“Great Grace Was Upon Them All” (Acts 4:32-37)

I want to begin by saying what a privilege I consider it, to be invited into this pulpit on the occasion of your anniversary. Karen and I have just been attending over the last five weeks and it are clear to both of us that God is doing great things in and through this church.

Thirty-three years! Sometimes (especially when my knees are bothering me!), I wish I could go back to the age I was then. But it excites me that many of you were not even a twinkle in your parents’ eyes back then. Thirty-three years! A third of a century—take a moment to think how much has changed in that span of time! I was still using a typewriter thirty-three years ago! Anyone here know what a typewriter is?

Thirty-three years: the tender age of an innocent man who hung dying on a cross. As he cried aloud, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the curtain of the Temple was ripped in two from top to bottom, the earth shook, the skies darkened, and the world would never be the same again.

It is in the shadow of that event that we meet Jesus’ followers in the book of Acts this morning. In those final verses of chapter 4, Luke gives us one of his little glimpses into the life of the community of believers that had begun to form in Jerusalem. And a remarkable picture it is! The church was barely in its infancy. But just take a look at it. Luke tells us in verse 32, “The full number of those who believed were one in heart and soul… With great power the apostles were giving their testimony … and great grace was upon them all…”

Now I am convinced that Luke, the author of Acts, has given us that amazing portrait of the church for a reason. It’s not like a picture in an art gallery, where you stand and admire it for a few moments and then move on to something else. No, as beautiful and compelling as it is, this picture is really far more than that.

In fact, it is the second little portrait of the church that Luke gives us in the early chapters of Acts. And, just as with the first, he has written it down for us not only to show us what the church was, but also to teach us what the church is both called by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be.

So we can see these verses as a kind of pattern, a model. Not that we’re required to follow it precisely to the letter. But we are to learn from it, to glean principles from it, and then by the Holy Spirit’s power to put those principles into practice. So what are the principles that Luke wants to share with us?

I want to suggest that there are three. And they fall under the headings of community, testimony and generosity.

Community

So, let’s begin with community. We find it right there in verse 32: “Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul.” I believe that that description stands in dramatic contrast to so much of what many people are experiencing in our society today. What we see around us again and again is not community but estrangement. It is not connection but alienation. It is not togetherness but a profound loneliness.

It’s more than twenty years since Robert Putnam wrote his book entitled Bowling Alone. In it he detailed the gradual decline over the previous fifty years in community involvement, in everything from political parties and public meeting attendance to membership in civic organizations and social clubs (and that of course includes the church). In the years since he wrote, the decline has become only more precipitous. Social media for an increasing number of people have taken the place of real relationships. We spend more time texting on our cellphones than in face-to-face conversation. And now, to put the icing on the cake, we have covid, which has forced us even further into our own separate cocoons—where we hesitate to give one another a hug or exchange a handshake. Even a friendly smile is obscured by a mask.

All of this stands in stark contrast to God’s plan. You only have to read two chapters into the Bible, where God has just created the universe in all its complexity out of nothing. Each day God brings more and more things into being—sun, moon and stars, dry ground and seas, plants and trees, animals and birds and fish in all their endless profusion. And at the end of each of those days, what is the chorus that we hear? “And God saw that it was good.” “And God saw that it was good.” “And God saw that it was good…”

Then we turn the page and we read of God forming the first human being from the dust of the earth. God looks down once again upon the creation he has made, but this time what does he say? Not, “It is good,” but, “It is not good…” “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

You see, God has created you and me for community. And when God begins to bring about his new creation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and through the gift of the Holy Spirit, what is one of the first things we begin to see happening? Community.

And an amazing community it was—a community where people saw themselves as belonging to one another. Years later the apostle Paul would reflect on this and write about the church as a body, where feet and hands, eyes and ears and noses (not to mention all our internal organs) are all interconnected and interdependent.

“Community,” wrote Henri Nouwen, “is not a human creation but a divine gift…” But it doesn’t just happen spontaneously, Nouwen warned. “[It] calls for an obedient response. This response may require much patience and humility, much listening and speaking, much confrontation and self-examination, but it should always be an obedient response to a bond which is given and not made.”[1]

I believe that one of the greatest challenges facing the church in our western society today is to be that kind of community, where the self-giving love of Christ is visibly and tangibly present. I believe that’s what many people are looking for in our society today. And I believe that when it happens people will flock to it like bees to a honeypot.

