“A Better Covenant” (Hebrews 7:20-28)

 

The other day I was going through some old DVDs in our basement, when I came across one of my favourites: The Princess Bride. I find it difficult to believe that it goes back thirty-five years, so I’ll excuse you if many of you are not familiar with it.

I won’t recount the whole story for you. (I’m not sure I remember it all that well myself!) But there was one character in it called Vizzini who stood out for me. It seemed that in almost every scene where he appeared, he would find a reason to utter the word, “Inconceivable!” In fact it gets to the point where another character ends up saying to him, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Well, I suppose we may all have our favourite words. That certainly seems to have been the case with the author of Hebrews. I mentioned a few weeks ago that one of his favourite words is “better”. In all he uses it eleven times: We have a Saviour who is better than the angels (1:4), we are heirs of a better hope (7:19), we are recipients of better promises (8:6), we desire a better homeland (11:16), we are purified by a better sacrifice (9:23), we will rise again to a better life (11:35) … And in verse 22 of this morning’s passage we find that Jesus is the guarantor of a better covenant.

Which brings us to a second favourite word in Hebrews: “covenant”. It occurs for the first time in verse 22 this morning. And by my count we will come across it a total of nineteen times before we arrive at the conclusion of the final chapter. So if we’re going to understand the message of Hebrews, we need to understand what its author means by the word “covenant”.

So let me ask you: What comes to your mind when you hear the word “covenant”? Personally, I can think of covenant being used in a couple of settings. The first is in the realm of legal contracts, where two parties agree to certain conditions that must be met in order for a deal to be settled. The second is in the realm of marriage, where bride and groom swear to love, honour and cherish each other to the exclusion of all others “till death do us part”.

Perhaps you can think of other examples. But whatever the case, I think we all can agree that a covenant of any kind involves solemnity, permanence and commitment.

The Four Covenants of the Old Testament

Outside of marriage, covenants may not be a regular feature of life today. But they were not uncommon in the world of the ancient Near East. There were covenants between kings, covenants between cities, and covenants between rulers and their subjects. And some of them can be traced back to more than four thousand years ago. However, common though covenants may have been in the ancient world, the Old Testament is the only place where you will find a covenant in which one of the parties is God. So let’s take a few moments to look at some of the covenants we find there.

The first time the word “covenant” appears in the Bible is in the account of Noah. No doubt you are familiar with the scene, as after what seemed an endless time in the ark, Noah at last stood on dry ground once again. As he gazed into the sky, there was a rainbow and God spoke to him: “I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you, and with every living creature … that never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 9:9-11)

Turn another half dozen or so chapters through Genesis and you will come to a second covenant, this time with Abraham. God promises that his descendants shall be as numerous as the stars in the sky. Added to that, they will no longer be wanderers but will be possessors of a land that they can call their own. Unlike the covenant with Noah, however, this time there was an obligation on the part of Abraham and his descendants: that every male should be circumcised as a sign of the covenant.

We come to a third covenant when we turn to the book of Exodus and stand with the people of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai. There the Lord lays down the conditions that his newly rescued people are to uphold if they are to remain in relationship with him. We think of them as the Ten Commandments. But rabbis would tell you that there were in fact no fewer than 613!

The fourth covenant comes two centuries later, when the nation of Israel was entering its golden age under King David. God’s promise to David is summarized for us in Psalm 89: “I have made a covenant with my chosen one; I have sworn to David my servant: I will establish your offspring for ever, and build your throne for all generations.”

Now these are all amazing promises. The people of Israel stood in immense privilege. No other nation was so favoured. But the problem was that they never upheld their side of the covenant. They failed to recognize that circumcision did not involve just a surgical procedure, but that that outward act was intended as a sign of an inward commitment to serve the Lord God and him alone. Instead, they found themselves being attracted to the false deities and pagan practices of the nations that surrounded them. They bowed before images made of wood and precious metals and some even sacrificed their children to them. Their priests and their leaders from the king down became corrupt and the people were not far behind in following them. The poor were trodden under foot and widows were forced to beg to keep themselves and their children alive.

