Today’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrews is the climax of the argument made in this remarkable book and so I want to explore the quite distinctive theology of the letter to the Hebrews and see what it has to say for our faith today.
As the name suggests, the letter to the Hebrews is addressed to people of the Jewish faith, a people standing in a centuries-long tradition which the author of this letter understands very well. These words are the words of a Christian from the Jewish tradition, explaining Jesus to other Jews.
It speaks therefore to a people who believe that they have a covenant with God that stretches back into the midst of time when God chose their ancestors to be his people. It speaks to a people who are familiar with a pattern of worship whereby a group of priests who are descended from other priests, enter into the holy of holies in the temple in order to make sacrifices in order to atone for the sins committed by the people and restore the proper relationship between God and his people.
So the letter to Hebrews is addressed to a people who are convinced that they need priests to make sacrifices for them so that they are not abandoned by God. And the letter says that Jesus changes all this. He changes all this because he is a new kind of priest – completely different to the ones who have gone before. What makes him different?
First of all he lived a perfect life. Not like the other priests. Jesus lived among us, endured temptation in the wilderness and did not succumb. He is without sin, whereas previous priests have been sinful just like the rest of us.
Secondly, he is not descended from other priests, in fact he is not really descended from anybody at all because he has always been since the beginning of time. And he will always be until the end of time, not like the old priests who would come and go.
And whereas the old priests would go in and out of the temple to make sacrifices to God, Jesus is permanently stationed at God’s right hand side, interceding for us for ever.
The old priests keep making new sacrifices to atone for our sins, but Jesus doesn’t have to do that. He has made the one big sacrifice for the sins of the whole world so no more sacrifices are needed. It’s done.
And whereas the old priests would sacrifice animals, the sacrifice that Jesus made once for all (and you will hear this language again when we pray over the bread and wine at the altar); the sacrifice that Jesus makes is himself. He sacrifices his totally perfect and sin-free self, for the sins of the world.
Now we have to imagine, and I am sure we can, how a people who felt they were observing a faith that had been passed down to them for many generations, a faith that required them to pay priests to sacrifice animals in a temple so that they would be forgiven by God, we have to imagine how they must have felt when they were told that this faith given to them by their ancestors was now redundant, had now been replaced by something new and better.
Because we don’t like to let our ancestors down, lightly. We feel indebted to them to an extent. We feel we are carrying on where they left off.
When my grandmother died, it fell to my uncle to sort out all her effects and when he did so he sent me some possessions of my grandfather’s that she had kept. She sent me the whistle that had been presented to him when he had graduated from teacher training college in Birmingham in 1924 and also his union badges dating from the 1950’s. One badge was for the National Union of Teachers and one for the National Association of Headteachers.
I was surprised and delighted to receive these things through the post and telephoned my uncle to thank him and in that conversation I told him that I hadn’t realised that my grandfather was a particularly union-minded man. He was a church warden for many years and more than happy to tell his grandson that he had always voted Conservative.
My uncle was able to put me straight on that. Not only had my grandfather retained his membership of the National Union of Teachers when he became a Primary School Headteacher, he had even seconded the conference motion at the union conference in the Isle of Man that committed the NUT to campaign for equal pay for women teachers.
Hearing this story and holding the whistle and the badges in my hand had quite an effect on me. I myself was a teacher and trade union rep at that time. It seemed extraordinarily important to me that I was somehow continuing in my grandfather’s footsteps. I would say it became a source of strength to me when I faced difficult situations as a teacher and as a trade union rep.
I wonder whether you have parents or grandparents or other ancestors or passed down stories about ancestors that help you to understand who you are, give you confidence when times are tough. I wonder whether there a people who have gone before you whose lives help you to know what you need to do.
We have these people as a church; people who have gone before us, whose lives help us to know what to do. There’s Philip and James, of course. There are all those people who used to worship here, whose memory is precious to us, whose lives shape ours and inspire us. There are all those people we met in other churches, all sorts of different kinds of churches, whose examples have inspired people who worship here today. There are the people who built this church and shaped it in its early days. There is a 2,000 year history of church all across the world that shapes how we worship here in this place and who we are.
All these things are things we should celebrate and our passage this morning from the letter to the Hebrews explains this to us in beautiful and inspiring way.
Our passage begins two thirds of the way through a long list of heroes from the Jewish tradition. These are all people who achieved great things, endured much, and they achieved and endured because they had faith in the promise of God.
Yet all these heroes, although they were commended for their great faith which is clear in the mighty acts which they accomplished, did not receive what was promised, because it is only with the death of Jesus and his resurrection that the promise is finally delivered upon. It is the promise of the forgiveness of the sins of the whole world. It is the promise of a permanent and eternal reconciliation with God. Only with the sacrifice made by Jesus on the cross is the promise finally delivered and we are in perfect union with God.
But that no way devalues the importance of the heroes that had gone before. Far from it. Because of what has been revealed to us in the death and resurrection of Christ, we can no see the full significance of their faithful lives. They too are reconciled with God through the intercession of Christ and so they form a cloud of witnesses for us.
This is such a beautiful image I just want us to pause for a moment over it. A cloud of witnesses is looking down on us. It’s nice just to think about that cloud. Let us think of all the people who have gone before us, willing us on. People we knew. People we have heard of. People who are well known. People nobody has heard of. They are all there in our cloud of witnesses.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
The one thing that all those people in our cloud of witnesses had was faith. They had faith to endure. They had faith to meet challenges. That is what they inspire in us – faith. And as well as faith we can have astonishing hope as we look to Jesus the perfecter of our faith, who passed through the pain and shame of the cross to sit at the right hand of God.
It’s amazing what we can do with faith like this and hope like this.
We can endure the loss of a loved one; grief that gives us intense and enduring pain. We can endure the pain that others inflict on us. We can endure the suffering that arises in a fallen world. We can care for others who are sick in body, mind or spirit. We can reach out to others who are in need even though we know they may be an ongoing burden to us. We can take a stand for justice without knowing if we will succeed. We can endure our own illnesses. We can face our own death.
This is a church where all these things are going on. The race that is set before us is being run with great perseverance in this place. May we run that race always, feeling the gaze of our cloud of witnesses and looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Amen.