As part of our Lenten self-denial, in the spirit of Lent, today’s message will be a little longer than usual, and I do know that I can already run, um, a little long.  Please bear with me.

These Sundays are especially a time to turn minds and hearts to Jesus on his way to the cross.  The cross is uniquely Christ’s objective, supremely Christ’s achievement.  His ethical teaching and exemplary conduct are truly worthy of our attention and imitation.  Christ did not come only to impart ethical teaching.  He came to save lost sinners, call them back, bring them home.  Christ came to die for us, be the atoning sacrifice for us, so that justice and salvation might both be fully achieved in one person at one place.  Only Jesus can do that.  It’s not Christ’s ethical teaching that saves us.  His ethical teaching by itself doesn’t even change us.  It’s what he does for us at the cross.  Only he could.  Without his atoning death there, we remain in the same peril as all who live without concern for Christ, with precisely zero interest in God’s Word.

Hebrews provides several occasions to meditate upon what Christ has done for us at the cross.  This book of the Bible uses concepts familiar to a Jewish-Christian audience: priest, offering, sacrifice, blood, tabernacle.  The Westminster Confession, which spells out the traditional, historic Presbyterian understanding of what Scripture teaches, speaks of Christ as prophet, as king, and as priest.  Hebrews especially develops this picture of Christ as our priest.

A priest was set apart for service to God by a ritual of ordination, an anointing, through which the priests were authorized and permitted to be near God’s presence.  Priests offered the sacrifices brought by the people; they kept the people before God in prayer.  It was the priests who ensured the wall of separation between God and mortals was maintained, by way of teaching the holiness of God and of protecting the unwitting against trespasses.  Trespasses incurred the wrath of God.  The priests maintained the wall and had been given the way through the wall.  The prophet brought God to the people.  The priest, through sacrifice and prayer, brought the people before God.

I am not a priest.  There is no altar in this church.  I am a preacher, a Teaching Elder, a Minister of Word and Sacrament.  Reformed Christianity has no institutional priesthood and wants none, as we find our great high priest in Christ, just as Hebrews tells us.  We also read in Scripture that, now, in Christ, all believers are “priests”: every believer, in Christ, has direct access to God; there is no need for any intermediary, no middleman.  Some ask for my prayers as if I somehow had a direct line to God, as if my prayers got through quicker.  That couldn’t be further from the truth in Christ.  Every believer is called and privileged to exercise a ministry of prayer, for one another and for this world.  You and I are called to show others that there is a way, to encourage each other and those outside to pursue this way by which God makes Himself available for us.  We do none of this without the presence of the Spirit, always helping, always healing.

In the days of the wilderness tent sanctuary and the days of the Temple, God remained unseen: always a cloud concealed Him from sight.  You’ll know Him when you see Him.  We fuse knowledge with seeing: knowing is a matter of seeing, as when, with a big a-ha, we say, “I see!”  To know God, we must see God.  As He tells Moses and others, God may not be seen.  Scripture wrestles with this.  The One we must know is the One we cannot see.  In the fullness of time, according to His own plan, God resolved this paradox for us by coming to us in Jesus: “we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (2:9).

Well, that’s densely packed.  I’m going to try to unpack what we just heard.  Seeing Jesus, we see God and can have full confidence that we really can know God just as He wants us to know Him, a God of grace.  Grace is God offering us a gift, free to us, incomprehensibly costly to Him.  Please contemplate that mystery, often; let it reach deep in your mind and down in your heart.  God wants us to see Jesus so that we may see Him.  Turn your eyes upon Jesus.  John takes pains to remind us that the Son, being God, has always been.  The Word, the Logos, the Son, enters history at a particular time, being given the name Jesus (meaning God saves), to accomplish for us what we could not accomplish, to do what God required, by righteousness and justice, so that we could be restored to God.  We lost ourselves.  God chooses a people for restoration.  The Son saves us from our sin and restores us to God.  See God in Christ and know salvation.

