“Consider Jesus” (Hebrews 3:1-6 – 1998)

 This is a sermon I preached on 15 February 1998:

As he drew to the conclusion of his gospel the aged apostle John reflected, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” It was a common characteristic of those early Christians that they could not say enough about Jesus. At a much earlier stage in his life John had been arrested, along with his fellow fisherman-turned-apostle Peter, for publicly proclaiming the name of Jesus. When confronted with a court order not to do so any longer, they replied, “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard."

In a similar vein a number of years ago, when I was a curate in Montreal, we had a visit from Erica Sabiti, the Archbishop of Uganda. During his time there, he was hosted by a family in their home in the suburbs. After he had left, I remember the wife commenting (with some consternation) that all the time he was with them he never stopped talking about Jesus. Apparently that was something quite uncustomary for her as an Anglican!

It seems that our author to the Hebrews is a member of the same camp. He cannot say enough about Jesus. He began by extolling him as the exact representation of God’s being, shining with all the radiance of the divine glory, whose majesty is such that even angels are barely worthy of comparison with him. He is the eternal Son of God, to be worshipped and adored. He is the King of kings, to whom we owe our fullest allegiance. He is the unchanging Creator of the universe, who holds all that is in the palm of his hand. Yet we also know that that hand is a nail-scarred hand. This same Jesus, whose glory is beyond our power to conceive of it, has entered the sphere of our human existence. He has suffered and died in order to be the captain of our salvation. He stands alongside us in our weakness and need as our faithful brother. He is our merciful and faithful high priest.

You might think that after all of this the author might have run out of things to say. In fact, he has only begun. What we have been reading thus far is hardly more than an introduction to what he yearns to tell us about Jesus, who means everything to him. And so, as though we had not been doing so already, he calls upon us to “fix your thoughts on Jesus”. The word means to consider, to contemplate, to observe carefully, to focus our minds and hearts, for we have still more to hear about Jesus.

Jesus the Builder

Who is this Jesus? We have already l earned in chapter one that he is beyond comparison with the angels. Now the author compares Jesus with the towering figure of Jewish history. Although the Hebrew nation traced its origins to Abraham, it owed its identity to Moses. It was Moses who h ad led them out of their generations-long slavery in Egypt and in their trek to freedom in the land that God had promised them. It was Moses who communed with God atop Mount Sinai and brought down with him the laws and decrees which form the heart of the Old Testament. It could easily be said that Moses was the builder of the Jewish nation.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews begs to differ, however. Moses is not the builder of God’s house; he is just a part of it. He is a brick, a board or perhaps a piece of the foundation. That is not to deny the important place that Moses occupies in history. (Jesus himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets [that is, Moses’ contribution]; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.") Nor is it in any way to diminish Moses’ role within God’s purposes for his people. Yet it is to say that, as great as Moses was, there is one that is yet greater than he; and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you remember what Jesus said to Peter? “On this rock I will build my church” Jesus is the builder of God’s house. The word employed here is one that was commonly used for shipwrights. It was used to describe what Noah did as he sawed the wood and hammered the nails into the ark. But of course, what the author is speaking of is not a physical structure such as the ark. He is speaking of a spiritual reality. And what we find is that this picture of Jesus as the builder of God’s house points not only to who he is, but also to what we, his followers, are called to be.

In the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, St Luke gives us a marvellous snapshot of the early church. He tells us of the devotion of the first believers to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, to prayer and to a remarkable spirit of generosity. Then he comments, “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” What Luke recognized was that the church was not being built by its members. It was being built by the Lord. That does not mean that we are free to sit back and do nothing. Just the opposite: we must be as faithful as those first Christians in committing ourselves to teaching and fellowship, to worship and prayer, to generous giving according to our means and sharing with those in need, and to exercising the gifts that God has given us. Yet we do so, not in a frantic effort to prop up an institution, but in faith that Christ will use our contribution in the building of his church.

Jesus the Son

As we move from verse 4 to verse 5, the picture of a house and its builder shifts into a picture of a household and its members. Until very recently we have been accustomed to think of a household as a combination of a husband, a wife and 1.7 children or some variation on that. In ancient times family structure was much more complex. A household would include not only parents and children, but grandparents, uncles and aunts, perhaps some cousins, and the household servants. In any family in the ancient world a son (particularly the first son) occupied a place of honour. As the bearer of the family name, the heir of the family fortune, he held pre-eminence. And so it is with Christ and the church, the family of God. Christ is the first-born son. Christ is the head. The church exists for him.