The Promise of a New Covenant

It was into the midst of this ongoing scene that God sent his prophets. Their task was to warn the people, including the king and the royal family, the priests and all the religious officials, of their rampant corruption and infidelity.

But the prophets came not just to alert the people to their waywardness. They also brought a message of hope and redemption, of forgiveness and restoration, of new life and a whole new relationship with God. Among those prophets was Jeremiah, who came with these words:

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,” declares the Lord. “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbour and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

It was a remarkable promise—and we don’t have the time to go into it in any great detail right now. Suffice it to say, though, that this new covenant would not be a matter of outward obedience to laws and regulations. Rather, it would be centred in a relationship—knowing God, not as a distant being out there, but as a living presence, God himself coming to dwell within us. And we know that those promises were fulfilled in a person—in Jesus.

I love the way the apostle Paul put it when he wrote to the believers in Corinth: “All the promises of God find their ‘Yes’ in Jesus.” (2 Corinthians 1:20) Jesus has come to usher in a better covenant than the covenant with Noah or Abraham or Moses or David—a covenant that is sealed not with the sacrifice of bulls and sheep and goats, but with his own life’s blood; a covenant that involves not an outward obedience but his daily presence in our lives through the Holy Spirit. All of that is wrapped up in the words from Hebrews we have heard this morning, where we read that Jesus , “the Son who has been made perfect forever”, “is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him”.

Four Promises of Jesus

So it is that “Jesus is the guarantor of a better covenant”—a covenant that was sealed by his blood shed for you and for me on the cross and ratified by his resurrection from the grave on the third day. But what does that mean in practical terms? How does it work out for you and me today? Part of the answer at least can be found in four promises that Jesus makes in the gospels.

The first is found in John’s gospel, where Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” (John 6:37) So we have the assurance that when we put our faith in Jesus, he will never let go of us. We may fail him. Indeed we most certainly will. I know I have time and time again. But he will never turn his back on us. Peter found that out after he denied knowing Jesus not once but three times. It was not many days later that Jesus was coming to him once again and saying to him, “Follow me.” (John 21:19)

A second promise of Jesus comes to us from the week before his crucifixion, when he assured his followers, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” (Matthew 24:35)

Yesterday was the anniversary of my ordination. Back then there were theologians who were claiming that God was dead. Now those theologians are the ones who are dead—and the good news of Jesus continues to be proclaimed with power and to prove itself true in people’s lives all over the world.

The church in Nigeria grows by more than a million new disciples a year. At last count the largest church in Europe was where? In Kyiv, with more than thirty thousand adherents.[1] And where are the world’s largest Christian congregations? Not in North America, but in Korea and India.

A third promise that Jesus made to his followers came as they gathered for the Passover supper on the evening before his crucifixion. It was on that occasion that he told them, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (John 14:1-3) And so Jesus gives us the assurance that not only will he be with us in every circumstance of life, but that when life ends, we will be gathering among that joyful throng to sing his everlasting praise:

To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever! (Revelation 5:13)

And the fourth promise that Jesus has left with us comes in his very last words before he ascended to be with his Father: “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

John Baillie was a Scottish theologian of the early twentieth century. He was fond of telling the story of going for a walk one day with his young grandson, who was just a toddler. At one point along their way the little boy began to stumble. He might have fallen down altogether, had his little hand not been held in the firm grasp of his grandfather’s. And that, said Baillie, is how it is with Jesus. We may stumble and fall, but Jesus is with us and he will never let us go.

With all that in mind, maybe you can see now why covenant is one of the favourite words of the author of Hebrews. May it be one of your favourite words too. And by the power of the Holy Spirit may you seek to live out that covenant in your daily walk with the one who sealed it with his blood.

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[1]     Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent, 88

“The Original International Man of Mystery” (Hebrews 7:1-3)

 

I wonder if anyone can tell me what is the Old Testament passage most frequently quoted in the New Testament…

You might think it’s something like Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” If you’re really into the writings of the minor prophets, you might come up with an obscure verse like Habakkuk 2:4, “The just shall live by faith.”