Testimony

If the first mark of the church was community, then the second was testimony. Luke tells us in our passage this morning that “with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus”.

Now it may have been the apostles who were tasked with proclaiming the good news about Jesus at the beginning. But that did not last for long. We have only to turn to chapter 8 of Acts to read that it was ordinary believers who carried that good news beyond the confines of Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria and eventually into the farthest reaches of the known world. I love the way Eugene Peterson put it in his translation of the Bible: “Forced to leave home base, the Christians all became missionaries. Wherever they were scattered, they [proclaimed] the message about Jesus” (Acts 8:4).

I remember when Karen and I were in Libya in north Africa, strolling through the ruins of a Roman city that had flourished a century or two after the time of Christ. Those were years when being a Jesus-follower was still forbidden by the powers-that-be and Christians were severely persecuted for their faith. Yet, scratched and carved into rocks and walls, I could spot an “ichthus” here and a Chi-Rho there. I have to tell you, it was a deeply moving experience to stand in front of that silent witness of my Christian forebears, who would not be stopped from sharing their faith. Could they have imagined in all their wildest dreams that nearly two thousand years later their message would still be visible?

Those early believers were simply practising what they had learned from the example of people like John: “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you…” (1 John 1:3). They were convinced of what the great evangelist Paul had declared years before. Like him, they were not ashamed to proclaim the good news about Jesus, “for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). And they could not be kept silent.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that you start carving Christian symbols into walls. Or that you start buttonholing people on the streets. But what I am saying is that we cannot be silent. And in that regard we need to take to heart the wise advice of the apostle Peter. “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect…” (1 Peter 3:15)

I believe that what Peter was recognizing in that verse was that the Christian message is most commonly and most effectively communicated in the context of relationships. It’s when people are able to see the difference that Jesus makes within our lives that they begin to ask questions. And then we have an opportunity, not to cajole or coerce or to get into some kind of sales talk, but to allow the Holy Spirit to speak through us.

Generosity

So, we have community and we have testimony. Which brings us to the third characteristic that we see in those early believers, which was generosity.

If we are to believe what people report on their income tax returns, we Canadians are not a generous society. Taken as a whole, Canadians give just 1.6% of their overall income to charity; and half of those who do contribute give less than $200 annually.[2]

Now I recognize that you can’t measure everything in dollars and cents, and that generosity can be expressed in a whole variety of ways. But the generosity that we see in that first body of believers in Acts was an extravagant generosity. It is the generosity that Jesus talked about: “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, pouring into your lap” (Luke 6:38). For it is the generosity of God, who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all and now graciously gives us all things (Romans 8:32).

I remember a wise friend of mine once saying that when people met Jesus, they moved from being centripetal—that is, where they see everything in their world as spinning inwards towards them—to being centrifugal, where everything flows outwards for the benefit of others. He gave the example of Zacchaeus, the miserly tax collector in Luke’s gospel. Zacchaeus had spent his whole life squeezing the last penny out of the hapless citizens of Jericho. But after meeting Jesus it was as though he couldn’t give enough away. And it wasn’t though he did it grudgingly or because Jesus had been guilting him out or twisting his arm. He did it willingly, joyfully, extravagantly.

The same was true with the little Christian congregation in Corinth a generation later. When they heard that their fellow believers in Judaea were going through a hard time because of a drought, they gave generously. They could be generous because they had experienced God’s generosity in Jesus. “Though he was rich,” wrote Paul, “yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). So it was that Paul could urge them not to give “reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7-8).

It is important at this point to remind ourselves that generosity is far more than money. What I am talking about is an attitude of generosity that colours every area of life—a whole culture of generosity, of extravagant open-heartedness, of joyful largesse, that permeates every aspect of the whole Christian community. I am convinced that where this happens there is little that could be more attractive to an unbelieving world.

Let’s leave it there, then, with those three thoughts in our mind: community, testimony and generosity. And as we move into our thirty-fourth year, may the Holy Spirit so move among us that Jesus may have all the glory. Amen.