Hebrews reminds us that Christ is now crowned with glory.  Christ’s crown, his crowning achievement, is the character of God.  Jesus perfectly shows us the character of God for all to see.  Love, faithfulness, truth, justice, righteousness, grace—God’s character.  Jesus is crowned with glory because he is God making Himself known and visible for us.

Now, please note carefully that Jesus is crowned with glory because he fulfilled what God sent the Son to accomplish: to suffer death.  Not just to die, not that dying is such a small thing, but to suffer death.  Especially over these coming Sundays, we really do need to keep that word suffer in view: not some external burden to be lugged along but what is carried within, what weighs down heart and soul.  Oh, we know about such things, yes, we do.

I daresay, if we ever contemplate our own death, we hope it will be quick and peaceful, preferably in our sleep, though there are those who would much rather die with their boots on.  The last thing we want, for ourselves or for almost anyone else, is a long, slow, excruciating death.  Yet that is just what Jesus voluntarily took upon himself, for us.  It wasn’t physical agony alone that he had to bear.

When Jesus tasted death “for everyone,” as Hebrews tells us, this is the grace of God.  O terrifying, amazing grace!  Of course, the parent is willing to die for the child!  And the death of Jesus, his suffering death, has gracious consequences for us all.  Something big happens at the cross.  The cross is intentionally part of God’s plan from long, long before, and the surest shocking symbol of God’s abundant love.

Jesus is now most highly exalted because, voluntarily, he suffered the death that we fallen, broken, malfunctioning, sin-prone mortals ought to have suffered as the just penalty for our free choice to live for ourselves rather than for God.  The habit of letting God be an afterthought has no benefit.  To fulfill the Law is life, to fail—to sin, that is—is death.  That leaves us in a sad state indeed, until we know Christ, who took God’s death sentence upon himself, so that, in him, our penalty is paid.  Justice is maintained—would we really have God bend the rules that He set, or apply them arbitrarily, or with prejudice?  We shout and cry for justice, until it comes to us.  At the cross, justice is fully satisfied, and grace flows abundantly.

“In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered” (2:10).  There’s certainly a message for us, right there; it’s a hard message, overflowing with grace.  In Christ’s suffering is the entire, complete fulfillment of our salvation.  I told you something big happens at the cross; without the cross, it isn’t accomplished.  No cross, no salvation.  It isn’t enough for there to be perfect obedience and abundance of love all the way up to the cross; being the supreme moral example doesn’t go all the way.  Because of the cross, there’s nothing lacking, now, nothing incomplete, nothing unfinished.  We do not complete God’s gift by our obedience or good works.  We can’t add anything to it.  We receive it or we refuse.

Faith is God’s constant, comforting reminder (grace again!) that we are among those whom He has freely, graciously selected for salvation.  We aren’t chosen based upon our accomplishments, background, eye color, language, affluence, initiative, education, credentials, friends, exemplary character, or anything about us.  We are chosen because God chooses to choose—that’s grace.

He didn’t have to; His love does not make Him blind to anything.  He owes no one anything.  We follow Jesus, who brings those who follow to glory.  What is glory?  God—the manifestation, the reflection of God’s own character.

The penalty for sin is not death only but God’s wrath and curse, the woe He told Adam and Eve to expect as a consequence of their freely chosen disobedience, their willingness to cast aside their relationship with God in order to pursue what could only be their own destruction.  No salvation, now, without suffering.  Everything, we are told, exists for God and through God.  This is purpose.  So few seem to know their purpose, much less fulfill it.  Christ’s sufferings were not on the cross only.  We are told he was a man of sorrows and acquainted (well-acquainted) with grief.  Not just at the cross.  Whoever conscientiously, prayerfully, daily, directs his or her living unto God is going to see the world in a different way, and will see with great sorrow how people stray, willingly, freely, stray so far from God and His perfect goodness, and not only those outside the church.  Each of us continues not many steps from a plummet.