Depending on how you do your calculation, there are something in the range of three hundred quotations from the Old Testament that can be found in the New. But the quotation that tops them all is from Psalm 110, verses 1 and 4, which run like this:

The Lord says to my Lord:
    ‘Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.’ …
The Lord has sworn
    and will not change his mind,
‘You are a priest forever
    after the order of Melchizedek.’

The first place we find these words is in each of the first three gospels. They come up in the course of one of those nitpicking encounters between Jesus and the religious authorities. We hear them, not on the lips of Jesus, but from his opponents. They use them to try to debunk what people are beginning to say about Jesus: that he is the promised Messiah. Clearly, they recognized these verses as a messianic prophecy.

The next time we come across them is when they are quoted by Peter. They are to be found in the middle of his sermon on the day of Pentecost. He was addressing the large crowd who had gathered in the street when they heard Jesus’ followers praising God in what they recognized as their own languages. And after citing these same verses, Peter proclaimed, “Let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Messiah.” (Acts 2:34-36)

This in turn brings us to the Letter to the Hebrews, which we have been following now since the beginning of the year. So I will forgive you if you don’t remember way back in chapter 1, where this text is quoted once again. There, pointing to Jesus, the author asks the question, “To which of the angels has God ever said, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’”? (Hebrews 1:13)

Finally we come to the verse immediately preceding the passage before us this morning: Hebrews 6:20. There the author writes of Jesus as “having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek”.

When I was scratching my head early last week trying to come up with a title for this sermon, I thought of calling it “Who the heck was Melchizedek?” And perhaps that’s exactly the question you’re asking yourself right now! Well, the answer comes in the three verses which make up this morning’s passage from Hebrews.

The author takes us far back into the mists of history—in fact, to chapter 14 in the book of Genesis. Now here’s the scene: The rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah had been trounced in battle by the rulers of some of the neighbouring settlements. Among those whom they took as captives was Abraham’s nephew Lot. When Abraham found out about it, he pulled together his armed men and staged an overnight raid on the two rulers and their forces. The result was that Lot was made a free man once again and Abraham forged a treaty with the ruler of Sodom. And that is where Melchizedek enters the scene.

He appears to come to Abraham out of nowhere. He is the king of Salem (later to become Jerusalem) and the scene takes place in the nearby Valley of Shaveh. Melchizedek brings with him bread and wine and pronounces a blessing on Abraham. In response, Abraham returns to him a tenth of all his possessions. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, Melchizedek disappears into the mists of time.

Now I have to say that this scene is one of a few in the Old Testament that never fail to bring shivers down my spine. It is up there with the three mysterious visitors who later came out of the blue to visit Abraham as he stood at the entry of his tent. And with the fourth man who stood amid the flames with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego inside King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. I ask myself: Could it be that what those men witnessed—and what Abraham witnessed that day in the Valley of Shaveh—was a foreshadowing of the eternal Word, Jesus, who was with God and who was God from the beginning? I’ll leave it to you to come to your own conclusion.

King of righteousness

But back to Melchizedek. Our passage this morning tells us three things about him. The first is a translation of his name. It is a combination of the two Hebrew words melek, which means “king”, and tsedeq, which means “righteousness”. Put them together and Melchizedek’s name means “king of righteousness”—and as such he points directly to Jesus.

But before we go any farther, perhaps we need to ask, what does it mean to be righteous? Many people confuse righteousness with self-righteousness. In reality the two could not be farther apart. Jesus put the lie to what masquerades as righteousness when he told the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector who went to pray in the temple. You will recall how the Pharisee strutted in and parroted, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get…” That isn’t righteousness: that is shameless, delusional pride.

Several years ago one of my brothers had new neighbours move in next door. In an effort to be friendly, he went over and invited them over for a barbecue. He was taken aback by their response: “Oh no. We couldn’t do that. Our church forbids us from sharing meals with outsiders.”

