The High Priest Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17; Psalm 127; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44 When Jesus finally led his disciples into Jerusalem many of his followers expected him, at last, to stand up and act like a Messiah, become king, storm the Roman garrison, and set up a grand new "House of David" government. To their surprise, he bypassed city hall and attacked the temple. The temple was the sanctuary where the priests worked, making sacrifices to God and thereby atoning for the sins of the people. So maybe Jesus wasn't supposed to be a king. Maybe he was a rabbi who, when he got to Jerusalem, was elevated to the status of a priest? But, at the temple, Jesus grabbed a whip and, kicking over their tables and spilling their precious coins across the floor, drove the moneychangers from the temple. Jesus' cleansing of the temple, and charging the moneychangers with turning the Lord's house into "a den of thieves," seems a somewhat severe, over-the-top reaction. After all, the moneychangers were there as a public service, following scripture, helping people to buy the requisite animals for the temple's sacrificial rituals. How did Jesus expect people to worship at the temple? How on earth could we worship God here in our church without our hymnals, our organ, the rituals of baptism and communion and all the other means that we use to approach God? How are we to be with God without an appropriate ritual vehicle to get to God? The story of Israel could be read as a record of our repeated attempts to get to God. The story begins in darkness, as progenitor Jacob dreams of a ladder let down from heaven to earth with heavenly messengers taking God's mail back and forth. In the exodus, much of the biblical account of the escape from Egyptian slavery is consumed with minute details about a portable "tent of meeting" that Israel utilized in the desert in order to meet and to be met by God. 1
Those stories find their culmination in the grand temple in Jerusalem, the center of the world, Mount Zion, where God descends to God's people, and heaven and earth traffic with one another. The temple construction was a massive undertaking that took almost fifty years to build. Its complex of buildings occupied more than thirty acres and was a wonder of the ancient world. Jews everywhere turned toward the temple in prayer, for it was believed that it was the place of divine-human meeting. When pilgrims trudged up toward Jerusalem for festivals, they weren't just going up to a beautiful place of worship; they were going to heaven. Isaiah foretold a day when not just Jews but all the nations would stream into the temple singing, "Let's go up to Jerusalem, to the temple where we can learn the ways of God and walk with God." Everybody would gather to worship the true God at the temple, a "house of prayer" for all people. In our scripture reading today, the letter of Hebrews compares Jesus with a priest at the temple. But we have no record in the Gospels where Jesus is spoken of as a priest. Jesus is often called "rabbi," and rabbis were the lay teachers of scripture. Hebrews' designation of Jesus as a "priest" is all the more odd considering that Jesus seems severely critical of the temple. When his disciples expressed awe at the temple's grandeur, Jesus quipped that he could tear the whole thing down and rebuild it in three days (exactly the number of days Jesus' body was in the tomb). In driving the moneychangers from the temple, in disrupting the temple system, in healing people outside of the temple's rituals, was Jesus thumbing his nose at the priests in the temple? Or was Jesus saying something very different about priests and temples? John's Gospel says that Jesus, in his interaction with the temple, was setting himself up as the new "temple," the new means of mediation between God and humanity. That is what priests do, they mediate between God and humanity; they make God more accessible to people. And now Hebrews 2
says that there is only one great High Priest and it's Jesus. The location for humanity's encounter with God is now not some dark, glorious, impressive temple; rather it's paradoxically through a horrible tool for torture - the cross. Some people think of the cross of Christ as our way to get to be with God in heaven when we die. Surprisingly, the Gospels portray the cross first as God's way to get heaven to earth, not in the future, but now. When Jesus breathed his last and died on the cross, Luke says that the curtain in the temple, the veil that separated heaven from earth at the high altar (sinful people from righteous God) was mysteriously ripped in two. Who slashed the curtain? It was as if, in one last, dramatic, wrenching act of self-sacrifice, God ripped the veil of separation between earth and heaven. Now Israel need not gather on the Day of Atonement (the day of "at-one-ment" with God), stand before the temple, give over their sins to the high priest who would then pull back the curtain, enter the temple's holiest place, and offer their sins to God. The curtain had been ripped asunder. Now we can get to God ourselves because God has gotten to us. On the cross, Jesus somehow had done something decisive about the distance between God and us. Our lesson from Hebrews focuses on the great "sacrifice" that Christ made for us. Most priests sacrifice at the altar, justifying us to God but Jesus became the sacrifice himself. Everything about Jesus is cruciform, shaped like a cross. The cross was not just an unfortunate event on a Friday afternoon at the garbage dump outside Jerusalem; it was the way the world welcomed lover Jesus from day one and still does today. From his very first sermon at Nazareth, the world was attempting to summon up the courage to render its final verdict upon Jesus' loving reach: "Crucify him!" Calvary brings into focus the significance of Jesus. It was not just that Jesus was born in a stable, had compassion for many hurting people, told some unforgettable stories, and taught noble ideals. Rather, the significant thing is that Jesus willingly accepted the destiny toward which his 3
actions drove him, willingly endured the world's response to its salvation. Arrested as an enemy of Caesar, tortured to death as a criminal, Jesus was more than just one more victim of governmental injustice. He was not just an example that good sometimes can come from bad. Rather, as Paul puts it, on the cross Jesus was victor: Jesus disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them on the cross. And he did it not for power but for love. In love we dedicated these tiny children in the hope that they too might know the wonder of love. Ralph Milton reflecting on love writes: Three days ago my brother Randy died. Two months ago, my first grandchild, Jacob was born. Those two events need a lot of meditating on. The holiness and the beauty of those moments are only gradually sinking in. I m sure I will never understand them fully, if at all. But the Spirit has been speaking. Jacob came to us in the poverty of birth. He came weak and naked with nothing but his need. But one day, soon after he was born, I lay down on the sofa with him asleep upon my breast. Jacob sound asleep, Grandpa weeping at the wonder of it all. Like the widow giving copper coins, unconscious of the greatness of her gift, tiny Jacob gave me love and trust and joy that I will treasure all my life. And my brother too. There on the hospital bed, the morphine shutting down his eyelids, we spoke to each other from the poverty of his dying and the poverty of my grief. I said words to Randy I had never said before in all the wealthy, healthy 60 years we had been brothers. I love you Randy! And from the pain-wracked poverty of his dying, Rand gave a gift he never could have shared before. I love you too, he said. Blessed are the poor, for they have gifts to give. You see, it is not in power, but in love that God reaches out to us. The cross is not what God demands of Jesus for our 4
sin but rather what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to a broken world. This is all validated by God raising this crucified victim from the dead, not by dramatically rescuing Jesus' failed messianic project, nor certifying that Jesus had, at last, paid the divine price for our sin. Rather, it showed the world who God really is and how God gets what God wants by showing us that love is what is truly powerful. And on the cross, the great High Priest Jesus showed us that God wants you, and God wants me and that God will stoop to almost anything, even death on a cross, to embrace us with love. Thanks be to God! Amen. 5