The whole question of priesthood in all its different interpretations is one which has vexed the church for many years, with the issue in the Church of England of course now focussing on the issue of women bishops. Now we're not going to venture into that minefield this morning but I do want to spend a few minutes studying that brief but rather difficult seeming passage we have just read from the letter to the Hebrews and to discover what it has to teach us on the subject of priesthood and in particular about the priesthood of Jesus.
Our short reading from the end of Hebrews Chapter 7 is ripped rather out of context because it is merely a few verses taken from somewhere near the middle of a long exposition of the issue of priesthood and the role of Jesus as the great High Priest that started right back 2/3 of the way through chapter 4 and which eventually reaches its conclusion in chapter 10.
This short passage though is about much more than priesthood for in reality, it is about the whole means of salvation and there are three points I want us to take away this morning – Firstly that Jesus has a permanent priesthood, secondly that because his priesthood is everlasting, he is able to save completely those who come to God through him and thirdly, and far most significantly, Jesus is unlike the other high priests because rather than offering sacrifices day after day, he offered himself as the PERFECT sacrifice.
Now, there is a lot of theology to cover there in a short time and we will only be able to look at each of those points very briefly but to begin with, in order to put the passage in context, we need to take a brief glimpse back to the Old Testament and the understanding of priesthood that we find there.
If we go back to the book of Exodus, in giving the law to the people as a guide to holy living, the Lord does two things. Firstly he commanded worship and secondly, having given the law, recognised the inevitability that as fallen, sinful humans, we would break the law and graciously provided a way by which the severity of that sin could be recognised and at the same time, atoned for.
In the agrarian society of the time, worship entailed the offering back to God of the best of the flock and the first fruits of the harvest – the sacrifice of a perfect, unblemished ram or goat, the pick of the flock, or the offering of the very best of the grain harvest as a grain offering for there was to be no second best for God. Worship was costly and sacrificial, the people were to give back to God of the very stuff of life to them.
The sacrifices were to be brought to the priest by the people who would offer them on their behalf.
Just as worship was costly and sacrificial, so was sin. The severity of sin was acknowledged because atonement could only come through the shedding of blood. Thankfully for us, the blood that was to be shed was that of an innocent animal, offered as a sacrifice by the priest, the one who stands between God and man, who intercedes on man's behalf.
Aaron, Moses brother, and his two sons Nadab and Abihu were appointed by God as the first priests and the whole priestly line throughout Israel's history was to be drawn from the tribe of Aaron.
Unlike today and the complex assessment and selection process applied to select those to serve as ministers in the church, in Old Testament times, your eligibility to serve as a priest was based on genealogy and genealogy alone and this Aaronic priesthood was to continue to serve God and the people right through until the time of Jesus.
The priests were to serve God and to serve God alone and so that they didn't have to work, were to be supported in their duties by the tithes and gifts of the people.
Meanwhile, the priests were to intercede between man and God through the offering of sacrifices whether in worship or as atonement for sin, sacrifices that could be an offering of grain or anything from a pair of doves to a bull.
The sacrificial system certainly demonstrated vividly the seriousness of worship and the severity of sin in the eyes of God, for the altar in the Temple would have been a cross between a slaughter house and a giant bar b que as animals were sacrificed and then offered as burnt offerings.
Amongst the priests, there was one who was appointed to the role of High Priest. Officially, there was only supposed to be one High Priest but by the time of Jesus, the level of political instability was such that there were a number of High priests. The role of the High Priest was deeply symbolic for it was the High Priest and the High Priest alone of all people who was allowed to enter the Holy of holies in the Temple, the very dwelling place of God on earth and even then, only once each year on the Day of Atonement as he bore sacrifices for his own sins and the sins of the people.
So this was the Aaronic priesthood with which Jesus himself would have been familiar and it was the High Priest Caiaphas who presided over the council or Sanhedrin when Jesus was summarily brought before them accused of blasphemy.
But as well as understanding the role and duty of the Aaronic priesthood, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews wants to draw our attention to that mysterious and enigmatic character Melchizedek and especially in the first part of chapter 7.
Apart from here in the letter to the Hebrews, we encounter Melchizedek just twice, once in Genesis 14, then in Psalm 110 v4 so why does the writer to the Hebrews place such emphasis on Melchizedek?
We know very, very little about Melchizedek. We know from Genesis 14 that he was king of Salem (Jerusalem) and priest of God most high. We know that he encountered Abram as he returned from having rescued Lot and blessed him and that in response, Abram gave him a tenth of all that he had captured in battle.
Of significance is that, as we read in Heb 7 v3 Melchizedek was without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, like the Son of God he remains a priest for ever.
The contrast we are to draw here is with the Aaronic priesthood – where you could only be a priest if you were of the tribe of Aaron. However good a priest you might make, unless you satisfied the genealogical criteria, you could never become a priest. By contrast, Melchizedek who has no known genealogy and who is without beginning or end of days is a priest and remains a priest (because we have no record of his death).
Now we come to the crunch. In that solitary encounter between Melchizedek and the victorious Abram. Melchizedek blesses Abram who in turn voluntarily gives him a tenth of all he has and this is of deep significance because the one who blesses is superior to the one who is blessed and as in the patriarchal tradition, the elder was always superior to the descendent, because Melchizedek blesses Abram who is in turn the ancestor of Aaron, Melchizedek is acknowledged to be superior to Abram and to Aaron and his descendents.
The significance of the priesthood of Melchizedek to the writer of the Hebrews then is that the priesthood of the order of Melchizedek was far superior to the priesthood of Aaron.
