Lenten Sermon

Pastor Phillips’ Sermon

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Please pray with me. Heavenly Father, during this time of Lent, we pray that you will give us your Holy Spirit to journey with you and with our Savior through the time of His passion, that in our reflections, in our devotions, in our small groups that are gathering, we will discover new insights and add depth to our faith and our strength that we receive from you. Bless us tonight as we meditate on your word and your role, Jesus, as our High Priest. Amen.

The author of Hebrews tells us very plainly over and over again that Jesus is our High Priest. He compares the high priests that were human beings, the guys who would come year after year, be appointed as high priests and he compares them to the ministry of Jesus and he demonstrates how their ministry is inferior to Jesus.

But I want to give you a little more background information as what a high priest is, because we read those words in the gospel readings and things like that, we read those words and that title but it’s hard for us to really identify what that is because there are no people in our society today who serve as high priests. In fact, there is not a person who serves in a similar capacity as a high priest. It is such a unique and unusual role. So I think in order for us to understand what the author of Hebrews is saying about Jesus, we need to dig in and find out what a high priest is so we can see that.

The high priest was the single most important person in Israel. He occupied every leading official position, presided over every major operation and made every final decision regarding them. Even the king of Israel was subject to the high priest. The high priest had the greatest authority of the temple priests, and he was the only one who was allowed to perform the holiest rite of the year. On that day of atonement, Yom Kippur as we hear our Jewish friends say, he entered into the most sacred room in the temple, the Holy of Holies, the inner most court where there was the Ark of the Covenant and he went in there for one purpose, to offer a sacrifice on behalf of the nation of Israel. So he would take the blood of a goat that had been sacrificed outside in the temple court, and he would take it inside and he would sprinkle here and here and here. He would sprinkle it on the Ark of the Covenant so that he might make atonement, a sacrifice on behalf of the nation of Israel.

That was what God commanded them to do, to make a sacrifice of an animal and use the animal’s blood to symbolize the atonement that one day would come when God would send the Messiah, the Savior. So that was what the high priest would do. One day a year, he would go in and make that sacrifice.

His position was a lifetime position. High priests were appointed for life, and the only people who were to serve as high priests were the descendants of Zadok who was a descendant of Aaron, the first priest of God. Zadok was a priest who served when the temple was first built. When Solomon finally built the temple, Zadok was the priest. So he was appointed the first high priest. And descendants of Zadok served generation after generation after generation all the way up until the time when the Israelites were carried off into captivity. And then when they returned from captivity, they resumed, to some degree, that sacrificial system. But then the temple of Solomon was destroyed and other temples took their places.

But there was a huge gap in time and finally, the temple of Jesus’ day was built, the temple of Herod, much different temple and, by that time, the high priesthood had been hijacked you might say and corrupted and now even the Romans could appoint who they wanted to serve as the high priest because they had so much influence and power and authority.

This is how they dressed. Unlike the other priests, they were required to live a holier life. They could not express themselves openly when they were grieving. They could not touch a dead body, not even the dead body of their parent or child. Over the traditional white robes, the high priest added a blue robe fringed with gold bells. On his chest hung a breast piece of 12 stones representing the 12 tribes of Israel. On his head rested a turban with a golden rosette inscribed “Holy to the Lord.” Only the high priests dressed like that.

But again, by the time Jesus came, the high priesthood had been corrupted and it was no longer the descendants of Zadok ministering faithfully on behalf of the people representing them before the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy of Holies. Now it was whoever the Romans wanted to use as a puppet to control the people of Israel.

So that’s what a high priest is. It’s somebody who serves on behalf of the people. In the perfect world, the high priest was a holy man, a godly man, dedicating his life from the moment of his childhood, when he first became aware that he was a descendant of Zadok, he dedicated his life to living according to God’s laws, God’s rules, God’s ways, avoiding those things that would make him ceremonially unclean. And daily making sacrifices for his own sins. Does that make sense to you? He’s a holy man, but he has to make sacrifices every day for himself. He’s supposed to represent the whole nation of Israel, but he needs someone to represent him because, just like you and I, he’s a sinner. He falls short of God’s holy ways in his thoughts, in his words, in his actions. He just isn’t the person that God has called him to be. That’s what a high priest is.

And that’s where Jesus comes in. Jesus represents him. Jesus represents you. He represents me. Jesus speaks to God the Father on our behalf. Jesus offers Himself as the supreme sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. The priests had to make sacrifices day after day for themselves just to be able to be effective in priesthood. Jesus lived his life in perfect obedience to God. He was tempted in every way but never sinned. Jesus offered Himself as a sacrifice for our sins once.

The high priests had to do it over and over again every year. On the day of atonement, they had to do it over and over again. What’s the difference? A little bit of a trick to grasp, but this is the idea. The Old Testament sacrifices were just a shadow, like a sign pointing to the future, a model of something that was about to happen. The sacrifices that the high priests of the Old Testament times made were a symbol representing the sacrifice that Jesus would make. So when Jesus came, the need for a high priest ended. The need for the priest to make sacrifices ended. He sacrificed Himself once for all, not the blood of a goat, not the blood of a lamb but the blood of the Lamb of God. He offered Himself and only His sacrifice could completely satisfy God’s requirement for holiness and pay the debt of your sin and my sin and the sin of everyone who’s ever lived. That’s a high priest. He really did it. All the rest, even the best of them fell short but Jesus, our high priest, did it.

Sometimes I wonder what it was like to live back then and I think, you know, maybe if your high priest was bad, it was miserable. Maybe if the guy who was the high priest during your lifetime was just a pawn of the Romans, he didn’t make good decisions, he didn’t lead in a godly way, his heart wasn’t in it when he made sacrifices for you and the rest of the nation, I couldn’t help but think that probably had an impact on your life if you lived then.

But what if it was a good high priest? What if he was really a godly man, sincere and devoted, lived his life to the best of his ability according to God’s ways? When he was involved in public affairs and major projects and decisions that had to be made, he did it with a sense of, “I want to walk with God in this decision.” What a blessing it would have been like to have a high priest like that, a high priest that influences every aspect of your life. And, translating that to today, imagine if your teacher was a godly man or woman, your governor, your boss, your president. Imagine if everything they did represented God and His holiness. What a blessing that would be. It sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? If there was perfect justice and peace and every decision of our leaders was guided and guarded by God and His wisdom. It sounds like a dream.

It’s hard to picture what that would be like, but there is something we can experience. We can know exactly what it’s like to have Jesus as our high priest, to have Him represent us before our heavenly Father and speak to God the Father on our behalf, to have His sacrifice bring benefit into our life, to know the peace of allowing Him to be the most important person in our life, to be the most powerful leader in our heart, to have the most influence, guidance and wisdom in every plan and decision that we make. We can know that.

And we can also know that He has completely taken away all of our sins. This is our high priest, Jesus. Amen.

Copyright 2010 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church