God sent Jesus to be our Redeemer, our Savior.  Redemption comes with a cost; payment must be made, satisfaction given.  The one wronged—God—must be satisfied.  I don’t have the means, the wherewithal, to pay for the damage I’ve caused to myself, to others, or to my relationship with God.  Any damage-causing act, or word, or thought, reduces whatever means I may have had.  If it were only a matter of past offenses, possibly a way might be found, though probably not.  The problem is we add to the list.  Who can give satisfaction for us? 

          God sends Jesus with a message of hope and of challenge.  Jesus doesn’t come to offer us the false hope of a way out of our trouble, an immediate end to struggle, a way to run away.  Jesus comes with a challenge, offering us true hope: a way forward, through the trouble, bound together as blood brothers.  The Father sends the Son.  The Son comes to us full of willing compassion.  God’s purpose isn’t destruction but salvation, restoration.  God does not delight in sorrow or suffering: God is good, remember?

          Salvation is for those who heed God’s prophet; restoration, for those who go to God’s priest.  The prophet is God’s representative to us; the priest is our representative before God.  We aren’t Catholic, and we have a priest.  It isn’t me.  If the prophet, like Jeremiah or Isaiah, seems to speak with the awful authority and terrible volume of God, the priest speaks with the hope, faith, and love of people who are hurting, who feel their need for God, for blessing, for salvation, for abundant life.  The prophet can seem scarcely human; the priest is entirely human.

          We may suspect that Jesus can’t really sympathize with us, doesn’t know what it’s really like to live this life, because, after all, he isn’t fully human.  He’s some holy amalgam of God and man, divine and human, so the choices and challenges aren’t real choices, aren’t real challenges, for him.  What we say with our creeds and confessions, though, what they say with Scripture, is that Jesus is fully human, and fully divine.  The choices and challenges are just as real for him as for any of us.  Culturally, we seem to be more convinced of the full humanity of Jesus now than ever before, much more so than of his full divinity.

          We don’t understand how the same man can be fully divine and fully human.  Our salvation is entirely tied up in these two natures perfectly together in one man, Jesus Christ.  If he isn’t fully God, we aren’t saved: only God, who cannot die, can save us under His just judgment against sin.  If Christ Jesus isn’t fully human, we aren’t saved: it is we humans, who die, who need saving under God’s just judgment against sin.  Receiving God’s righteous sentence against us in his own fully human body, Jesus Christ saves us.  Jesus was subject to our weaknesses.  He understands and holds out his hands to us.  “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (Heb 4:15).

          This order of Melchizedek may sound just as strange as other things we don’t understand in Scripture.  Without going into detail, the point is that Jesus is our great high priest, forever fulfilling the duties of priest.  A priest prays; Jesus prays, for us.  A priest offers the people’s gifts to God; Jesus offers us.  A priest makes the sacrifice that cleanses, that clears the way between us and God; Jesus is the sacrifice.  The Scriptures are plain about what is required for cleansing, for clearing the way, the satisfaction and atonement for the wreck and ruin of our sin: blood.  Only blood cleanses.  Only blood clears the way.  Only blood pays.  The life we could have had with God, the life we ruined, Christ restores, by his blood.  His life for our life.  His purity and righteousness for our sins and stains.  That’s why, with all its stomach and heart-wrenching gore, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ gets it right: all that blood on display reminds us that he was pierced for our transgressions, and that by his wounds we are healed: God with us taking upon himself God’s righteous judgment against us so that, by the grace of God, we might have forgiveness, reconciliation, life.

          The preacher of Hebrews tells us that, while he was among us, Jesus “offered up prayers and petitions [. . .] to the one who could save him from death” (5:7).  God has the power to save from death.  The psalms are alive to this hope, this glory, this grace.  Scripture is plain that the essence of death is absence of relationship with God.  The death we should dread is the death of relationship with God.  That’s the meaning of being dead in our sins, dead in our trespasses.  Physical death will come, beloved; we cannot bar the door against that visitor.  In Christ, however, there is a difference in death—Christ makes alive, in every way.  In Christ we die to sin.  In Christ, death is now our final, total release from the strings of sin.  Christ died for sins that we might die to sin.  There is something more, something after, for us, now.

          Christ who was sent to die saves us from the darkness of death through grace, the power of God’s salvation, the joy of pardon.  Grace, salvation, and pardon vividly remind us that God is good, and how good He is!  Grace, salvation, and pardon vividly remind us that God’s love endures forever.  Jesus Christ, the Son, is God’s very own.  As we have faith in Jesus Christ, we are received by him, we are in him, and he is in us: we become God’s very own, with Jesus.