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[1]     Henri Nouwen, Community

[2]       https://afpglobal.org/sites/default/files/attachments/generic/WCDW2021.pdf

“Lost and Found” (Luke 15:11-32)

 

One of my greatest delights in the church where I last served in Minnesota was to be part of a group of men who met faithfully every Wednesday morning for prayer, followed each week by coffee and conversation. Both the prayer and the conversation could be pretty free ranging at times. But I have to tell you that over the years that group was a spiritual lifeline for me.

One of the wonderful surprises for me in coming to All Nations five years ago was to discover that there was a similar group here—at least until covid struck. It even met on Wednesday mornings. One of the disciplines we have followed as a group has been to read chapter by chapter through a book that focuses on some aspect of Christian living.

A couple of years ago that book was a slim volume by the late Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen, entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son. In the introduction Nouwen tells how he went to the Hermitage, the world-renowned art museum in St Petersburg founded more than 250 years ago by Catherine the Great.

There Nouwen found a comfortable chair and planted himself directly in front of Rembrandt’s famous painting of The Return of the Prodigal Son. Before he knew it, more than two hours had elapsed. After a short break for coffee and conversation with the head of the museum’s restoration department, he returned for another hour until a guard and one of the cleaning ladies silently made it clear that closing time was upon him.

During those hours Nouwen carefully examined and meditated upon each of the figures in Rembrandt’s masterpiece, beginning with the younger son, then moving to the elder son, and finally the father. We don’t have the hours this morning that were at Henri Nouwen’s disposal in the Hermitage. It is a temptation to allow our familiarity with Jesus’ parable to cause us to skim though it quickly. But for the next few minutes I do want us to take some time to meditate and focus our thoughts on the three principal figures in Jesus’ beloved parable.

The Prodigal Son: Repentance

Let’s start with the son. To begin with, we need to remember that this story follows directly on from two others that Jesus had just told, about a lost sheep and a lost coin. As with the stories of the coin and the sheep, the parable of the prodigal son is also about being lost. But with the son there is a difference. The sheep and the coin were lost through no fault of their own. The sheep had been so busy munching on its own little patch of grass that it hadn’t noticed when the others had been herded back into their paddock for the night. And we would be silly to blame the coin for having been mislaid or dropped or whatever caused it to be missing from the woman’s purse.

But the case of the son stands apart. His lostness was not something that just happened to him. Rather, it was the direct result of his own rebellion and self-centredness. His demand to receive his share of the family estate amounted to treating his father as though the old man had already died. It was an act of consummate disregard for the feelings and the welfare of others. It is likely that his father’s assets were tied up in the form of land and livestock. Was the son really expecting his father to liquidate them and live on just a share of his income for the rest of his life?

Jesus doesn’t bother to delve into details like that or to psychologize. He didn’t need to. His listeners would have been filled with indignation at the brazenness of the son’s demand. And when the son ends up among the pigs longing to eat their slop, I can imagine them muttering under their breath, “Serves him right, the selfish twit!”

Indeed there would have been a certain justice to it if the story just ended there. The camera fades off into the distance with the son lying in rags in the filth of the pigs. But the son has a change of heart. Our Bibles say he came to his senses. Jesus’ words quite literally are, “He came to himself.” It seems to me that perhaps for the first time in his life the son was able to stand outside himself. He began to see himself objectively for the selfish, heedless good-for-nothing that he was.

(And here I can’t help but be reminded of those famous lines from Robbie Burns:

Oh, would some Power the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us.)

However, if repentance is to be genuine, there needs to be more to it than that. It is not just a matter of gaining a new perspective. It is a change of heart and life. As Pastor Dave made very clear in his sermon last week (and here I quote): “Repentance is both remorse and changing our lives… Remorse is feeling badly for what we did … seeing things the way the offended person sees things. But repentance means that then we need to turn away from what we did. Remorse isn’t enough… We need to change.”

So it was that with a heart made heavy by the realization of his own waywardness and the hurt he had caused, the son swallowed whatever pride he still had left and began the journey home.

The Waiting Father: Reconciliation

At this point Jesus shifts the scene back to the family homestead. There we see the father, no doubt appearing somewhat older and wearier through the loss of his son. Perhaps he is a little stooped and frail. We can imagine him at dawn getting up and gazing with sadness towards the horizon where he had last seen the son’s departing figure.