And so just as Moses and you and I may be characterized as parts of a house with Jesus as the builder, so we may also be seen as servants in a household where Jesus is the son. We may understand the place that a servant had in a household in New Testament times from a remark that Jesus made to his disciples:

Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, “Come along now and sit down to eat”? Would he not rather say, “Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink”? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty” (Luke 17:7-10).

The glory of membership in Jesus’ household, however, is that he does not treat us as servants. As he said to his disciples at the last supper, “I no longer call you servants Instead, I have called you friends.” It is our inestimable privilege to be included in Christ’s family, not as servants, but as his friends. More wonderfully still, Jesus comes among us as one who serves. “Who is greater,” he once asked his disciples, “the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (John 15:5; Luke 22:27). And so we discover one of the miracles of God’s grace: a son who comes to us as our servant.

Jesus the Apostle

We have looked at Jesus as the builder of God’s house and the son in God’s family. Yet there are two important words about him that we have skipped over. They occur in the first verse of the chapter. One of them is familiar to us, but the other, I suspect, is less so. Jesus, the author tells us, is “the apostle and high priest whom we confess". The concept of Jesus as our high priest was introduced in the previous chapter and receives a fuller treatment in the next. But this is the only occasion in all of the New Testament where the word “apostle” is used with reference to him.

Commonly we think of apostles as those whom Jesus appointed to be his representatives in the world: Peter, James, John, Andrew, Simon, Jude, Matthew, Bartholomew, Thaddeus and the rest. These were the ones who accompanied Jesus to the towns and villages of Galilee and on whom he conferred authority to proclaim the good news and to cast out demons. After the defection and death of Judas Iscariot, the apostles met to find a suitable candidate to fill their ranks. Their criteria were that, whoever the person was, it must be someone who had been with them throughout the whole period of Jesus’ ministry, right back to his baptism by John and through to his ascension. Their primary task, as they saw it, was to bear witness to Jesus’ resurrection and that was what they faithfully did from the day of Pentecost onwards.

How, we may ask, does Jesus fit into this picture? Certainly we cannot speak of him as an apostle in the same sense as Peter, John and the others. In what sense, then, does Jesus fit the title of apostle? The answer lies in the meaning of the word itself. Our English word “apostle” derives from the Greek verb apostello, which means “send forth". Simply put, an apostle is someone who has been sent out by someone else. In the Greek-speaking world the word was used to denote an envoy, a delegate or a messenger. The twelve apostles were sent out into the world by Christ to bear witness to him. But Christ has been sent by the Father.

So it is that we hear Jesus repeatedly speaking of himself as having been sent. Quoting from Isaiah he announced at the outset of his ministry, “The Spirit of the Lord has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Taking a little child into his arms, he instructed his disciples, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.” To a woman seeking healing for her daughter he said, “I have been sent to the lost sheep of Israel.” And in the upper room after the resurrection he addressed those who had gathered with the words, “As the Father has sent me, so send I you.” (Luke 4:18,19; Mark 9:37; Matthew 15:24; John 20:21).

Once again, when Hebrews refers to Jesus as the apostle of the faith we confess, it is telling us something both about Jesus and about ourselves. Just as Jesus was sent into the world by the Father, so he sends you and me. And just as Jesus entered fully into the suffering of sinful humanity, so he sends us to the same costly participation in our world today. To use theological jargon, what we are talking about is the principle of the incarnation. That is, just as Jesus took flesh to make God and his love a reality in the world, so he sends us to do the same: not merely to proclaim a message of words from pulpits of brass and stone, but to share in the lives of those around us, to make God’s love a reality by the kind of people we are, by our willingness to be with others and to give without an eye to the cost. To confess Jesus as our apostle is not only to acknowledge him as the one sent by God, but to recognize that he sends us today.

This point was brought home to me very forcefully this past week. At the suggestion of members of our Bible study group I watched the video Dead Man Walking. It is the true story of a nun, Sister Helen Prejean, who became the spiritual advisor to a man who had been sentenced to death for the brutal rape and murder of two teenagers. This was an emotionally wrenching experience for her, not only as she sought to relate to this twisted and manipulative individual, but as she also attempted to offer love and understanding to the parents of the two victims and to enter into their grief. As he was being taken to receive a lethal injection, her final words of advice to the convicted killer were that he should look into her face as he died, so that the last thing he saw would be the face of love.