Melchizedek is a type of Christ – a fore-runner, a model.
David makes the same connection between Melchizedek and Christ in Psalm 110 and v4 when he declares of the coming Christ – “You are a priest for ever in the order of Melchizedek”.
So, we have the priesthood of Aaron and his descendents, a priesthood that intercedes between man and God through the offering of sacrifices in worship and as atonement for sin but we have another, higher order of priesthood, in the form of Melchizedek.
All that is something by way of a long and complex introduction to the passage we have just read but hopefully we will begin to understand how it all fits together in just a moment.
To come now to the first of my three points – that Jesus exercises a permanent priesthood.
Right at the beginning of our passage from Hebrews 7, in v23, we read that “there have been many of those priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; but because Jesus lives for ever, he has a permanent priesthood”.
The writer here is clearly referring to the Aaronic priesthood. As mortal men, their ministry as priest or high priest was limited to a brief period of years. Now, he says, compare this to Jesus who, by virtue of living for ever, exercises a permanent priesthood. The transitory, temporal, human priesthood has been superseded by the permanent priesthood of the immortal Jesus. And it is here that we begin to make the connection with the priestly order of Melchizedek who is without beginning or end of days and so exercises a similar everlasting priesthood which is superior to that of Aaron but which remains inferior to that of Christ.
So Jesus exercises a permanent priesthood because he lives forever.
I met up with a friend of mine who is a cathedral canon on Friday. They are adjusting to life with a new dean, the previous one having moved on after 10 years or so in office and there is still something of a sense of bereavement within the congregation. There is none of that with Jesus because he lives forever and is priest forever.
And then to the second point, that Jesus is able to save all who come to him BECAUSE he lives forever to intercede for them.
In v25 we read, “Therefore he (that is Jesus) is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them”.
This follows directly from the first point – because Jesus exercises a permanent priesthood, by definition he must live forever (otherwise his priesthood could not be permanent). Because he lives forever that means that 2000 or so years after his birth, death and resurrection, he is just as able to save us as he was those first disciples because he remains at the right hand of God the Father to intercede on our behalf.
For as Paul puts it so graphically in 1 Cor 15 13 & following
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
If Christ did not rise again, if he is not still alive and reigning in heaven, our faith is in vain but because he is – we have tremendous hope and encouragement. I sometimes despair of the Christian church. Amidst all the present turmoil, as a church we seem to have lost sight of the fact that Jesus is alive, is alive forever, that he reigns at the right hand of God the Father and that he is able to save completely those who come to God through Him – Amen!
This is our very core belief – we confess it week by week in the creed, we hear it in Scripture, expounded from the sermon. We need to proclaim it and live it. We have the victory and it is our third, final and most significant point of all – for this is why we have the victory because Jesus, the perfect and sinless one, had no need to offer sacrifices first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people because he himself was sinless but rather offered himself as the perfect sinless sacrifice for the sins of the people.
The role of the priest was to offer up the appointed sacrifices for the sins of the people. Before he could do this, because he himself was sinful, he had to offer sacrifices for his own sins.
By contrast, as v26 reminds us, Jesus was holy, blameless, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens. Jesus was everything that the priests weren't. That isn't to say that the priests were a particularly bad bunch of themselves although there were a good few bad apples, but they were human and subject to all the same human follies as the rest of us. By contrast, Jesus was everything that the priests weren't – holy, blameless, sinless.
It was because of this that Jesus had no need to offer sacrifice for his own sins but Jesus of course went on to do much more than this as he willingly offered himself as the perfect sacrifice for sin.
The animals offered in sacrifice were to be perfect – year old males without blemish or defect yet despite this, the sacrifice was never sufficient, and so had to be repeated time and again, day after day, year after year.
There are so many tragic ironies in the crucifixion of Jesus but one that is particularly apparent here is that it was Caiaphas the high priest who was ultimately responsible for condemning Jesus to death. Caiaphas was of course, the one man who could enter the Holy of holies, and who had particular responsibility for offering the sacrifices for his own sins as well as the sins of the people.
Little did he know that as he condemned Jesus to death he was offering the one perfect sacrifice for the sins of all mankind and as Jesus went to the cross, he went not as a lamb to the slaughter, completely unaware of what was about to happen but fully aware of the enormity of the events that were about to take place as he willingly accepted the punishment that was rightly yours and mine.
So it is that in dying on the cross Jesus became the ultimate, perfect, sinless sacrifice. The sacrifice he offered was sufficient for all time and so we no longer need to offer the blood of innocent animals in sacrifice at an altar but rather we gather around a table as we remember the death of Jesus through the bread and wine that he shared with his disciples on the fateful night before he was crucified for our sins.
Through his death, Jesus has paid the price for sin and is appointed as the great high priest who lives forever, interceding for us. The priesthood of Aaron and his descendents has been swept away to be replaced by a new, perfect, eternal high priest.
In offering himself as the one perfect, sinless sacrifice, on the last day God the just will look on those who have put their faith and trust in Jesus and see not a dirty sin stained individual but Jesus.
This is why this passage is about so much more than just a theological discussion about priesthood because it encapsulates the whole glorious truth of salvation.
As for us today, yes we still have and need priests but the role is very different and the role will be different according to your understanding of church and of the sacraments.
Thankfully, our priests are no longer required to be butchers but they are still to intercede on our behalf. They have a role to teach and instruct, to care for souls, to lead us in worship, to mark the great events of life and to remind us of all that Jesus has done for us in offering himself for our sins, something we remember especially as we share together in the bread and wine of communion.