As Jesus’ followers we need to be so careful not to radiate that false brand of righteousness, the one that gives the impression that we see ourselves as better than other people. True righteousness is what we find in the tax collector, who crouched in a shadowy corner of the temple where he was barely noticeable. And not having the boldness even to lift up his eyes and look towards heaven, he murmured, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:9-14)

The truly righteous recognize their constant need of God’s grace. They seek to live in daily dependence on him. And this is what we see in Jesus, who said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” And again, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.” (John 4:34; 6:38)

We call Jesus righteous in a unique sense, though, because he did what no other human being has ever done: he lived a life of perfect, uninterrupted communion with his Father. Jesus is the true King of Righteousness. In him we are able to see all that it means to live in a relationship with God.

King of peace

The second fact about Melchizedek that our passage this morning points us to is that he was King of Salem—and Salem in Hebrew is the same word as shalom, which means “peace”. My Bible dictionary informs me that that word shalom involves a much broader understanding than what we commonly mean by “peace”. It carries with it a notion of “completeness”, “soundness”, “well-being”, “safety”.

So it was that, on the night before they were to face what would be their greatest trial, Jesus could comfort his followers with the words, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you… Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (John 14:27)

A few days later, as they gathered in fear for their lives behind locked doors, suddenly Jesus was in their midst again with the familiar words, “Peace be with you.” (John 20:19) And today Jesus comes to us with those same words, “Peace be with you.” Peace as we face tragedy and suffering. Peace as we run into broken relationships and conflict. Peace as we seek to negotiate the storms and setbacks that are an unavoidable part of life in in a fallen world. And in all of those circumstances, Jesus is able not only to give us inner peace. He also empowers us to be makers of peace. After all, peace is one of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Yet there is more to it than that—infinitely more! The peace that Jesus gives us in the here and now is only a foreshadowing of the real and lasting peace that he will bring with him in the new creation. This is the peace that we read about in the prophets:

“No more shall there be…
    an infant who lives but a few days,
    or an old man who does not fill out his days…
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
    they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
    they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
    and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain
    or bear children for calamity,
for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the Lord,
    and their descendants with them…
The wolf and the lamb shall graze together;
    the lion shall eat straw like the ox,
    and dust shall be the serpent’s food.
They shall not hurt or destroy
    in all my holy mountain,” says the Lord. (Isaiah 65:20-25)

That is a picture that never ceases to amaze me! (And what a stunning contrast it is to the images that we see in the news daily right now of bombed-out buildings and desperate refugees fleeing for safety in Ukraine!)

Yes, Jesus does bring us peace as we lay our troubles before him. But the real peace he came to bring is the shalom of the new heaven and the new earth, when all creation will thrive as it hasn’t since the Garden of Eden, in the light of his unending glory. And it is the vision of that peace that calls and arouses us to be makers of peace in the here and now.

Our eternal high priest

Thirdly, Melchizedek was a high priest. Abraham recognized this when he gave him a tenth of all that he had. We don’t know what kind of sacrifices Melchizedek offered in his high priestly role. But we do know the sacrifice that Jesus offered for us in his own life’s blood poured out for us on the cross.

Words are not sufficient to describe what Jesus accomplished for you and for me on that first Good Friday. The closest I can find are from my Anglican Prayer Book when it speaks about what Jesus has done for us through his death as “a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”.

The Letter to the Hebrews will have a good deal more to teach us about Jesus’ eternal priesthood in the succeeding chapters—and I don’t want to steal from what preachers might be led to say in the Sundays that follow.