Imagine his surprise one morning when far in the distance he spots a figure that looks hauntingly familiar. Can it be? Are his aging eyes playing tricks on him? But as the figure moves closer all doubts are erased from his mind. Barely able to see though his tears, he hastily straps on his sandals, tucks in his robes and, as quickly as his stiff legs can carry him, he runs down to the road to embrace his son.

Helmut Thielicke was a great scholar and preacher of the mid-twentieth century. He maintained that the central figure in Jesus’ parable was not the son at all but the father. For the story is as much about reconciliation as it is about repentance. Imagine if the son had journeyed all that way only to be met with rebuff by his father: “You were my son but you are no longer. Go back to your reckless living and to your pigsty! It’s where you belong.”

If that were the end of the story, we could not deny its justice. But Jesus’ aim is not to give us a lesson about justice. It is to tell us about grace. The father is the God about whom we read in the book of Daniel: “To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him” (Daniel 9:9). And the prophet Ezekiel puts it even more passionately: “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:10-11).

So it is that Thielicke could write:

The joyful sound of festivity rings out from this story. Wherever forgiveness is proclaimed there is joy and festive garments. We must read and hear this gospel story as it was really meant to be: good news! News so good that we should never have imagined it. News that would stagger us if we were able to hear it for the first time as a message that everything about God is so completely different from what we thought or feared. News that he … is inviting us to share in an unspeakable joy. The ultimate secret of this story is this: There is a homecoming for us all because there is a home.[1]

The Older Brother: Recalcitrance

It’s all a wonderful story. And as those who have turned to Christ in faith we have the assurance of God’s full and free forgiveness and the promise of an eternal place in his presence. But wait! There is more to be told. Jesus hasn’t finished yet. In Rembrandt’s famous painting a tall figure stands off in the shadows to the side. His hands clasped, he looks down coolly on the scene that is unfolding in front of him.

He is the older brother.

He has been out working in the fields. In the distance he has heard music and dancing and joyful laughter. As he nears the house his nostrils are filled with the rich aroma of a fatted calf roasting on the spit. His outrage is such that he cannot bring himself to step through the door. When his father pleads with him to come in and join the party, his cool silence quickly explodes into a furious outburst. Years of pent-up anger and resentment pour out like a flood bursting through a dam.

At this point let’s take a moment to stand back from the story and look at it objectively.

Surely the older brother had every right to be upset. He had been a dutiful son for years and had never received a whit of recognition for it. Where was the fairness in that? Where was the justice?

Now if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that he has a point. And here I want to suggest that it is not the penitent son who is the central figure in Jesus’ story. Nor is it the forgiving father. Rather, it is this son, who stands outside the party room, his feet firmly planted, his arms firmly folded in a well-justified huff.

Why do I think he is the central character? Take a moment to look at Luke’s introduction to Jesus’ parables:

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Do you see who Jesus’ audience was? It was all older brothers, people who had spent the greater part of their lives fastidiously seeking to live in obedience to God, right down to the minutest detail. If they weren’t the very definition of older brothers, I can’t imagine who is. And if I’m honest with myself, I am forced to confess that I am one of them too.

Yes, I will freely admit that I am a sinner. I acknowledge that my only claim on God’s salvation is by his grace and through faith in Jesus Christ. Yet I also have to confess that in the course of my years in the family of God I have in many ways adopted the attitudes and perspectives of an older brother. It’s not as though it’s intentional. For the most part it happens gradually and imperceptibly. But it happens none the less—so that I can become critical and judgmental in my attitude towards others, so that I am keener on justice and retribution than I am on mercy and reconciliation. And before I know it, I’m standing outside with my arms folded, while the party’s going on over there.

Yet the most wonderful thing of all is that Jesus leaves the parable open-ended. He does not consign the older son to living outside for the rest of his life in a perpetual state of indignation. It is as though Jesus is saying to all who will hear, “Now over to you…”

How subtly a religion of works can overtake the liberty of grace! How frighteningly easy it is to slip from being a younger brother to an older one! Yet the father’s invitation is there for us all. Is it any coincidence that almost the last words of the Bible are these?

