by CCW | 3 April 2022 08:00
The Letter to the Hebrews is a very rich and demanding theological text. It is intriguing to see when passages from Hebrews are read in the classical lectionary. Hebrews is read at Christmas – the thundering words about the pageant of God’s word culminating in the Word and Son of God (Heb.1.1-12; BCP, p. 105[1]). It is read today on Passion Sunday, the beginning of deep Lent, and, indeed, the end of the Epistle reading this morning (and our text) is the beginning of the Epistle reading for Wednesday in Holy Week (Heb. 9.15-28; BCP, p. 163[2]). Hebrews is read on Good Friday (Heb. 10.1-25; BCP, p. 174[3]). Hebrews is read in the Octave of All Saints for the commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (Heb. 11.13-16; 12.1-2, BCP, p. 302[4]), reminding us of our heavenly citizenship, at once “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses” and “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” It is read on Ascension Day at Evening Prayer and throughout the Daily Offices of Ascensiontide, thus informing our understanding of the Ascension as the culmination of the Resurrection. Such things suggest the theological significance of Hebrews.
And it is not by accident that Hebrews 9.11-15 is read today just after a thematic selection of readings from Leviticus on Friday evening and Saturday morning and evening just past. In a way, Hebrews is the Christian re-working of the forms of reciprocity in worship that belongs to Leviticus and especially in terms of the ethical demands that the worship of God entails with respect to our dealings with one another and the land; in short, the love of neighbour, which includes the stranger and the sojourner, and our respect and care for the land. Such considerations speak to the idea of atonement, to our being at one with God and through God with one another in God’s creation. This is the significance of Jesus as “the Mediator of the new covenant.”
The idea of mediation assumes conflict, a division between parties. But the Mediator here is not about seeking some sort of compromise between competition over partial goods, trying to find some sort of consensus which we agree upon and make. The issue of mediation here is about the yawning and unbridgeable gap between God and man owing to human sin and evil. The divide or opposition which we have caused cannot be overcome or mediated by us. The Book of Leviticus, with all of the rigour of its proscriptions about ritual and sacrifice, takes seriously the relation between Israel and God as grounded in God’s own holiness. “You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19.2). “I am the Lord your God” is a constantly repeated refrain in Leviticus, a constant reminder of the holy otherness of God as the ground for our actions towards one another and towards the created order. But such things presuppose our separation from both God and nature and from God and one another. What Leviticus seeks is atonement, actions commanded by God that seek the reconciliation of our humanity with God and with one another and with the created order.
The Christian focus of atonement is on Christ exactly as Hebrews puts it, “the Mediator of the new covenant.” Christ is mediator not simply as a go-between of parties working out a consensus, but as the one who effects the reconciliation, the atonement. He is our atonement. Why? Because he is both God and Man. In him is the effective reconciliation and true form of reciprocity between our humanity and God and between God and the created or natural world. Thus the Levitical concepts of sacrificial offerings, “the blood of goats and calves,” gives place to the blood of Christ “enter[ing] in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” The same kind of language and imagery of blood and sacrifice is used but as focused on the pure humanity of Christ in his relation to his divine nature. The emphasis is on God and Man in Christ effecting the true reconciliation of our broken nature and broken world with God. It is about the transition from death to life. It signals the nature of the Lenten pilgrimage which is about nothing less and nothing more than our participation in the redemptive work of God in Christ effected through his humanity in sacrifice, a sacrifice which is God’s love towards us overcoming all the forms of human division, conflict, and animosity. Thus Hebrews shows not simply the abrogation of the proscriptions and regulations of Leviticus but their fulfillment in the one Mediator, Jesus Christ.
In other words, the mediation can only happen through God, on the one hand, but can also only happen in what belongs to our humanity, on the other hand. To learn this and to think our way more deeply into the mystery of human redemption is the project of deep Lent and Holy Week. The Gospel highlights the struggles that belong to our learning. The mother of Zebedee’s children, James and John, comes to Jesus with her sons “worshipping him and desiring a certain thing of him.” Worship is about a recognition and an honouring of what is worthy of our attention but that is something about which there is always more to learn, always more to appreciate, always more to grasp, and always more to understand. It is about our orientation and openness to an inexhaustible mystery. The mother of Zebedee’s children sees something divine in Jesus. In that sense, she is a bit like the unnamed woman of Canaan whose insight into God in Christ moved her to seek the healing of her daughter.
