suffering of at least some of you in this room. I say to you: God did not will or cause this suffering; but, given what the Evil One has wrought, the Lord who calls you His friend and has entrusted it to you to bear it unto Him. You are participating in His suffering, and, as Paul has written, helping to fill up the sufferings of Christ. I have come to the end of the things I wanted to say today. Please note: Kendra and Linda will continue this tonight with their presentation on intercession. I will leave you with one thought about intercession. There is the one little throw-away lien in Hebrews where it says that all priests are appointed by God to act on behalf of men. Now we are used to prophets who act on behalf of God. So this is something different altogether. God has appointed persons priests to represent human beings before him. Think about it. Our God so yearns to be in relationship with us, so longs to hear our voices, and to consider our concerns, that even when we cannot or will; not draw near to Him, He will appoint those to speak and act before Him on our behalf. It is

9 important to know the mind of Christ. It is equally important to know the heart of God. In this we ee something of the heart of God towards us. It is the hert of God, I believe, that I have been speaking about today. 9