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life. (Revelation 22:17)

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[1] Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father, 29

“The Eternal Priesthood of the Only-Begotten Son” (Hebrews 5:1-10)

Those of you who have been keeping up with the Encounter With God daily devotionals will over this past week have been reading from the Book of Leviticus. I am disappointed that Scripture Union has chosen not to follow Leviticus chapter by chapter, but is leaving large sections unread. On the other hand, I fully understand their predicament. It has been my experience that when people start reading the Bible cover to cover, even with the best of intentions and firmest discipline, there are many who fall by the wayside at Leviticus. Chapter after chapter is taken up with detailed instructions on the legal and sacrificial system of ancient Israel: burnt offerings, grain offerings, fellowship offerings, sin offerings, guilt offerings, dietary laws, holy days, defilements and purifications, penalties and punishments. For us living three thousand plus years later, it is all a bewildering maze. Way back in the early third century the great biblical scholar Origen moaned, “If you read people passages from the Bible that are good and clear, they will hear them with great joy… But provide someone a reading from Leviticus, and at once the listener will gag and push it away as if it were some bizarre food.”[1]

If Leviticus has an equivalent in the New Testament, it has to be the Letter to the Hebrews. The reason, of course, is that so much of the logic of Hebrews is built upon the ceremonies and regulations of the Old Testament Law. All of this makes Hebrews a challenging read. Yet, if we are patient and persistent, we will find in it some of the most precious gems that the Bible has to offer. In spite of his disparaging remark, Origen also wrote this about Leviticus: “We must entreat the Lord himself, the Holy Spirit himself, to remove every cloud and all darkness which obscures the vision of our hearts hardened with the stains of sins in order that we may be able to behold the spiritual and wonderful knowledge of his Law”[2]. And of course the same can be said for Hebrews. With these thoughts in mind, then, let us turn to the fifth chapter of Hebrews, and let us earnestly seek what the Holy Spirit may have to reveal to us there.

If we were to encapsulate the message of the thirteen chapters of Hebrews into a single phrase, it might be something like “Jesus, our Great High Priest”. The whole point of Hebrews is that it is Jesus, and Jesus alone, who is able to bring us into a relationship with God. Through his sacrificial death on the cross Jesus has done for us what no earthly priest could ever achieve—and as he is writing to a largely Jewish audience, the author of Hebrews naturally uses the Old Testament Law to make his point. So what does he have to tell us in this fifth chapter?

The sorrow of Jesus

The first qualification of priests, he reminds us, is that they are chosen from among the people. Priests are not some special breed of superhuman beings. They are not Captain America or Spiderman or Thor. They are ordinary individuals like you and me. And there is a reason for that. It is so that they may deal gently, that is, with understanding and sympathy, with those who are ignorant or who are straying in their faith. The word translated “deal gently” in verse 2 is found only in this one place in the New Testament. Literally, it means to have “measured feelings”—that is, not to fly off the handle or go berserk when someone comes to you with a problem or a failure. We all know people that we wouldn’t go to under those circumstances. It’s not that we are necessarily looking for someone to take our side, but that we want someone who is prepared to listen, who seeks to understand. And more often than not those are people who have tasted life, who have encountered some of the same obstacles, who are aware of their own weaknesses and foibles. And this is what we find in Jesus. As the old gospel hymn puts it,

Can we find a friend so faithful,
who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness;
take it to the Lord in prayer.

As evidence for what he is saying, the author of Hebrews in verse 7 takes us to a scene in Jesus’ life. It is of Jesus, his hands upraised in prayer, in the Garden of Gethsemane. “There,” he tells us, “Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears…” I believe that those tears were not for himself, but for those he came to save, for you and for me, as he contemplated the tragic and wanton destruction of our sin and as he prepared to take that sin upon himself at the cross.

Three times in the gospel records we find Jesus in tears. The first was as he gathered with those who were mourning outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus. There, John’s gospel tells us not only that Jesus wept, but that he was overcome with emotion. “Greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” is the way the passage puts it (John 11:33). The second occasion was as he approached the city of Jerusalem for what would be the final time. Luke tells us, “As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes…’ ” (Luke 19:41,42). And now, in today’s reading, we find him in the Garden of Gethsemane as he prepares to take the full brunt of our sins upon himself.

