Nearly seventy years ago, William Barclay wrote: “[i]t is a grim commentary on human nature that many a book and many a play and many a film has had success simply because it dealt with forbidden and ugly things.”[1]  Fifty Shades of Grey, anyone?  What critically-acclaimed movie these days isn’t rife with “adult content,” drug use, and foul language—as if this were the most truthful depiction of the essence of modern life?  So far as forbidden and ugly things go, how about almost any pop song on the radio and many things (far too many things!) that can be found—and are—through the internet.

In the movies, one of the key problems a murderer has to solve is how to dispose of the body.  That screenwriters imagine all this tells us too much about the darker verges of our fantasy life.  In some movies, the killer doesn’t even bother with disposing of the victim but makes a demented game out of deliberately leaving bodies to be found.  Others, as we watch with fascinated revulsion, come up with ingenious ways to conceal what they have done.  Lakes, construction sites, big safes in innermost rooms, tubs in sub-sub-basements, jars in dim, dusty crowded storage units.  Kind of makes you shiver.  Kind of makes you sad.  Entertainment!  Well, as we know, the real entertainment isn’t what the killers are doing, nothing so perverted as that, no no.  The real entertainment is how the investigator uncovers everything.  Discovery—there’s something about discovery.  The truth will emerge; it can’t be concealed forever.

“For the word of God is alive and active.  Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow” (4:12).  That’s graphic.  It’s meant to be.  A double-edged sword would be used for combat, for attack and defense.  We hear elsewhere in Scripture of the sword of the Spirit, the sword of the Word.  It has work to do, in this life.  The Word is for revealing, for discovery, uncovering, for opening up what had been sealed tight, shut away, out of sight.  No matter how deeply anyone buries the truth, and for whatever reason he or she does so, God will expose all to His light.  Confession isn’t for shame, though a little shame might be healthy in our shameless age.  Confession is for admitting the truth, so that the truth can then do its work.  Truth is not for condemnation and does not condemn.  Truth heals, restores.  Truth is for repentance.  No forgiveness where there is no repentance.  No repentance where truth is denied.  We can’t hide anything from God, but that doesn’t stop us.

Several years ago, I was at St. Luke’s in the Medical Center.  I was ushered into one of the surgical observation rooms.  Don’t run to the window too quickly!  On the table below me was a man cracked open stem to stern.  They were doing surgery on his heart.  I had to take it in in several brief, wobble-kneed dizzy doses before I could bring myself to stand there and watch continuously.  Oh, the human body!  O, life!  O, what we do to ourselves in this life, with this life we’ve been given.  They were operating on his heart after years of continual, habitual abuse, but they could not change his heart: that was the tragedy.  I wondered where the sin was—maybe they could just, you know, remove that, as long as they were in that deep.

Surgeons work wonders for our bodies.  Only God can work wonders for our souls.  He does.  His Word does, even if it means showing us what we don’t want to see, causing us to see what we thought we had hidden away so skillfully, so completely, shoved down, out of sight.  The word, we are told, “judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (4:12).  If only our thoughts and attitudes were humble all the way through, and pure.  Faithful as far as East is from West.  Clean North to South.  It’s not just the filthy, rotten things we have done, beloved, the sad, awful things we’ve done and said to others, and to ourselves.  It’s the sin in us, with us.  We don’t want to admit it’s there: we’re good!  We’re kind!  We’re Christian!  Then why do we need Jesus?  For what?  So that we can know how to be kind?

Beloved, there are many people on this earth who know next to nothing about Jesus, yet they are kind, patient, self-controlled, generous.  And there are plenty of Christians who don’t seem to measure up to even the common standard of kindness.  We don’t need Jesus to show us how to be nice and play well with others.  We need Christ because there is sin in us, all of us; we enter this life with it already there; we exit this life with it.  We need Jesus because we are all under God’s condemnation until we are in Christ.  No one likes that condemnation talk, so we decide to hide it away, bury it somewhere and point and call to other things: not that, this!  We are burying and hiding away the very reason Christ came and called all, first of all, to repent.  There is only one thing God will do to sin—condemn it completely.  That leaves us sinful human beings in a sorry state, indeed, until we avail ourselves of the one way God provides to be done with bondage to sin.

“Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight.  Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (4:13).  So, what’s everything?  Like every-thing?  If my conduct even now wouldn’t withstand God’s scrutiny—and it wouldn’t— how much more my conduct twenty, thirty, years ago!  Well, does God really go back that far?  Isn’t that, you know, a little severe?  It’s amazing how keen people are for justice in this world, clamoring, crying for justice, until it comes.  Oh, but all this judgment talk—that’s not the Bible, that’s not Jesus.  Yet here is the Bible, telling us that God sees everything, all laid bare, and it is to Him that all must give an account: not just Christians; all people.  Woe to those who think this is all superstitious silliness and fear-mongering.  What do they gain by thinking so?  What does thinking that way allow them to do?

What will our defense be?  I don’t remember that.  That wasn’t me!  I wasn’t in my right mind!  Will we argue with God?  Job sure wanted to: and he was quite sure that he was innocent, had never done or even said one thing that would offend God, though he like all of us was also a sinner in that his inmost, fundamental nature was broken, a crack all through it.  If I must stand before God to give my account, as I’m afraid I must, I won’t have much cause to be proud of myself.  I think my best defense will be to plead guilty and throw myself upon the mercy of the court.  Yes God, You’re right.  Yes God, that was me.  Yes God, I did that.  Yes God, I knew what I was doing.  Yes God, in that moment I wanted that more than I wanted You.

