Lent 5 Year B- Passion Sunday 03/17/24

Sermon for 5 Lent B
March 17, 2024

  Jeremiah 31:31-34      Psalm 51:1-13       Hebrews 5:5-10            John 12:20-33

St. Paul, in his first letter to the folks of the early Church at Corinth spoke an uncomfortable truth that I would guess resonates with most of us.
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He said:  “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles . . .”  1 Corinthians 1:22-23

He intended those words for us here at 17th and Holmes, as well.

But!  But!  We aren’t Jews!  We’re Christians!  And we aren’t Greeks, either!  

Well, to state what I assume you well know is the obvious –Duh!—St. Paul wasn’t speaking critically about Jews or Greeks as far as what they professed “religiously”, but as to how they defended the truth and/or arrived at the truth of what they considered to be sacred or meaningful to their worldviews.   “Jews” were those people who were comfortable with “signs,” stories and symbols tied in with historical events, and preserved traditions associated with those events.  “Greeks” were those who were pragmatic thinkers, who needed logic and reason (is there a difference?) to figure out what was “true” and why it mattered.    So of those of us gathered this morning (like those in John’s Gospel this morning) to “See Jesus”, some of us are Jews and some of us are Greeks, even if some of us Greeks barely passed  “Intro to Philosophy” in college or were never “introed “ at all. 
 
In other words, we are like the early Christians that Paul addressed in his letters, and John addressed in his Gospel.

But we are all befuddled, or have spent time being befuddled, as well as horrified, at the Crucifixion of Jesus.  The Cross is a physical and an intellectual fixture of Christian worship and teaching at any time, but it is especially so during Lent.  During this season of the church year, the Cross looms large over us, and we avert our gaze to our spiritual poverty, for to not grapple with our minds and hearts with it is to impair our joy in the celebration of the Resurrection Day of Easter, and to risk reducing the Empty Tomb to sentimentality.

Many who claim to practice the Christian faith have averted their eyes and tried to put the Cross not only out of sight, but out of mind, too. Today there are many worship spaces across the spectrum of Progressive to Evangelical denominations that lack any hint of a Cross on wall or table.  And many who have adopted so-called “Christian Nationalism” have replaced it with the American flag!

The Cross is too messy, too illogical, too upsetting, too confrontative of both church, state, and the way the world does business, for many people to want to deal with.  We just want to “welcome you, praise God with you, salute the flag with you,” not wrestle with the question of “why did Jesus have to die?”, and die such an agonizing death?

I admit that I have been one of those people.  I would rather preach on the Manger rather than the Cross, which is why I am glad the lectionary doesn’t leave me to my own preferences! 

From my childhood on, I have struggled with the concept of why Jesus had to die, and to die SUCH a death.   In the fundamentalist view of the church of my childhood, Jesus was presented as a special person in history, who did wondrous things, and loved children, but was also God’s son that God had killed on a Roman cross because I and everybody else at worship were deserving of death at God’s hands ourselves.  What???   God “hated” our sin so much, that we deserved to die and go to Hell, but God loved us so much that he sent his “only Son” to die a terrible death in our place.  What???   And all we had to do was “believe in Jesus” or “invite Jesus into our heart”, and we would go to heaven.  If we didn’t, we would go to Hell—maybe even that very night—which seemed to me a terrible price for God and His son, Jesus, to pay for a mission that was less than 100% successful!   It didn’t make sense to a boy of 10 and I have gone on to find better answers in the deep traditions and thinking of the Christian Church.  

I’m certain that many of you sitting here this morning have had a similar faith journey and have been helped, if not downright rescued, by exposure to deeper meanings from Scripture and Christian theology and tradition.  For instance, the bold statement by St. Paul just noted that “GOD was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.”   God didn’t send a Son, an entity different than Godself.  God the Father was also the Son and through the agency of His Holy Spirit, was Himself and the Human Jesus who died on the Cross.  These building blocks of Christian theology, the Incarnation, and the Trinity, are the reason I am still a Christian.

The writings in the New Testament especially the letters of St. Paul, and the Gospel of St. John the Evangelist, explore, and expand on, the meaning of the intentional self-sacrificial suffering of God, and it is preached about often in this place, AND its story is embedded in our worship, in the Mass, every time it is celebrated here.

There is some “old preacher” wisdom that says to never preach on the genealogical lists of the Bible, and to avoid preaching on the Letter to the Hebrews.

But fools rush in!  I want to take the opportunity given by the Epistle reading today, The Letter of Paul to the Hebrews, to point out an approach to God’s sacrifice of self and Son that is unique within the Bible.   The author, whether Paul or not, was probably writing to  a church that had many converts from Judaism within the congregation.  It seems to be a church that was discouraged, maybe in danger of disbanding, and the author uses concepts familiar to its congregation to lift it out of despair and/or apathy using words and imagination. 

The writer, or Preacher, if you will, uses imagery of Jewish temple worship to make the case for the cross.  He speaks in terms that are familiar to those who are steeped in the stories and theology of ancient Israel, as found in the writings of the First Testament.  i.e., He used Jewish narrative to form a Christian narrative, without denigrating the Jewish narrative.