What is of special interest here is also the exchange. Jesus asks her, “what wilt thou?” What do you want? What do you seek? He is drawing out of her what she seeks for her sons. Lent is about the purification and rectification or redemption of our desires; it is about learning what is truly to be wanted which can only be what belongs to the will of God for us. This exchange shows the problem about our desires in order to set our desires, our loves in order. What does she seek? Positions of prestige, power, and honour for her sons. She, like so many parents, has ambitions for her children. That can be a problem. A host of assumptions and questions underlies her request. First, this is what she wants for them but it is what they want for themselves? Secondly, wanting positions of power and prestige for her sons is to place them over others; it implies a division and a hierarchy that privileges the few over the many. As such it raises questions about justice and, of course, as the dialogue shows, it excites envy and resentment, more division! But the divisions and tensions are all about our wills as not properly attuned to God’s will.
This is the remarkable truth and power of Jesus’ answer. “Ye know not what ye ask.” Our ambitions for ourselves and for one another are not by definition always good and we do not always know either what we really want or what is really good for us. Such is the human dilemma in our fallenness. We are divided in ourselves and between one another. It is thus about the struggle to learn not simply how to get our way but about what is the way, about what is to be wanted and in what way.
Jesus then turns to the sons and addresses them. His questions to them point to his passion, to the realities of sacrifice and service. Note that such things stand very much over and against the ambition for power and prestige. “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” The questions point to his passion and to the sacramental forms of our participation in his sacrifice. Powerful lessons for us. But as Jesus goes on to say, to sit in positions of ultimate power and authority, of triumph and victory, is “not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.”
This goes to the logic of mediation. In talking about the cup and the baptism he is talking about what is effected through his humanity in the Passion. In talking about his Father, he is referring to what belongs to God, to his divinity. It signals the reciprocity between humanity and divinity. It illuminates an understanding of Christ as “the Mediator of the new covenant” between God and man, something which is at once accomplished in the humanity of Christ and in his divine relation to his Father, for he has come, as Hebrews in the Epistle for Good Friday puts it, “to do thy will.” Such is the meaning of atonement, our being at one with God and with one another through the mediator between God and Man. Redemption is effected by God but it is effected in what belongs to the truth of our humanity.
On Quinquagesima Sunday, in the Gospel reading from Luke which complements this Gospel from Matthew, Jesus tells us that “we go up to Jerusalem” and he explains exactly what that means in terms of his passion, death and resurrection. Yet the disciples “understood none of these things.” Here the other disciples are “moved with indignation against the two brethren.” There is division and animosity. They think that special privileges are being granted to James and John and not to them. Here we see yet again the divisions and oppositions that belong to the human community, to the limits of human justice and the problems of human ambition which always pits the few over the many; advantages for some at the disadvantage of others, on the one hand, and the inability to take joy in the good which comes to others, on the other hand. What Jesus says, of course, has nothing to do with favouring some at the expense of others.
This provides the occasion for more teaching by Jesus about the precise nature of human redemption and about the radical nature of himself as the Mediator. He tells them and us that it is not about power and dominion over others but about service and sacrifice; “whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.” There is no order without some sort of hierarchy, a distinction of functions, of leaders and followers but that is not about lording it over one another. The radical teaching of deep Lent is about service and sacrifice on the part of everyone and as grounded in Christ. What he commands the disciples here is grounded in himself and in his sacrifice. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Christ, as the deeper logic of the Scriptures and the Fathers and the history of the doctrine of the atonement teaches, is the one who triumphs over sin and death. He is Christus Victor through what happens on the Cross in the reciprocity between his humanity and his divinity. He is thus the propitiatory sacrifice, the one who accomplishes the true reconciliation between God and man in what belongs to the truth of humanity. As such, Jesus, too, is the example for us of what belongs to reconciliation in our own lives. These are all the interrelated and complementary aspects of atonement, of our being restored to oneness with God, with the whole of creation, and with one another.
The teaching is clearly and nicely summed up by Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse:
The patristic doctrine of redemption is not “classic” or propitiatory, or exemplary; it is all of those at once, as is the doctrine of the Scriptures. To exclude one dimension or another is to diminish its truth and its power. It is not “objective” or “subjective”; it is both at once. It is not the work of Christ as Son of God or of Christ as Son of Man; it is the work of Christ who is both God and man in distinction of natures and unity of person. Indeed, the full development of the patristic understanding of the atonement depends upon the working out of the Chalcedonian understanding of the integrity of the divine and human natures in Christ. To deny that the humanity of Christ has an essential role in the work of redemption implies a distortion of Christological doctrine in a docetist or a monophysite direction.
Such distortions are a denial or a diminishment of our humanity and of our relation to God in Christ; they belong to the gnostic tendencies, both ancient and modern, which are a flight from reality and from ourselves. Our liturgy, our worship, is about our participation in Christ’s mediation. We go with him into his Passion to learn what we should seek. We go with him into his Passion that we might know ourselves even as we are known in Christ, “the Mediator of the new covenant.”
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, 2022
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2022/04/03/sermon-for-passion-sunday-11/
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