I have no doubt that when people looked into Jesus’ eyes that was exactly what they saw. And as Jesus was sent by the Father, so he sends you and me into a needy, hurting and often twisted world that others might see in us the face of God’s love.

* * *

Heavenly Father,
we can never thank you enough
for sending Jesus into our world: 
grant that he may so live in us today
that we may serve you in all that we do
and that others may see in us
your face of love;
for the glory of your name.

“Why did Jesus have to be baptized?” (Matthew 3:13-17)

My Oxford Dictionary defines the word “eccentric” as “odd or capricious in behaviour or appearance; whimsical”. I suspect there are a number of us who have had either friends or relatives they might describe as eccentric. I had an uncle who at one time ran a Shell gas station. Whether it was to save money or because he liked the colours, I don’t know, but he painted the exterior of his house in the same yellow and red. The neighbours didn’t like it, but it sure made it easy to find.

I don’t know if the statistics would bear me out, but it seems to me that the greatest concentration of eccentric people is to be found in the British Isles. There was, for instance, an officer of the British army in World War 2 known as “mad Jack Churchill”. He lived by the motto, “Any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed”—and the sword he was referring to was the Scottish broadsword. In addition to his sword, he occasionally used a longbow. Early in the war he ambushed a German patrolman, shooting him with a barbed arrow. His shot earned him the title of the only British soldier to have felled an enemy with a longbow during the war.

Delving farther back into history, there was William Buckland. He was a clergyman and a brilliant geologist and palaeontologist, who lived in the early nineteenth century. He was known to have occasionally delivered his lectures on horseback and his obsession with the animal kingdom knew no bounds. The result was that his home was literally a zoo. Besides this, he was famous for eating animals of every species and placing them before his dinner guests. Various people who sat at his table recall being served panther, crocodile and mouse. Among the few creatures that did not suit his taste buds were moles and bluebottle flies.

Perhaps he was not as far along the eccentricity spectrum as William Buckland or Jack Churchill, but I do believe there is an argument that the man we meet with in this morning’s Bible reading falls somewhere into that category. He is John the Baptist (or John the Baptizer). Matthew describes John’s clothes as being made from camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waste, and that he lived on a diet of locusts and wild honey. (As an aside, locust eating probably wasn’t all that eccentric. Locusts were commonly eaten by the poorer people of that region and were an efficient source of protein.)

John’s message was uncompromising. He had no fear about exposing the hypocrisy of religious leaders, the corrupt practices of the tax collectors or the bullying tactics of the Roman soldiers—and ultimately his fearless denunciations would lead to his death. At the same time there were those who found John’s challenging message of repentance deeply attractive. And they came in droves to the grassy banks of the Jordan River.

However, John always recognized that his mission was only an anticipation of something far greater. And he knew its fulfilment was around the corner when one day he spotted Jesus in the crowd. “I baptize with water,” he said, “but among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (John 1:26-27; Matthew 3:11-12). Then something that had never entered John’s mind began to happen. Jesus walked forward and stepped down into the water. John was aghast. “I’m the one who needs to be baptized by you,” he protested. “So what are you doing coming to me?”

And that’s the question I want to ask this morning. Why did Jesus feel the need to be baptized? And what did he mean when he said it was “to fulfil all righteousness”? I think the answer is threefold.

Submission

In the baptism of Jesus the gospels give us a unique picture of the Holy Trinity. As the Son emerges from the water, we see the Holy Spirit coming down as a dove and alighting on him, and we hear the voice of the Father pronouncing, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Before I say anything else, let me state that at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity there will always remain a mystery. We can skirt around the edges of it, but we can never fully penetrate it. Theologians have sought to clarify it, yet sometimes their explanations can leave us more confused than when we began. The most helpful approach I have found is through the picture of a dance. Eugene Peterson put it this way:

Imagine a folk dance, a round dance, with three partners in each set. The music starts up and the partners holding hands begin moving in a circle. On a signal from the caller, they release hands, change partners, and weave in and out, swinging first one and then another. The tempo increases, the partners move more swiftly with and between and among one another, swinging and twirling, embracing and releasing, holding on and letting go. But there is no confusion; every movement is cleanly coordinated in precise rhythms … as each person maintains [their] identity. To the onlooker, the movements are so swift it is impossible at times to distinguish one person from another; the steps are so intricate that it is difficult to anticipate the actual configuration as they appear.[1]

So it is, at the baptism of Jesus, that for a brief moment in time the curtain is lifted and we are given a glimpse of the eternal dance of the Trinity—a still shot, if you will. Here we see the Son empowered by the Spirit in humble and willing submission to the Father. And that is Jesus’ posture not only at his baptism but throughout his ministry, and indeed through eternity.