This is my attempt to put this background in a nutshell:

First of all, ancient Jewish worship was centered on a purpose-built place: First, a mobile worship place called The Tabernacle, that later on became a “brick and mortar” building known as The Temple.  In both was a special table: an altar.   The Tabernacle/Temple was staffed by priests, people whose job was to maintain the Temple and its worship and cultic activities.   They were go-betweens.  Basically they were ordinary people who had the extraordinary job of representing the Temple worshippers before God, by seeing that sacrifices would be made, for the people,  using the altar as the portal to God.  

As priests, their function was to point to God, the one God, the God of the Hebrews, and their function was very important because to point to this God, in a world where there were many Gods, was a matter of life, sanity, and their survival as a people, because this God gave them rules for order in the midst of shot- in-the-dark chaos.  He also gave them assurances that He wasn’t a capricious and cruel God that wanted to be appeased, like the “small g” gods of their neighbors.   Yes, he could be angered, but when their actions kept them from the blessings He would give them, or if they decided that they liked the little g gods better.

The articles of Jewish law and the practices of Jewish ritual were not superstitious pagan mumblings or the sacred practices of un-enlightened people.   Responsibility towards their neighbors, faithfulness to a God who cared, constant evaluation of their actions, and an effort to live a life that rose distinctly above the primitive and destructive lifestyles of other cultures they rubbed shoulders with, were hallmarks of their religious tradition.  These practices  were spelled out in the sacred writings of the Torah, and symbolized by the workings of sacred worship centered in gifts brought to God and laid on the altar before Him.  These were composed of  thank offerings of a symbolic portion of their crops and sin offerings of living creatures, mostly bulls and goats. (Lambs were in a special category and I don’t want to get into that now!)  These sin offerings involved spilling the blood of the offered animals onto the altar, and then they would be  subsequently burned.  To them, a blood offering was using a  valued life source as a way of offering the most precious thing they could imagine, not to appease God, but to acknowledge that they were aware of how they had failed to keep up their end of living a life that honored God, their neighbors, and their “better angels” (to use a modern term), and to seek to recover, or keep intact, they covenant their God had with them.  

The priests, especially the high priest, that made this worship work were not perfect, and most of them acknowledged that, offering their own sin offerings.

  (Although, the Bible tells stories of priests that took advantage of the system, tried to game it for their own prestige and power, and even put their stamp of approval upon pagan ways, twisted the teachings of their tradition, and served the purposes of ungodly kings.   Surely that wouldn’t happen today would it? –smile--).

Priests did not become priests because they thought it would be cool.  They were appointed by God or from families of priests and priest-apprentices appointed by God.  This was especially true of the High Priest, whose job it was to make the sin offering on the altar, which was in the “Holy of Holies”, the innermost interior of the Temple.  
They, as well as the people, were not terrified by God, but they didn’t take God lightly, either.   

When the early Christians read about these things in the only Scripture they had—the Jewish Scriptures—which has become our Old Testament, they were struggling to make sense of the crucifixion of Jesus, and it was easy to see in the sin sacrifices, the blood sacrifices, a prototype (or is that archetype?) of the spilling of Jesus’ life blood on the Cross. 

 There is some question in my own mind whether or not that clarified the meaning of the crucifixion or muddied the waters, but it has considerable standing in Christian theology.  Still, most of Christian tradition has moved away from the concept of Jesus  taking our punishment, without de-emphasizing that he died for our sakes.

In the case of The Book of Hebrews, the author uses the motifs of Jewish Temple worship, especially the altar and the actions of the High Priest to make sense of the actions of Jesus on the Cross.  It does not downplay or condemn these practices, but instead uses them to point beyond themselves to a new understanding of God and Jesus.

In the Book of Hebrews, Jesus is not the sacrifice, He is the ultimate High Priest offering the Sacrifice.   Furthermore, He was appointed by God only, not by human authority or family connections.   Jesus is the ultimate go-between God and ourselves.  That which he offers to God is our lives, warts and all, which he has gathered up as the incarnate Son, or Person, of God becoming fully human has experienced everything we could ever experience in our human lives, including betrayal, failure, and a painful and unfair death, whether a state execution or an attack from our bodily cells. In the context of the Trinity, the ongoing relationship among the Father, the Son, and The Holy Spirit, God Himself not only experienced the death of His Son within a human body, but also experienced the excruciating loss of His “only Son”.   In Hebrews God offers Himself to the world as he comes into the world and into humanity as Jesus, enjoys human life, suffers human death, and in the process, as priest takes His oneness in and understanding of all humanity and offers, then brings it back to God.  Jesus is not just a sacrificial entity, he is both altar and priest.  And we are evermore held in this downward and upward arc of His divine priesthood.

As we continue our Mass this morning, consider the actions at the altar, in the pew, in the choir, and the keyboard of the organ, to be actions that re-enact, or at least point to, the ongoing action of God in Christ reconciling us to Himself, and sharing his love and strength with us.  We are not sinners in the hand of an angry God, at least not a vindictive One.  We are part of a great enterprise in which God decided to encourage His people by taking on human life and the worst that it could endure, so that he might break the power of death, and change their hearts and lives from the inside out.  It wasn’t a one-off action.  It continues in the Holy of Holies which is the connection of Heaven and Earth, the very heart of the Trinity in which God dwells and we with Him.

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.
--The Rev. Larry A. Parrish, St. Mary ‘s Episcopal Church, March 17, 2024