Perfect Through Sufferings

Propers: The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 29), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

For we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, and yet without sin.

So we read last week in the Epistle to the Hebrews. It is an argument continued in Hebrews this morning:

Although He was a Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered; and having been made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him, having been designated by God a High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

There’s a lot to unpack in this brief yet remarkable passage, and we ought to begin, I believe, with that word “sympathize.” It leaves rather a poor taste in the mouth. These days we have sympathy cards, well-meaning yet often maudlin expressions of sentiment: “I feel bad for you.” But to sympathize, in the Greek, literally means to suffer with, to suffer beside, shoulder to shoulder. It means I stand with you; I bear with you; the pain you know is my pain too. I am with you in this.

And that makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it? Much of pain, much of grief, much of dread, is the isolation, the loneliness that accompanies it. To have someone sympathize—to have someone suffer what you suffer—is to be no longer alone.

Speaking theologically, God the Father in Heaven knows exactly what it is to suffer. As God He is omniscient, having perfect knowledge of all things. He understands our sufferings better than we do, for His perspective is transcendent. Yet as God He is also impassable, which means He cannot suffer, cannot change, cannot be harmed. God is infinite and eternal, beyond limits, beyond time. So it is one thing to know someone’s sufferings, but quite another to suffer alongside them.

And that, my brothers and sisters, is why Jesus had to come. Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, God-With-Us, God become one of us. Conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, He is truly and fully human, while remaining truly and fully God. The Son is eternal, yet chose to come down, for us and for our salvation, to be born of Mary in a Bethlehem cave.

“Although He was a Son,” the author of Hebrews states, “He learned obedience through what He suffered.” St Paul writes much the same thing in Philippians: “Though He was in the form of God … [He] emptied Himself … and being found in human form, He humbled Himself, and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

In Christ God stands with us, suffers with us, like unto us in every way save for sin. Thus, says Hebrews, “having been made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him.” Note that bit, “having been made perfect.” Peculiar, isn’t it? Does Jesus need perfecting? Does this imply that He was somehow imperfect when He was “only” God, the infinite Son of the infinite Father? If so, He wouldn’t make for much of a Savior.

Perfect, in this context, does not mean without flaw, which is how we typically take the word today. Needless to say, the Son of God was flawless before the Incarnation. But perfect has another meaning: that of being suited for a task, the appropriate solution to a problem. The key, as it were, is perfect for the lock.

In being made human, Christ perfected Himself for our salvation. Now could He enter entirely into our wounds, into our brokenness, to fill that depthless chasm torn by sin full to bursting with the infinite Life and Breath and Blood of God. Now in Christ can God truly suffer, now in Christ can God truly sympathize, in and with and through us all. No longer is He “just” transcendent, infinite, beyond. Now He is with us, He is in us, in our suffering, in our brokenness, in our wounds.

And that makes all the difference: to have a God who does not simply know our sufferings in the abstract, but who now bleeds with us, bleeds for us; who takes our brokenness and sin and redeems it, resurrects it, making our very wounds the portals by which the Holy Spirit of God is poured out into us, into our flesh. Here sympathy does not mean, “I feel bad for you.” Here sympathy means, “I die for you.”

When I worked as a hospital chaplain, a patient—a Greek Orthodox man—pointed at my cross and said, “Do you know what that means? That means that our God knows exactly what we’re going through, and will not abandon us in our sufferings, but leads us through them to eternal life.” That day he preached to me.

Then there’s that last bit of today’s passage: that Christ has been “designated by God a High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek.” This has a lot to do with the Old Testament. Brush off what we learned in Sunday School. The Epistle to the Hebrews is, in effect, a commentary on the Hebrew Bible, interpreting the Old Testament in light of Christ’s Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. It demonstrates how the Old Testament foreshadows the New, and the New fulfills the Old.

In the Old Testament, under the Law of Moses, the role of High Priest was indispensable. God’s people could go without a king for a good long while. They could go without prophets for a while. But they needed a High Priest more than anything, for it was the High Priest who mediated the forgiveness of sins. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies at the heart of the great Temple in Jerusalem, having made all the appropriate sacrifices, and there he would utter the ineffable Name of God.

In accordance then with the Law, the sins of the entire people, including those of the High Priest, would be forgiven, and the Covenant with God renewed. Legend has it that a red thread would be tied to the outer doors of the Temple, and that on the Day of Atonement that thread would suddenly turn white to proclaim the miracle of God’s mercy to His people. It did that every year right up until the Crucifixion of Christ.

But there were priests before Moses, priests before the Law. One of these was Melchizedek, the King of Salem—which would one day become Jerusalem—who refreshed Abraham with bread and wine in the Name of their mutual God. We don’t know anything about the origins of Melchizedek, about his lineage or his people. Some thought he might be Shem, the long-lived son of Noah; others, that he might be God Himself or an angel upon the earth.

All we know is that he was King of Jerusalem before there was a Jerusalem; he was a High Priest of God before there was a High Priesthood; and he was a monotheist before Abraham. Melchizedek is a mysterious figure, a miraculous figure, who blesses us, refreshes us, and communes with us in bread and wine. To say that Christ is High Priest, is to say that He forgives us all our sins, once and for all, not with the blood of bulls and goats, but with His own incarnate Blood of God.

And to say that He is High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek, is to say that He is greater than Father Abraham, greater than King David, greater even than the High Priesthood of the Temple in Jerusalem. He is before them all and after them all: the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. The Scriptures revolve entirely upon the axis of the Cross and emptied Tomb of Christ.

Brothers and sisters, it is not the will of God that we be crushed with pain. It is not the will of God that even one of His little ones be lost. He did not want the world to fall into brokenness and sin. And sometimes we wish that He would just snap His almighty fingers and set it all right again, force the world to be good. But God is wiser and truer than we are, infinitely so. And His working out of the salvation of this world is slower and subtler than it seems we can imagine.

Yet we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are. He learned obedience through suffering, and having been made perfect for us became the source of eternal salvation for all. And He shall never stop forgiving, never stop healing, never stop raising the dead from out of their graves and calling us home in Him—for He is our High Priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.