If the judgment of condemnation were all there was, woe to us all.  But you and I know there is also Christ.  There’s the glory; there’s the grace!  And Christ is God.  Our judge is also our advocate; more, he is our friend; more, he is our brother.  Faith in Christ brings us into a new, different relationship with God.  These Sundays on our way to Easter, we are sitting with Hebrews as we meditate upon what Christ does for us at the cross.  The cross is no tragic miscarriage of justice, no barbaric brutality of an ignorant past.  At the cross, Jesus fully opens the way for a new, different relationship with God, as we heard today.  It’s terrible and wonderful all at once.

“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess” (4:14).  Because our case is hopeless without Christ, let us hold firmly to Christ our hope.  This is the faith we profess: Christ our salvation, our only way to salvation.  Christ on the cross, “sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone-cold tomb.”  What kind of Christmas carol is that?  Probably one of the best.

Christ is our priest, our high priest.  We know about Catholic priests.  Despite the many good priests out there, we’re likely to think of the bad.  The bad are beyond deplorable: wicked, demonic, monstrous—slaves of sin.  We know about monsters, too—monsters aren’t confined to the Roman Catholic Church.  A Catholic priest, despite the vestments, vocabulary, and confessional, is not a priest in the way the Jews understood and experienced.  A priest offers sacrifice: he was specially set apart by God for this holy task.  Since the days of Moses, when God established an ordained priesthood through Aaron and his direct descendants, no one presumes to be his own priest, her own priestess.  Precisely because of our sin nature, not always riding roughshod over us but always there, we need someone in God’s presence for us, a high priest.  In the days before Jesus, even the priests had first to make atonement for themselves by offering the blood of their sacrifice.  Christ makes atonement for us by offering his own lifeblood.  He is priest and atoning sacrifice.  His death sentence is our commutation, his condemnation our forgiveness.  His death is our life.  So far as I’m concerned, the crosses in our churches are far too neat and clean, too smooth by far.  We’ve forgotten the blood; we dare not forget the blood.

In our walk through Scripture this year, we haven’t yet arrived at Christ’s Ascension, but Hebrews calls it also to our attention.  Christ raised and risen is at the right hand of the Father; Jesus has a ministry there, praying for us in God’s presence.  Jesus is exactly where we now need him to be.  God is ready to give us abundance of grace.  We must ask Him for it, ask Him in Christ’s name.  As I’ve mentioned before, a name, in Scripture, is not just the combination of sounds by which someone is called.  A name speaks to character.  To speak of God’s name is to consider His character, who He is.  To speak of Christ’s name is to remember Christ’s character.  Christ is God.  Christ is our sacrifice, our atonement, peace, and reconciliation.  Christ is our high priest, praying for us in the presence of God, “[f]or we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things just as we are, yet without sin” (4:15, NASB).

The thing about the sons of Aaron, the priests—besides their consistent, abject failure to live up to their consecration—was that they came to regard themselves as holier, higher, and purer than all those wretched sinners just the other side of the walls of the Temple.  Like many, by and large they were faithful, in their way, but not remarkably merciful.  They could perform the rituals, sing the psalms, and offer the prayers with meticulous precision, but they did not “sympathize with our weaknesses.”  Condemn, sure, fear, yes, loathe, you bet, but have compassion for us?  No.  A priest without compassion is not only a cold priest but also fails to demonstrate the character of God; he therefore demonstrates little acquaintance with the God he claims to serve.  Beloved, make sure to have a priest who serves and knows God.

The one who truly serves God is the one who truly loves God and knows God’s love, and so has great compassion for the waywardness of the human heart, because God has compassion.  Compassion is not permission or permissiveness.  Compassion is not approval or blessing of what, though contrary to God’s Word, remains someway so natural and compulsory to our bent, thwarted hearts.  Compassion comes with knowing how difficult it is for any of us to live up to the life God asks of us.  Compassion knows the best in us and the worst.  Compassion does not forego judgment; compassion ensures the judgment is just.  In Christ, we have been judged, and the judgment is forgiveness.  Not condemnation but reconciliation.

We want a priest who knows us—relationship.  Jesus knows us, not just our common struggle to live up to God’s love, not just our common failings.  Jesus knows each of us, personally, through and through because he is the Word, God’s Word that opens all things to God’s light and thereby to God’s grace.  Nothing is hidden from God.  Jesus is God.  Knowing us, seeing us through and through, with not the least thing hidden or unknown to Him, God nonetheless selects us for salvation, revealing the abundance of His love in grace toward us.

You and I, we have no claim upon God: no grounds, base, or the least cause for a claim.  There is nothing any of us have done, are doing, or can do, to merit God’s nod of approval.  God has claimed you and me only and beautifully because God is merciful and, for His own reasons, He is pleased to spare some from the conflagration, by sanctifying them for Himself in Christ.  Now is the time to come to God in an even fuller way, coming to know ourselves as God knows us, and loves us, in Jesus Christ.  “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (4:16).  Amen and Amen.

[1] William Barclay.  Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians.  1956.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1976.  162.