Lent 5 Sermon on Incarnation in Hebrews 5:5-10 for Preaching Class

This is my second sermon for my second year seminary preaching class. See my first sermon on John 6 here. This sermon was preached on April 7, 2014, for the students in my class small group. The text is Hebrews 5:5-10, a portion of the writer to the Hebrews’ discussion of Jesus as high priest.

 Who is Jesus? That seems like a simple question that any Christian ought to be able to easily answer. But when we start to try to describe just who Jesus is, it can get complicated fast. We all know the simple answer – Jesus is God.

Or, especially in this group, we can make it much more complex sounding and use phrases like, “Jesus is the pre-existent Christ present at creation, the eternal Word through whom God is reconciling all things to Godself.” Like I said, it can get complicated.

Another way to try to understand Jesus is by analogy, by comparing Jesus to something else. That’s what’s going on here. The text I just read is one small portion of a much larger argument in the letter to the Hebrews, from an author trying to answer this central question of Jesus’ identity.

We come in in the middle of an extended analogy of Jesus as high priest. Part of the analogy is that confusing reference to Jesus being designated by God as a priest in the order of Melchizedek. If you don’t know much about Melchizedek, you’re not alone. This is one of those bits of the Bible I’m pretty sure no one completely understands, that we don’t talk about very much.

Melchizedek is a mysterious figure who shows up in the story of Abraham in Genesis. Although he’s a priest of a Canaanite god, he blesses Abraham (Abram at the time) and Abram gives an offering to Melchizedek.

In today’s passage from Hebrews, the mention of Melchizedek is part of a larger point about the validity of God’s new covenant in Christ that the author doesn’t get to until chapter 7. The point is that Jesus has the authority to be the high priest, despite not being from the tribe of priests – the Levites – because Melchizedek’s order of priests pre-dates and is superior to the Levitical order.

Basically, the point is that Jesus has the authority to serve in the role of the high priest. In Jewish tradition, the high priest serves as an intermediary between the people and God. The priest is a person set apart from the community to go to God to intercede for them. Since Jesus is both God and human, he can act as the go-between, the mediator that we as humans need.

In some ways, it’s easy to speak about God as distant, as all powerful, as something like the “big guy upstairs.” If you’re like me, when you think of the voice of God, you think of this booming voice from James Earl Jones, or maybe Morgan Freeman. God is so powerful, so distant, that of course we need a mediator.

And Jesus is our mediator.

But he’s more than that. A danger of this analogy, of thinking of Jesus as the high priest is that we can forget he himself is also God.

So, in the middle of describing Jesus as a high priest, the author quotes from Psalm 2, the verse spoken from the heavens at Jesus’ baptism. “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.”

Instead of just choosing someone to be a mediator, God has personally come to live among us in the incarnation.

We throw that word incarnation around a lot when we talk about Jesus. It’s a great word. It’s so…fleshy. Meaty, even, like the Spanish word for meat, carne. That’s pretty much what it means.         God in the flesh.       As my home pastor likes to say, Jesus is God with skin on. It’s like another church word we use around Christmas time.      Immanuel   –   God with us.

We like to talk about God’s glory and power. We want what we’ll hear about next week, on Palm Sunday. We want the parades, the grandeur. We want to talk about a God who does miracles, feeds massive crowds of people, walks on water, heals the sick, and raises the dead. But the same God who did miracles did more than that in his human life. He experienced it all, culminating in his suffering and dying on the cross.

In so much of life, that’s what we need. We need someone who relates to what we’re going through here, now, in this world.

A few verses before this reading, the text reads, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet he did not sin.”

Because of Jesus, God understands whatever it is that you’re going through. I found out this week that my grandmother starts chemo tomorrow. Maybe some of you have been there. In times like that, you need a God who understands, a God who has come and lived in our world, lived our experience.

And that’s what we have. Verses 8 and 9 say “Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” Perfect? That’s an odd choice of word. It doesn’t mean we should suffer so we can become better. Rather, in the Greek this was originally written in, it means perfection in the sense of completeness. What an interesting idea. The Son of God, the eternal Word, the Christ, becomes complete, becomes perfect by experiencing human suffering.

God doesn’t do incarnation half way. For God to experience human life, for us to have a God who understands, that requires suffering. That requires a God who died, like we do. Only One who has gone through everything that we could go through can be the source of eternal salvation. For Jesus to be our high priest and represent us, he has to go through our sufferings.

These verses talk about Jesus offering up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and that God heard his cries. That’s disturbing, but it’s also comforting.

It’s disturbing that God can suffer. We worship a God who has died horrifically on a cross. But at the same time as we’re disturbed by the scandal of worshiping a God who came and suffered, we can also be comforted.

We can be comforted by the reality of a God who came to be subject to weakness, a God who came to experience the messiness that we live in. A God who lives in the junk of our lives, yet brings resurrection. A God who personally became our high priest, our mediator, who willingly became subject to weaknesses, in order to be with us.

We’re getting ready for the celebration of Easter in a few weeks. In Easter, we will celebrate the resurrection, the awesome miracle of Christ’s victory over death. We’ll see the promise of hope for our future, that we too can be raised by God with Christ.

But right now we’re here in the church season of Lent. Being in Lent is important too. Lent speaks to the reality of life here and now, in this world.

The season of Lent has a focus on the suffering of Jesus, on the passion of Christ. But in a way, Lent is really a celebration of the incarnation.

It’s a celebration that the all-powerful God who created you has chosen to come be with you. Instead of miraculously removing your suffering, God comes and joins in it.

Lent is a celebration of incarnation. God coming in flesh.

That’s who Jesus is. That’s who God is. And that’s good news.