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.
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