Yet allow me to say that, unlike Abraham’s response to Melchizedek, we can’t be satisfied with giving just a tenth. Jesus demands our all. As he said to his first disciples, he says to you and to me, “If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) The apostle Paul said much the same thing a generation later when he wrote to the believers in Rome: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1)

Switch now for a moment to the twentieth century, to 1937, when the Nazi party had all of Germany in its oppressive grip. A young Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat down to put together a study on the Sermon on the Mount. He could not have known that eight years later he would die as a martyr to Hitler’s brutal régime. Nor could he have known how prophetic his words would be when wrote, “The cross is laid on every Christian… When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”[1]

As we focus our thoughts this morning upon Jesus, the King of righteousness, the King of Peace and our Great High Priest, the only response that enters my mind comes to me in the words of the hymn writer Isaac Watts:

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

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[1]     The Cost of Discipleship

“If Stones Could Shout” (Luke 19:28-40)

For the next few moments I want you to try to imagine what it must have been like to be among those who stood on the streets of Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. (I’ll even let you close your eyes if you like, as long as you promise not to go to sleep!)

The city would have been bustling with people, as worshippers from all over Palestine and many from considerably farther afield—from as far away as the distant corners of the vast Roman Empire—had begun to gather in preparation for the annual Passover celebration.

For centuries there had been a tradition that, as they made their way towards the holy city, travellers would recite what are known as the Psalms of Ascents, the fifteen psalms beginning with Psalm 120. Many of those psalms remain familiar to us today, as they have become entrenched in our Christian worship: “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?” “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go the house of the Lord.’” “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved…” “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream…” “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain…”

So it was that there was literally music in the air as Jesus and his followers made their way towards Jerusalem. Our Bible reading this morning opens with them looking across at the city from the top of the slope that separates it from the Mount of Olives—and I find myself hearing the distant echoes of those psalms being sung in the background.

As they made their way along the twisting road that led down into the valley and then up towards the city, Jesus knew what awaited him there. Indeed, he had been warning his followers about it for some months: “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.” (Luke 19:31-33)

The Disciples

In fact, Jesus had warned them on at least three separate occasions what was going to happen to him. However, the disciples, really hadn’t paid very much attention at the time. Plus, I suspect that by this time they were so caught up in the excitement of the coming Passover celebration that those words of foreboding had faded almost entirely from their minds. They would have had no idea of the darkness that was to engulf them over the coming days.

It was in that context that Jesus came to them with a request: “Go into the village ahead of you. There on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’”

The instructions seem strange to me—almost like something out of a James Bond movie. However, the disciples seemed to think nothing of it and went on their way unquestioningly, following Jesus’ directions to the letter. And as it turned out, everything was exactly as he had told them. Little did they know that they were embarking on a trajectory that would lead to treachery, betrayal, torture and execution.

Now they were happy to obey Jesus and to carry out his instructions. But in a few days’ time they would see this same Jesus, whom they had come to love and adore, roughly arrested, unjustly tried, brutally tortured, and nailed to a cross to die a slow, agonizing death. And they would find themselves cowering behind locked doors in fear for their lives. Piece by piece, everything that they had come to believe in and to hold dear over the previous three years would be turned on its head.

The Multitude

The next scene takes us to the gates of Jerusalem. Located atop Mount Zion and surrounded by thick stone walls, the city would have made an impressive site, especially for those who came from the towns and villages of the countryside.

I am reminded of one of my visits to New York City. I was with a friend and we were walking through the streets of Manhattan, when a stranger came up to us and said, “You’re visitors here, aren’t you?” When we asked him what gave us away, he replied, “It’s because you’re looking up, not ahead.” All our attention had been riveted on the enormous skyscrapers that towered above us, to the point where we weren’t paying any attention to where we were going!

I can imagine a similar dynamic taking place with many of the pilgrims from the tiny hamlets of Palestine—among them Jesus’ disciples. There were the more than a quarter of a million of them jostling along through its narrow streets. And everything about the city would have prompted oohs and ahs.

At the centre of it all was the magnificent Temple occupying thirty-six acres of land. Its fifty-foot-high gates flanked by enormous columns, its gold glistening in the hot Near Eastern sun, it would have been an impressive sight even to modern eyes. Already more than forty-six years in the making, it would not be fully completed for another four decades.