I suspect that, like his temptations, which certainly were not limited to three, neither were Jesus’ tears. I imagine him weeping for the paralyzed man by the Pool of Bethesda who had sat waiting to be healed for thirty-eight years; for the Samaritan woman at the well and her five failed marriages; for the man tormented by so many demons that they called him “Legion”; for the woman who secretly clasped the hem of his garment in the hope that she might be healed; for the rich young ruler for whom luxury was a greater priority than eternal life; for the Pharisees and the Sadducees and all the other religious officials for whom attention to details and perpetuation of traditions had become more important than a living relationship with God; and not least for his own followers, who demonstrated themselves again and again to be of such little faith. In Isaiah’s words, “He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). And I don’t think we are stepping outside the bounds of orthodoxy to imagine that our Great High Priest has shed tears for you and for me as well.

The suffering of Jesus

The second aspect of Jesus’ ministry on which this morning’s passage focuses is his suffering. We read in verse 8, “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” When you allow yourself to think about it for a moment, this is a profound statement. As Son of God, I suppose we could say that Jesus knows everything that goes on inside the human mind and heart. As King David put it in Psalm 139,

Lord, you have searched me and known me…
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path…
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue …,
you know it completely. (Psalm 139:1-4)

In the Gospel of John we read much the same thing about Jesus. John writes, “Jesus … knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone” (John 2:24-25). Now it is one thing to know something about others through book learning or through what others have told you about them or even through observation and listening over long years. But we move things to an altogether different plane when we actually share their experience. Dutch theologian Henri Nouwen drew attention to this in his little book, The Wounded Healer. He wrote of

… the basic principle that no one can help anyone without becoming involved, without entering with his whole person into the painful situation, without taking the risk of becoming hurt, wounded or even destroyed in the process. The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others. … In short: “Who can take away suffering without entering it?”[3]

Even though Jesus may have known all that it is to be human simply by virtue of being the divine Son of God, it was necessary that he also learn obedience through himself entering our human experience, actually suffering in his own person. Our season of Lent began with the account of Jesus being tempted by the devil. And the four gospels offer us glimpses of when he was tired, grieved, unjustly treated, hungry, thirsty and even angry. Yet Jesus’ full entry into our human experience would only come at Calvary, as he shared not only our life but also our death.

The salvation of Jesus

This, I believe, is what our passage this morning intends, as the author goes on to affirm that “having been made perfect, [Jesus] became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him”. It may seem a little odd to us—perhaps even bordering on the heretical—to think of Jesus being made perfect. After all, wasn’t he perfect from the beginning? Wasn’t he the sinless Son of God? Doesn’t Hebrews itself describe him as “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3)? All of that is true. And I believe that the key to understanding it and putting it all together is the verb that the author uses here. It is the word teleioo, which means to complete, to accomplish, to bring to an end. More significantly, it is closely related to the word that we hear from Jesus’ lips in John’s gospel, as he utters his final cry from the cross: “Tetelestai—It is finished.”

Jesus’ work was not completed, not perfected, until he had carried his cross through the dusty streets of Jerusalem, until the nails had been driven through his hands, until the beams had been hoisted up from the ground, until he painfully gasped for his last breath. At the cross Jesus did more than sympathize with us. He did more than personally enter into our suffering. At the cross he took the full load of it upon himself. It was there, on the cross, that Jesus completed the work he came to do. It was there that he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

The Communion service of the Kenyan church gives recognition to this in its exuberant final blessing, when we proclaim together,

All our problems… we send to the cross of Christ.
All our difficulties… we send to the cross of Christ.
All the devil’s works… we send to the cross of Christ.

As Jesus said to the Greeks at the festival who wanted to see him, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” As we enter Holy Week in a few days’ time, may each of us find ourselves being drawn once again to the cross of Jesus. There may we bow in profound adoration and thanksgiving before the one who is not only able to deal gently with our weaknesses, but who has taken our very sins upon himself to destroy their power and banish them for ever—Jesus, the source of eternal salvation.

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[1]     Ephraim Radner, Leviticus, 17

[2]     Homily 1 on Leviticus

[3]     page 72