Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 6th,
Year of Our + Lord 2014
St. John and Trinity Lutheran
Churches, Fairview and Sidney, MT
Rev. Dr. Arthur A. Just, Guest
Preacher
Hebrews 9:11-15 Entering Holiness
Greetings
in this Fifth Sunday in Lent from President Lawrence Rast and the faculty and
staff of Concordia Theological Seminary.
It’s an honor to be with you this morning, and later today for the topic
“The Sunday Service and the Mission of God.”
And to be with your pastor and his wife.
Pr. Warner is a former student, and it’s wonderful to see them both
again.
Today’s
lessons place us in the center of salvation history, which means to say, in
Jerusalem, in the temple, in the place of God’s holiness. Even the Old Testament lesson is about the
temple, for the place where Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac was Mt. Moriah, and
when Solomon built the temple, he built it on top of Mt. Moriah. So at the very place where Abraham was going
to shed the blood of his son Isaac, he
instead, of course, shed the blood of a lamb.
Solomon built a temple on the spot where priests would now shed the
blood of many lambs as a foretaste of the blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God who
takes away the sins of the world.
That’s
how John’s Gospel begins. With John the
Baptist declares of Jesus: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world.”
So
God provided a lamb for Abraham, and in Jesus, a lamb for the world and for
us. So the place of the temple, Mt.
Moriah, is called “The Lord will provide.”
And he has provided for you, in the supper here prepared for you – body
and blood -- for the forgiveness of all your sins.
So
the world of Abraham and Isaac, of Jesus, and of the Jews in today’s Gospel who
said Jesus had a demon, their world was defined by the purity code -- who was
clean or unclean, who was worthy or unworthy, who was holy or unholy. For the Jews, to be clean was to be a true
child of Abraham. And they knew that in
Jesus all of this was being challenged.
For not only was Jesus claiming that Abraham was his father, Jesus was
going further than anyone had ever gone before -- he was claiming that God was
his Father and that he, Jesus, was God’s only begotten Son, and that he was
present in the world to make things holy as the Lamb of God who takes away the
sin of the world.
That
is why the theme of our lessons today is holiness, specifically, entering
holiness. For that is the goal of our
Lenten pilgrimage. To journey with Jesus
to the altar of his cross and to watch how in the most horrific, shameful,
unclean deaths imaginable -- the death of a criminal -- God would cleanse the
world of its sin, making it holy. We
enter this holiness today -- in hearing God’s word and receiving his body and
blood. The six weeks of Lent are nothing
more and nothing less than a prelude to this reality: the celebration at Easter
that Jesus Christ, the High Priest of the good things to come, has entered the
Most Holy Place once for all by his blood.
Jesus enters the Most Holy Place
by blood. His blood. Not the blood of bulls and goats, not the
blood of Isaac whom Abraham was ready to sacrifice at God’s command, but the
blood of Christ, Lamb of God, pure and holy.
And Jesus must shed his blood to make right what has gone so terribly
wrong. What was so right by God’s
creative hand in that first Garden, became so wrong when our first parents ate
of the forbidden fruit. Jesus must make right what had gone wrong. And he can only do this through the shedding
of his blood.
Blood is necessary to make whole
what has been broken -- to make clean what is unclean -- to make holy what is
unholy. The Jews thought that Jesus was
a threat to them because they could see that he was from God, that he was here
to make right what has gone wrong. But
they could not bear to hear his word because, as Jesus said, their father was
not God, it was not even Abraham. Their
father was the devil, who was unclean, unholy, a liar.
The tragedy of our world is that
it is no different than their world.
Like their world, ours is broken by sin, death, and the devil. Everywhere you turn, something is broken:
marriages, parishes, nations, families, institutions. It is our nature to break and destroy. Our world is broken at our own hands, every
time we try to make things whole we make things worse.
Hebrews tell us how God makes
whole what is broken: “But Christ having come as a High Priest of the good
things to come . . . by his own blood entered the Most Holy Place once
for all, having obtained eternal redemption.” This is his testament to us
as the Mediator of a new covenant.
And so Jesus Christ must be the
High Priest of the good things to come. His temple is a hill outside Jerusalem;
his altar a wooden cross planted in a rock pile on that hill; his grave a tomb
in a nearby garden. Passersby see
hanging on the tree a Galilean carpenter’s son. And then they read the sign, “Jesus
of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”
But this is no ordinary Nazarene.
Jesus, King, is both victim and priest – Lamb of God that takes away the
sin of the world – High Priest entering the Most Holy Place.
And
this High Priest has one final liturgy over which he must preside. A liturgy
that accompanies his making right what had gone wrong. And so Jesus intones this litany for God and
man over his own flesh as Paschal victim on the altar of Golgotha.
The
Paschal Lamb without spot has now been offered to God. His blood sprinkles all creation and
sanctifies it. A creation that had gone
wrong had now been made right -- lepers are cleansed, paralytics are healed,
the blind see, sinners are forgiven, demons flee, consciences are purged from
dead works, and the dead rise up and walk around the holy city. The new creation has arrived.
The
temple curtain tears open -- the Holy of Holies is laid bear. No more sacrifices need to be made. No more blood of bulls and goats. Separation
from God’s holiness has ended. God’s
blood is poured out. Access to God’s holiness is through the flesh of Jesus
Christ, the Mediator of a new covenant – a covenant of his blood.
Entering
into his Most Holy Place – into heaven itself -- we enter by his body broken,
his blood poured out: “Take eat, this is my body, given for you. Take drink, this cup is the new testament in
my blood, poured out for you, for the forgiveness of your sins.” His
liturgy of death is now our liturgy of life. A world that had gone wrong over
forbidden fruit is now made right at the banquet of the Lamb in which our host
is our food -- Paschal victim is now our Paschal bread and cup of
Paradise. These are the good things to
come from Jesus Christ, our High Priest.
In the words of T. S. Eliot:
“The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh
and blood --
Again,
in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”[1]
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