Now add to that the excitement and anticipation over the coming celebration of Passover. Then into this scene there enters a strange sight—a man riding on a donkey, with other men going before him and spreading their cloaks along his path as though he were a king or some kind of royalty. This leads to what seems to have been a spontaneous outburst of excitement, as some join in and spread their garments on the road, while still others cut down palm branches and lay them along the cobblestones. Meanwhile, all of this is accompanied by joyful shouts of “Hosanna!” and “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”

Of course, we all know that within the space of a few short days the jubilant cheers of the multitude would turn to shouts of “Crucify!” Among them there might even have been some of those who passed by him as he hung naked on the cross, who jeered at him and mocked him with the words, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself…”

The Stones

Then there were the religious authorities, who would have none of this spontaneous celebration. “Teacher,” they snapped, “rebuke your disciples.” To which Jesus replied, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”

My suspicion is that the stones that Jesus was referring to may have been the enormous megaliths that formed the base of the Temple. Some of them weighed as much as five hundred tonnes. You may recall that on a previous visit to Jerusalem one of Jesus’ disciples had drawn attention to them. “Look,” he said (and I can imagine the wonderment in his voice). “What massive stones! And what enormous buildings!” (Mark 13:1)

Now let me ask: Can you think of anything more inanimate than a stone—particularly a stone of that magnitude? Yet Jesus says, “If [the human voices] were silent, the very stones would cry out.” What did he mean? Was he just being poetic? Was he using exaggeration to get his point across?

Maybe. But I think there was more. And my reason is this: It is because at the cross everything would change—and I mean everything. It was not just a matter of closing the gap that separates you and me from God on account of our sin. What was happening on the cross would radically affect the whole created order in its entirety—even the rocks! For it was on the cross that Jesus would defeat once and for ever the cosmic powers of sin and evil and death—all that is wrong and sinful and out of step with God’s will in the universe.

We get a glimpse of what was happening in Matthew’s remarkable account of what took place in Jerusalem at the moment when Jesus gave up his spirit:

And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. (Matthew 27:51-53)

So it is that when we get to the Book of Revelation, we find the aged John peering through his astonished eyes not just to catch a dream of things made better, but to be captured by a vision of the whole of creation transformed. What he gazed upon was a new heaven and a new earth. “For,” he says, “the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” (Revelation 21:1)

The apostle Paul expressed the same kind of understanding in his letter to the Romans, when he wrote:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:18-23)

So as we move through this Holy Week towards the observance of Good Friday and Easter, if I leave you with anything, I want to leave you with a cosmic vision of what was taking place as our Lord and his disciples made their way into the holy city.

When Jesus was to utter those words from the cross, “It is finished,” he was not just saying that his life was coming to an end. He was doing away once and for all with sin and evil and death. He was ushering in a whole new creation, made perfect in accordance with the will and pleasure of his Father.

In the words of the apostle Paul, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” (Colossians 1:19-20)

When New Testament scholar N.T. Wright wrote his book about the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion six years ago, he chose the dramatic title The Day the Revolution Began. In his conclusion to this massive 400-page-plus study, he wrote this (and please forgive me for quoting it at length!):

With all this we lift up our eyes and realize that [we] have been so concerned with getting to heaven, with sin as the problem blocking the way, … that [we have] forgotten that the gospels give us [the atonement] not as a neat little system, but as a powerful, many-sided, richly revelatory narrative in which we are invited to find ourselves, or rather to lose ourselves and to be found again on the other side. We have gone wading in the shallow and stagnant waters of medieval questions and answers … when only a few yards away is the vast and dangerous ocean of the gospel story, inviting us to plunge in and let the waves of dark glory wash over us, wash us through and through, and land us on the shores of God’s new creation.[1]

The obedience of the disciples would quickly turn to fear. The shouts of “Hosanna!” that rang through the streets of Jerusalem would soon be no more than an echo. But the day is coming when even the stones will not be silent, but will resound with the joyful chorus of all the redeemed:

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honour and glory and blessing!
(Revelation 5:12)

Let’s be sure that you and I are part of the crowd!

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[1]       The Day the Revolution Began, 415-416