Even with all the blessings of grace, this life has hard sorrows.  Christ through the Spirit is continually at work against our fallenness, misguidedness, and deludedness.  It hurts to see these.  Consider all Jesus saw.  Consider all he sees, still, and in us.  Temptation gnaws away at us, keeps probing, digging, chipping away here and there.  It hurts to feel it.  Jesus knows.  Jesus experienced insult and rejection from those whom all decent people regarded as deplorable sinners.  He experienced insult and rejection from those generally regarded as the righteous: the ones so much closer to God than the riff raff.  How could Jesus endure it?  By grace, for he was being made the perfect, complete, entire means of our salvation precisely through what he suffered, suffered for the sake of his unwavering loyalty, his unshakeable faith, his unswerving purpose, in his own life, to make God known and visible.  To glorify God above all no matter what.  Suffering awaits those who would likewise glorify God.  But suffering is not all that awaits.

The preacher in Hebrews calls Jesus our pioneer.  No pioneer had an easy life.  Hardship was the stuff of the pioneer life.  We marvel at what they went through, say to ourselves we could never do it (even if deep down, we sort of wished we could), wished we could have that sort of character, that mettle and determination to keep going.  A life that forged the way, that made a difference: they don’t make ‘em like that anymore!

Such perseverance, such faithfulness in the face of all hostility, remains a model for us.  Our salvation in Christ will cost us, also.  Christ shows us the way, makes the way open for us.  Shall we follow?  It can feel frightening, to follow, there to the cross.  We don’t go alone.  We receive grace as we throw ourselves now upon God’s abundant mercy, as we rely entirely upon what Christ has already done for us.  Let our response be rejoicing, thanks, and praise, and newfound ability and desire to live for God, rather than for the sad, hollow little idols here below.

The preacher of Hebrews writes something that his Jewish audience would have understood well enough: what is holy communicates holiness.  What comes into contact with what is consecrated, devoted to the Lord, takes on that same quality of God-devotion.  Holiness by association!  It is characteristic of holiness that it establishes connections, relationship, that it claims for itself what comes into contact with holiness, as if it were saying be holy, too!  Let’s be holy together.  If there’s no relationship, there’s no holiness.  “Both the one who makes people holy [Christ] and those who are made holy [through contact with what is holy] are of the same family.  So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters” (2:11).  By giving his life for us, he gives us his life, his holy life, his life of holiness.

Don’t let anyone tell you the cross isn’t so very important, that nothing worth talking about happened there.  There are those, even in the church, who do talk that way.  Life Christ’s way is his cross-enabled gift for us.  Being holy himself, by what he does for us, he makes us holy.  Oh, how we want to feel the touch of Christ!  As he touches us, he communicates holiness to us.  Please understand, consider: in Christ, we are each, now, holy.  This isn’t our doing.  It’s what God is doing.  We belong to Him, now.  Being made holy by him, we now are of the same family, brothers and sisters of Christ through the gracious will of our Father in heaven.  We don’t need to rely upon angels, saints, Mary, priests, or anyone to go to God on our behalf, because in Christ, we have been taken into God’s family, made God’s own children.  God does not cut Himself off from His children; He loves His children, delights in them, listens to them, and responds.

We are holy and we must be made holy: the Spirit is with us to cause us to become what we are in Christ.  We don’t make ourselves holy.  We become holy—consecrated to God, devoted to God—God’s own—by coming into contact, communication and Communion, with Christ, who is holy and holiness itself, because Christ is God.

For the last two hundred fifty years, thinking of Jesus primarily in his humanity has not posed a challenge.  The problem has been receiving Jesus in his divinity, accepting Jesus as God Himself.  In the days of the preacher of Hebrews, it was the opposite: among the faithful, the divinity was fully accepted, but the true humanity presented huge obstacles.  God would never stoop so low as to permit Himself to be a real, true man!  The preacher of Hebrews tackles this obstacle: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity” (2:14).  Fully human—mind, body, soul—for a divine purpose: “so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (2:14-15).

