I am going to start doing something new with my sermon postings. Rather than make a separate text post, I am going to post my pulpit notes here. They are in many ways a sketch, a guide for what will happen live on the pulpit. In these I would out the flow, the transitions and all the important phraseology. Let me know if you prefer this. A sermon is a live speaking event. It is not primarily a written medium.
“Secular” Christmas, with its emphasis on the giving and exchange of gifts, and with of that all course comes of the shopping, and with all of the shopping there is the impulse of the business community to remind us as early as possible that it is “Christmas season.” As a result, by the time Christmas comes, most of us are tired of “Christmas” and just want it all to be over and for things to back to “normal.”
But, in the older rhythms of Christian life, when our lives revolved around the church, the sacred calendar and the remembrances and celebrations of the Christian faith, the month prior to Christmas was a season of preparation called “Advent” in which we prepared ourselves spiritually to celebrate Christmas. Christmas would be a 12 day celebration from Christmas through to Epiphany.
Today, according to the church calendar, is the “First Sunday after Christmas.” And today is a day of deepening our meditation on Christmas themes.
The value of Christmas is not that it celebrates the birth of a child, the baby Jesus. Childbirth is a blessing. But our focus is not on how cute Jesus was when he was little.
Nor is Christmas a celebration of feel good “universal values” like peace, love, hope, joy, goodness or any other non-specific hard to define feeling. Not that any of these feelings are bad things, it’s just that they are not the “true meaning of Christmas.”
Christmas is important and we celebrate it because of the nature of that child, who he is, and then what he accomplishes as an adult.
The passage that we have in front of us reminds us that human sinfulness and the cross of Christ are linked to the nature of who he is. The “holiday cheer” version of Christmas wants to deny all of this. It passes over the “why?” of Jesus. This passage reminds us that Jesus is King, but that he claims his throne, not through battle and conquest, but by means of his suffering and sacrificial death.
This passage of Hebrews is exploring the meaning of “Immanuel” that “God is with us.”
It is a challenge to hold together in our minds the two realities of Jesus together in one person. There is a temptation to think that if God is among us that he somehow not really like us. That he only seems human. The other is to see Jesus as merely human, a really great man, better than all other men, but still just a man.
But Hebrews reminds us that in Jesus God, for whom and through whom the whole universe was made, genuinely became a man. As verse nine says, he who was greater than the angels because he created them, became less than the angels for us, to die for us.
His humanity was very real. The more you mediate on it, the more mind blowing it becomes. It makes your head hurt just thinking about it. God is three persons, one essence, and yet God the Son, fully God in every way, became so much like us that even though he was without sin, it was possible for him to be tempted, for these temptations to be real. If they were real that means there was a real possibility that Jesus could have fallen into sin, that God the Son living as a man, might disobey God the Father. It hurts your head thinking about it.
And we are told that it was “fitting” that this is the way it should happen, that God should become man and suffer for us. Not just the penalty for our sin, but the suffering of facing temptation day in and day out throughout his life. It was “fitting” that it would happen this way. The author of Hebrews says to us that of all the ways that we might conceive of salvation happening, this is the most appropriate or suitable way for it to happen.
Think about that. Because of our sinfulness, because day in and day out in small ways and in large ways we succumb to temptations, because of this if seems somehow fitting that the Creator of the universe, in whom and through whom all things were made, might become so much like us that he would suffer in every way like us but without sin. We tend not think about temptation as a form of suffering, but this is what it is.
In this whole process Jesus is described as the ἀρχηγὸν of our salvation. The NIV translates that as “author” but other translations use the words “architect,” “pioneer,” “chief,” “leader,” “prince,” but to get at the meaning we might use the word “archetype.” An archetype is a kind of symbol that shows us how to be a thing. For those that like The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn is presented as the archetype of the “Good King.” His character shows us what Tolkien thought a king should be. Rather than give a list of characteristics, he helps you see it in the form of a story.
