Jesus is the High Priest

We are spending this Lenten season and Easter Sunday looking at the various ways that Jesus was described within the letters we find in scripture. We have found that he was the redeemer, the righteous one, the giver, and the Savior. This week we discover that he is also the High Priest.

Our scripture comes from Hebrews 5:5-10. The words will be on the screen.

5 So also Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him,

“You are my Son, today I have begotten you”;

6 as he says also in another place,

“You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.”

7 In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. 8 Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. 9 And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, 10 being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.

Please pray with me…

The book of Hebrews is written to what is believed to have been a group of Jewish Christians who were teachers. They are believed to not be Jewish by heritage, or at least they were not fluent in Hebrew, because the Old Testament quotations used are from the Greek Old Testament.

This letter was written because these teachers had swayed away from orthodoxy concerning Jesus. Another way of saying it is that they were not considered to be teaching the correct understanding of who Jesus is and what Jesus did.

The writer hoped that through this letter they would be led into a correct understanding of Jesus. In our scripture today the writer is stating that these Greek Jewish Christians should view Jesus as a high priest.

It would be true that these teachers were not from Jerusalem, but they would have an understanding of the role that the high priest played within Jewish society. They also would have known that a high priest would have come from the line of Levi therefore they would wonder how Jesus could be a high priest since he is from the line of Judah.

The writer is saying that the role of the high priest in Christianity is being represented to us through Jesus. The high priest would be considered to be the highest religious leader of the Jewish faith during his time in that position. There is no doubt that Jesus is the highest leader of the Christian faith that was fully human.

The high priest first and foremost was called by God. God may not have specifically called Jesus a priest, but he pointed out that he had an even greater connection. He called him his son. God will at other times tell the disciples, that he is his son in which he is well pleased, listen to him.

The high priest would be considered the connection between the people and God. The high priest would help keep order within the Temple and help lead people into a closer connection with God and would help separate the divide between humanity and their God.

We believe that Jesus fulfilled this role during his time on earth. First through being “the example” to those around him, meaning he was showing them how to live a life right with God, and later through being willing to die for us on the cross.

It was through his teachings that Jesus was attempting to lead those that would listen into an understanding that they had been over emphasizing the law. He wanted them to focus on grace. That it was only through God’s grace that a person could be in a close connection with God.

He points out that the law was impossible to keep. There was no way for a person to not sin. The law was needed to help them to follow the ways of God more closely. It was not meant to be something that they could keep. They would sin.

This was why they needed grace from God. They needed to trust that God would be in a relationship with them not only because of the way that they lived their lives. They had to believe they didn’t deserve and were unable to earn God’s love. He gave them forgiveness due to his love for them.

Jesus also wanted them to show grace to each other. He focused on loving those around you including those that you might consider to be your enemy. God desires for us to remove hate from our heart and to focus on love.

The high priest was the person who would make the sacrifice and go into the Holy of Holies which is where it was believed God lived within the Temple. He would sprinkle the blood of the sacrifice onto the Mercy Seat, the place that it was believed God sat, to atone for all the sins of the Jewish people.

Jesus made it so that this ritual would no longer need to be performed. He permanently allowed the divide between humanity and God to be able to be removed by each individual person. He did this through his death on the cross.

We find this within scripture represented in the physical form through the tearing of the curtain immediately following Jesus’ death. The curtain that tore in two was what divided the rest of the Temple from the Holy of Holies. The divide between God and humanity was torn away. People could become as closely connected to God as they were willing on their own.

He sacrificed himself in order to allow for the power of sin to be removed from our lives. He gave each person that desired to do so the ability to have God so closely connected to them that he could reside within them through the Holy Spirit.

Jesus is to be our highest authority. We are to have the faith to believe that he died on the cross for us in order to remove the power of sin. We are to trust him and rely on him to be beside us and help us as we face the struggles internally and externally in our lives.

We are to believe as we have spoken of over the last few weeks that Jesus is our redeemer, the one who paid the price for us upon the cross. The righteous one, the one who is able to make us right with God. The giver of life, the one who takes away the power of sin and death and allows for us to have eternal life. And last but certainly not least, our Savior, the one who sacrificed himself for us in order that we could be saved.

We have seen within this series how Jesus should play a role in each aspect of our lives. He should be the one that we are to believe cares about us, believes in us, and will never leave us. This is not only true in the case of us individually but also as a church.

We need to have the faith to believe that God is at work in all aspects of the church. He is attempting to lead and direct us as believers in Jesus into a closer relationship with him while also helping us understand our calling as a collective group of believers desiring to serve him.

The writer though did not only call Jesus a high priest. He called him a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. We find the appearance of Melchizedek in our first reading. His appearance occurs right after a huge battle has taken place that Abraham joined in order to save his nephew Lot.

After the battle he meets with two kings and one of them is Melchizedek whose name literally means “my king is righteousness.” It also states that he was “priest of God most high.’ This can be confusing for us because it could lead us to believe he is a Jewish priest.

This would not have been possible because Judaism did not have priests at this point. He is believed to be a priest of Baal which was a Canaanite god that we often within the Old Testament find the Jewish people at times choosing to worship.

So, we have the writer of Hebrews choosing a priest of a foreign god who often led people away from the one true God, to be the one that they believes Jesus is similar too. What else we know about Melchizedek is that he was king of Salem. This is believed to be the area in and around Jerusalem. The area that will eventually become the capitol of Judaism.

We have a person who by name matches Jesus due to his name referring to righteousness. He also like Jesus is a king who is also a priest. He resides in the area that is most closely associated with the one true God.

We have in Melchizedek a person that based off of what we know about Jesus most closely resembles Jesus in his name, titles, and location. This alone could be enough reason for the writer of Hebrews to unite these two together.

The writer also adds another dimension to the resemblance in chapter 7 of Hebrews. He points out that we do not have a time frame in which Melchizedek reigned. The writer states that this is also like Jesus in that Jesus also will reign forever.

This combination of non-Jewish and Jewish to form Jesus as our high priest has the writer of Hebrews wanting these teachers to understand who Jesus is. He is attempting to make the point to these teachers that Jesus is Jewish, but he was not preaching the same message that the Jewish people had been taught in the past.

He wants them to teach those that are their students that Jesus offers us a different way of looking at God. A king that is the righteous one. The king who desires to help each one of us become the best person that we can be.

The king whose chosen people are those that are willing to believe that he is their Messiah. It does not matter Jew, or Gentile. Slave or free. Male or Female. All our accepted into the kingdom of God.

Why should this matter to us. It should matter because we have access to the King of kings and to the high priest of our faith. It would be my guess that not everyone would have access to the high priest during his time in that position. It would be my expectation that not everyone would be able to speak to the king whenever they wanted.

We have been given that access. We are allowed to speak to our high priest, our king whenever we desire. We often will do this through prayer. We also know that our high priest listens and responds to our prayers.

We should feel blessed to have a high priest that desires to be in communication with us. Who wants to walk beside us through the good and bad times that we may face in our lives. A high priest that loves us so much that he is willing to die for us in order to be closely connected to us.

We have a message to share with those around us. A message of love. a message of joy. A message of peace. A message of hope. We can let those we meet know that we know of someone that desires to be a part of their lives and wants to help them through life’s struggles.

He wants to be the king of their lives. He wants to be their high priest. Jesus desires to be a part of all parts of our lives.

Let us pray…