The preacher says the devil “holds the power of death.”  Does he mean Satan can kill us?  No.  As we read so clearly in Job and elsewhere, only God has the power of life and death.  What happened in the garden?  Adam already knew, he only needed to remember what God had clearly told him, that disobedience in the one thing God had commanded meant death.  The Tempter could not kill Adam or Eve, but he could tempt; temptation indulged, disobedience indulged, could have only one outcome.  The Tempter holds the power of death to the extent that we indulge the temptations that come our way.  We’ve all done so.  If we hadn’t ever, we would stand in no need of a Savior.

A temptation indulged can do one of at least two things: on one hand, this can cause us to give up hope and just continue indulging the temptation, and whatever other temptation then also comes along (and they do!); on the other hand, a temptation indulged can cause us to redouble our efforts to erase the mark, wash out the stain, mend the tear, by being good, doing good to others, showing God how very sorry we are, all the while desperately hoping that, by all our efforts, we might win God over, win God back.  Got to make our argument, make our case, persuade the judge!

In either event, whether we tearfully just keep hurting ourselves or tearfully wear ourselves out trying to wash out the stain, the knowledge that eternal punishment is the doom of all transgressors looms over us and weighs us down, in resentment, rage, or grief.  It’s the problem of the Law: Paul touches upon it several times.  The law can tell us what not to do and agonizingly remind us of the penalty for those who do what the law tells us not to do, but the law cannot cause us to do the good; the law cannot cause us to refrain from evil.  No Law can make us righteous.  We need a Savior, a Redeemer.  God, as God, cannot die.  Spirit does not redeem flesh.  Flesh must redeem flesh—the entire sacrificial system God gave His people made that evident!  Life for life, blood for blood.  Man as man cannot make atonement for his sin—his fundamentally broken nature—or even his own broken acts, words, thoughts—all the ways in which our brokenness breaks out.  Man as man certainly cannot make recompense for the sin of anyone else.

Christ became as we are so that we might become like him.  The way God appointed for this was the cross.  The Son took for himself a true, mortal body so that his death would clear our debt and reconcile us to God.  Those who trust in Christ as Savior, and Lord, need no longer fear punishment, just as John reminds us.  If we’ll trust what we hear through John, those in Christ shall not even be judged.

People feverishly struggle to get as much as they can as often as they can, however they can, before death takes everything away—all that matters to us most.  Jesus so often reminds his disciples not to be afraid, to have courage—more, to have faith.  Faith is the way to courage.  The Christian is also learning not to be afraid of death.  We can accept death, with courage, with faith, because we know, now, there is what is after death—Christ tells us, promises us, shows us.

Last of all, this: “For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.  Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (2:17-18).  Again, much is packed in tightly, wonderfully, here.  He had to be like us.  He had to be God, too.  To “make atonement for the sins of the people,” Jesus must be human in every way and God, two natures in one person.  God and man, Christ is our perfect priest.

A priest who is perfect not only perfectly performs his duties but perfectly knows those who come to him for intercession and God’s forgiveness.  There’s always a question, among clergy as well as among the laity, whether or not a priest or pastor can be a friend, too.  In Christ, we all have a friend who also happens to be our priest.  Merciful and faithful—it is possible for us to be merciful but not faithful (God help us!); it is possible for us to be faithful but not merciful (God help us!).  Jesus is both, both for us, perfectly.  He knows our temptations, hurts, and hopes because he had them, too.  He truly can help us when we are tempted, because he also was tempted, is well acquainted with the suffering, sorrow, and exhaustion temptation causes.  He can help us through, because he made it through.  Oh, it costs us, takes a toll—Jesus knows!  It is possible not to collapse, capitulate under the weight of temptation.  It is possible to get back up, bear our cross, and continue on, even in the storm.  Let Jesus lead you; let Jesus bring you to God.  Let Jesus bring you home.