Jesus is the archetype of our salvation. He is the one who both establishes the pattern which embodies everything that is meant by the term “Saviour” and “salvation.” At the same time that he makes salvation happen, he also shows us the path to salvation. In this sense “making others holy” is also the path for “becoming holy.”
In this we have to distinguish between righteousness and holiness. Righteousness is a relationship term. We are right, we are good with another person. Sin breaks relationship. When I do something to you, when I sin against you, we are not right. Being made righteous again is the process of restoring and making that relationship good again. Jesus makes us right with God.
But salvation is much more than just being right with God, just as a relationship between two people is more than just not having anything against someone else. In spiritual terms what fills up the relationship between God and man is “holiness” or “purity.”
What the author of Hebrews here is talking about is the “perfecting” of our relationship with God. That perfecting is the process of becoming holy, pure, it is about preparing ourselves to enter the Holy of Holies, the very presence of God himself, to commune in the deepest intimacy with God.
Here again in verse 11 the translation of the NIV smooths out the Greek. “Of the same family” expands on the Greek that says that because the Son became man in every way, he is “one” with us. We are not merely of the same family. We are one and the same. We are of the same flesh, just as brothers share the same parents so we are of one flesh with Jesus.
But we are his “flesh and blood.” This is interesting in the context of the present-day language that wants to try to redefine “family” as whomever you feel the closest to. Family is with whomever you want to think of as family.
But the author of Hebrews goes so far as to say that in Christ we have a flesh and blood bond to each other. We thus become God’s children, not some idea or fuzzy concept of family, but in Christ we become God’s flesh and blood children. This is part of the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, that we participate together in taking into ourselves the body of Christ,
We are family, we are one flesh, forged in faith, forged by the suffering of Jesus Christ, God who became man, like us in every way.
The goal of this is to set us free from sin so that we too might be holy as he is holy, that we might be perfected the way he was perfected: in suffering. What the author has in mind is not necessarily physical pain and suffering or even mental anguish, but rather that the core of our suffering is the facing of temptation.
Jesus shows us the path of glory, his path to ascending the throne of God. He is the archetype, the pattern, the leader, the one who goes first to show us the way, that we are perfected in the same way that Jesus himself was perfected, through the suffering of facing temptation and passing through the testing to be purified in the process. We are trying to live into the story of Jesus, to become like him, to be Christ like.
Because he is one of us and we are one with him in faith, one not just as an idea, but in the flesh, he can act as the family priest on our behalf, both offering the sacrifice as well as being the sacrifice to atone for our sins.
He pays the price for our sins and sets us free from the power of death, a power that holds us prisoner to the devil.
But the whole thing comes together in verse 18: “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”
Jesus is one with us. He knows, he really knows what you are going through.
In that moment when you are isolated, alone with your desires pulling and pushing and driving you to do something you will regret, that will fill you with shame, that will pull you into bondage, keeping you trapped in your old self, your old ways that hide who you are in Christ; we know that Jesus was here, in this moment that we are in. He was feeling what we are feeling, but he didn’t give in.
Because of this he is able to be there for you to show you the pathway out, the way through, what it will take to resist, all of it. This is what it means that he is the archetype of our salvation.
Jesus is the one who resists temptation. God became one of us, a brother to us in the flesh, by blood, so that as our brother, he would endure what we endure, he would face everything we will face, all of it. Together, with us. A brother to us, one with us, bonded to us in the flesh so that he might stand alongside of us, to know us and to show us the way.
He can show us the way out, the way through, the way to holiness, the path to the Holy of Holies, the throne room of God, to overcoming what happened in the Garden when we were cast out of God’s presence.
If we must embrace the “true meaning of Christmas” it is that God became flesh so that he might face our temptations, to suffer these fears and temptations, overcoming them so that he might be able to help us in our suffering to also overcome temptation and thus reveal the holiness of God in our lives.