We hear it repeatedly from his own lips: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work,” Jesus told his followers (John 4:34). “I do not seek to please myself but him who sent me” (John 5:30). “I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me” (John 14:31). And we see his unwavering commitment to that purpose most poignantly demonstrated in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before his crucifixion. There we find Jesus falling with his face to the ground as he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39).

As Jesus stepped down into the Jordan to be submerged under the water, then, it was not as an act of repentance as John supposed, but as a public witness for all to see, to his complete commitment to the Father’s will. As he would later tell his followers, “I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

Solidarity

There is a second purpose that underlies Jesus’ baptism. That is, that it was not only an act of submission to the Father’s will but also an indication of his solidarity with the human race—with you and with me. Jesus was demonstrating in a visible, physical way that he is one with us, one of us.

Some of you may remember when the Queen visited Halifax in 1994. Part of her itinerary was to take her along Barrington Street. At that time Barrington was already well down along its slide from its former glory in the first half of the century. “Seedy” and “run down” would be a kind way to describe the way it looked. So the government spent thousands of dollars on temporary cosmetic improvements to some of the surrounding buildings. The result was that the street took on the appearance more of a movie set than of a real place. For some reason someone among the powers-that-be was of the opinion that the Queen should not be exposed to things as they really were.

Well, not so with the Son of God. When Jesus came to our world, he did not come as a visiting dignitary. The opening verses of John’s gospel emphatically tell us that the eternal Son of God became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14). As preachers such as myself are keen to point out, a literal translation of that verse is that “he pitched his tent among us”. What that means is that Jesus did not just come for an overnight visit—touch down, see a few of the sights and then fly off again. And he did not live in a palace, surrounded by all the luxury that this world is able to provide. No, he came as an ordinary man and over the course of thirty-three or however many years, experienced all that it is to be human.

Being baptized in the muddy waters of the Jordan was for Jesus a concrete way of conveying that this was what he was doing. As he plunged under the water, he was physically identifying with all those who were responding to John’s message—not standing on the bank in silent observation but throwing himself in with our lot, becoming one with us, immersing himself in our condition and all that that entails.

Sacrifice

Jesus’ baptism, then, was an outward and visible sign of his total submission to the Father’s will. And it was a sign of his solidarity with you and me in our human lot. But I believe there was also a third meaning to be found in what he did that day. And it is revealed in a couple of conversations he had with his followers some time later.

The first of them came while Jesus was teaching a large crowd. He had warned them in a parable of how they must be ready for the coming of the Son of Man. At that point Peter came to him privately and asked if the parable was just for them or for everyone. Part of Jesus’ response consisted of these words: “I have a baptism to undergo, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:50) I can only imagine that Peter must have been mystified by those words. Nevertheless they stuck with him and lodged in his mind.

On another occasion two of Jesus’ followers came to him asking, “Let us sit at your right hand and the other at your left in your glory.” To which Jesus replied, “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” (Mark 10:38) Again Jesus’ words were met with incomprehension.

Yet, while the disciples failed to grasp the implications of what Jesus was saying at the time, it became clear to them later that what he had been referring to was his death. So it was that, even at this beginning point in his ministry, there loomed before him the shadow of the cross. As Jesus descended into the waters of the River Jordan, he was also looking ahead to the day when he would be plunged into the deeper waters of death—when he would willingly offer himself up for you and for me on the cross.

There he would take upon himself not only our humanity but our sin. There he would bear the full weight of our waywardness and rebellion. And he did it so that you and I might be freed to be the men and women that God created us to be, to be human in the truest, fullest sense. He did it so that you and I might join in the joyful dance of the Trinity and one day hear our Father’s voice pronouncing, “This is my beloved son, this is my beloved daughter…”

Today, as we remember the baptism of Jesus, may it help us to recognize him as the one and only Son of God, completely submissive to the Father’s will. May we know his presence, walking alongside us, sharing our joys and our pains, our hopes and our disappointments. And may we live in gratitude that the road that began with his baptism was the road that led him to Calvary—that he was pierced for our transgressions and that by his wounds we have been healed.

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[1]     Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 44-45