          The wisdom that preserves us grows from the soil of the fear of the Lord: that awe, reverence, and love-born desire to grow and not harm our relationship with God.  This wisdom acts in our obedience, our faithful walk with the Lord, doing what He asks of us and avoiding what He tells us to avoid.  Wisdom and faithfulness are beautifully magnified, amplified, by humility.  The preacher of Hebrews tells us that Jesus, praying, “was heard because of his reverent submission” (5:7).  As, with Jesus from our very soul we say not my will but Thy will be done, we also live into the humility of Christ—loving, trusting, faith-full, blessed.

          We do not understand such talk, and see no real reason to, when we know we’re right, or at least not wrong.  Since our hearts are supreme, the supreme standard of right and wrong, good and bad, blessed and cursed, must conform to that supreme standard.  We’re always ready to submit reverently to what our fallible, fickle heart assures us is right, so right, and good, so good.  Only, who is on the throne of your heart?  If you’re not looking up, you’re looking down.

          Prayer, reverence, submission . . . we can practice these, and we hope and trust that, as Jesus is with us, in us as we practice this wisdom, this fear of the Lord, we will grow still nearer to Jesus.  Just a closer walk with thee.  Prayer, reverence, submission—we may sort of like the sound of these.  They sound sort of holy.  Practicing them, though?  It’s easier to sing the hymns, say the prayers, and hear the Word than to do them.  Don’t be discouraged, though.

          We come to the harder part of what we heard today: “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered” (5:8).  What does it mean that Jesus learned obedience?  Was he prone to disobedience?  We are.  We have to learn.  But Jesus?  If there never was any real choice for Jesus, how is he an example for us?  Obedience is learned through suffering.  Really?  As one fully human, Jesus would have had to learn obedience.  It doesn’t come naturally.  It comes spiritually.  Some children are docile and pliable; no child is perfectly obedient, for all sorts of reasons.  Inclination, or the lack thereof, is only part of it.  Jesus, also, had to learn obedience, continually, conscientiously putting it into practice in all sorts of situations where another way was always possible, and often enough felt desirable.  He did put that choice for obedience into practice—oh, how he did!  O, how he loves you and me!

          The tougher point for me, not because I don’t understand but because I don’t like, is this part about learning obedience in the school of suffering.  “I walked a mile with Pleasure; / She chatted all the way; / But left me none the wiser / For all she had to say. / I walked a mile with Sorrow; / And ne’er a word said she; / But, oh! The things I learned from her, / When Sorrow walked with me.”  Where else can the lesson be so deeply, so thoroughly learned?  Beloved, it’s not a challenge to obey when obedience costs you nothing or when what you’re told to do is in full agreement with your inclination, fully in line with what gives you greatest pleasure.  This is why the sin that clings is still so easy, all too easy to indulge.  Sin makes it easy to obey; God makes it necessary.  Sin sells every falsehood as though it were true; God tells and shows us the truth.

          When Jesus asks if anyone wanted to be his follower, he told them to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow.  There’s the way to life, blessing and glory, beloved, but Jesus doesn’t paint it in the most attractive terms, does he?  At first glance, it seems hard, burdensome, and unfulfilling—like any daunting challenge, like anything that seems to involve discomfort.  Learning, preparedness, confidence, come through challenge.  Not hopeless challenge, without resources or tools.  Not challenge without ability, but challenge with resources, tools, and ability.  The joy of the Lord is our strength.  From his Father in heaven, by the Holy Spirit, Jesus has all he needs to persevere.  In Jesus, we receive these same gifts, these gracious, glorious blessings.

          The point of the challenges is to learn, to grow, by trusting, by obeying.  We may not mind the trusting; obeying is another matter.  Not to obey, though, is not to trust.  There’s the crux of it.  As we have faith in the sure presence of God through all challenges, we become better acquainted with all that God has given us for perseverance: grace; we learn our full reliance upon God: glory.  Jesus knew his full reliance.  Consider all he did.  He tells us that we also can do all this and more, as we have faith.  By faith, we can do all manner of things we had never imagined possible, because God will use our faith to do them for His glory and for the upbuilding of His Church.  We already know about growing through challenges.  We call it maturity.  The church word for this maturing is sanctification: God making us holy, preparing us for life in His presence forever.  Sanctification, this holy maturing, is God perfecting us through grace, for glory.

          Hebrews tells us that, “once made perfect, [Christ] became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (5:9).  His obedience was perfected through all that he suffered—all that came as he consistently, devotedly chose obedience, chose faith.  It wasn’t the suffering that perfected it but his Father in heaven, sustaining Jesus through it all.  Pain itself does not teach, beloved.  God with us through the pain, as we are attentive and reflecting, promises to do wonderful things for us, and in us.  God uses the hardness of reversal to hone our souls.  You don’t have to be a Christian to experience sorrow, pain, suffering, disappointment, and hurt.  As a Christian, you are promised that God Himself will turn it all to your blessing.  Only have faith.

          Follow Jesus.  Don’t fear the cross.  Don’t fear the blood on the cross.  That blood is life for you.  That cross is freedom for you.  Jesus Christ is an eternity of love for you.

          Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!