Christ our High Priest

 

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.  Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.  --Hebrews 4:14-16

With the holidays rapidly approaching, it won't be long until we are inundated with Christmas music, media, and movies.  One of the movies I hope to avoid again this year is the adaptation of the Dr. Seuss book, The Grinch.  The protagonist is a monster, with a heart "two sizes too small."  We eventually see the redemption of this foul fellow, but not before he is described in song.

You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch
You really are a heel,
You're as cuddly as a cactus,
You're as charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch.

You're a bad banana with a greasy black peel!

You're a monster, Mr. Grinch,
Your heart's an empty hole,
Your brain is full of spiders
You have garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch.

I wouldn't touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole!

The song goes on interminably, but I want to point out the first few lines.  "You really are a heel."  This verbal slight has fallen out of use recently, but back in the day being described as a "heel" meant that you treat others badly.  A "heel" is an inconsiderate or untrustworthy person.  We've all known our share of "heels", those really contemptible people.  If we're being honest, we have all been that person at some point in our lives.

This is the kind of people that Jesus came to save.  It is the kind of people whom we are called to minister to.  We share Jesus with contemptible people because that's who we live among.  Just like Jesus did.  I want us to look at Psalm 41 with the idea of Jesus ministering to contemptible people as a great high priest.

Blessed is the one who considers the poor.  In the day of trouble the Lord delivers him; the Lord protects him and keeps him alive; he is called blessed in the land; you do not give him up to the will of his enemies.  The Lord sustains him on his sickbed; in his illness you restore him to full health.  As for me, I said, "O Lord, be gracious to me; heal me, for I have sinned against you."  My enemies say of me in malice, "When will he die, and his name perish?"  And when one comes to see me, he utters empty words, while his heart gathers iniquity; when he goes out, he tells it abroad.  All who hate me whisper together about me; they imagine the worst for me.  They say, "A deadly thing is poured out on him; he will not rise again from where he lies."  Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me.  But you, O Lord, be gracious to me, and raise me up, that I may repay them.  By this I know that you delight in me; my enemy will not shout in triumph over me.  But you have upheld me because of my integrity, and set me in your presence forever.  Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting!  Amen and amen.

 It doesn't take much to see Jesus in this Psalm.  The Sermon On The Mount starts with Jesus saying, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God."  Indeed, when Jesus went public with his earthly ministry, "He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor'." (Luke 4:17-18).  So Jesus can be called "blessed" because He was the One who considered the poor.  

Looking further, we see that the Lord protected Him and kept Him alive.  After hearing Jesus profess to be the Chosen One, religious leaders cried foul.  "When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.  And they rose up and drove Him out of the town and brought Him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff.  But passing through their midst, He went away."  (Luke 4:28-30).  Even so, the Scribes and Pharisees looked for ways to shut Him up, to trap Him in His words, fulfilling verses 7 and 8 of Psalm 41: "All who hate me whisper together about me; they imagine the worst for me.  They say, 'A deadly thing is poured out on him; he will not rise again from where he lies'."

Finally, we see the culmination of fulfillment in verse 9.  "Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me."  Doesn't this describe Judas exactly?  Which is why Jesus said in John 13:18, "I am not speaking to all of you; I know whom I have chosen.  But the Scripture will be fulfilled, 'He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me'."

The phrase "close friend" is literally "man of my shalom"--that is, a person with whom I was at peace.  This "friend," however, turned for.  When woodenly translated, the Hebrew for "lifted up his heel" is "made great with his heel."  Whatever that idiom precisely describes--scholars are uncertain--it is certainly not good.  The "heel" is frequently associated with "deceit" or "cheating," as in the story of the "Heel Man" himself, Jacob (Gen. 25:26; 27:36; cf Jer. 9:4).  And we cannot forget that already in Genesis 3:15, the heel is associated with the serpentine venom of the evil one.  --Chad Bird The Christ Key, page 170.

Perhaps the American idiom "he's such a heel" has biblical roots.  Yet we remember the very first Old Testament prophecy about Jesus when God spoke to the serpent, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." (Genesis 3:15).  In fulfillment of this, Romans 16:20 says, "The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.  The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you."  Hebrews 2:14 says, "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil."  Revelation 20:1-3,10 says, "Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain.  And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended.  After that he must be released for a little while....And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever."

But what of the high priestly role of Jesus, and how does it relate to Psalm 41:4?  "As for me, I said, 'O Lord, be gracious to me; heal me, for I have sinned against you'."  Surely this verse does not refer to Jesus, the one who "was tempted as we are, yet without sin," does it?  You'd be surprised.

In the Old Testament a system of animal sacrifices was established.  A lamb without blemish was offered to be killed in lieu of the offerer.  In essence, the lamb took on the sin of the human with the result that the sinful human was made clean or forgiven.

This is the only way to make sense of  John the Baptist's words, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world" (John 1:29).  John's listeners would have understood this because they were accustomed to thinking of sacrificial lambs "taking away" sins in some way.  In Psalm 41, and in other Psalms like it (e.g., Psalm 38), the Messiah is speaking as one who is free of blemish, without sin, yet also as the sacrificial victim who will take upon himself the sin of the world.  "He had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth," Isaiah says, yet he was "like a lamb that is led to the slaughter," for "he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed" (Isa. 53:9, 7, 5).  In short, what happened at Israel's altar teaches us how to pray Israel's Psalms.  --Chad Bird The Christ Key, page 171.

But wait, there's more!

When the office of the high priest was implemented and described in Exodus 28, the vestments included two onyx stones that each bore the names of six of the tribes of Israel.  That's how the high priest bore "their names before the Lord on his two shoulders for remembrance" (Exodus 28:12).  Also, on the breastpiece were four rows of precious stones, three stones per row.  These stones represented the twelve tribes (see Exodus 28:21) when Aaron, the first high priest, made a sacrifice for the people.

All Israel melted into Aaron when he stood before God.  This one man was the nation.  He was a sinner himself, to be sure, but because he was also the singular symbol of the nation before God, he also bore the sins of the nation before the Lord, even sins that he himself had not personally committed.  We see this ritual enacted on the Day of Atonement, when the high priest was to lay his hands on the head of the goat and to "confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins" (Lev. 16:21).  The priest confessed not only his own sins but the sins of others, "all the iniquities of the people of Israel."  When Christ came as our great and final high priest, he too was the nation.  Indeed, he was all humanity reduced to one man.  Though he had no sins of his own to confess, he confessed all the iniquities, all the transgressions, all the sins of every individual, everywhere, for all time, on the great and climactic Day of Atonement known as Good Friday.  What he does in the Psalms, when he prays, "I have sinned against you" (41:4), is pray as our high priest.  --Bird, page 172

2 Corinthians 5:21 says, "For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."  Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

However, the question could arise as to how one is to think about the fact that Christ also prays these Psalms with us.  How can the sinless one ask for forgiveness?  In no way other than he can, as the sinless one, bear the sins of the world and be made sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21).  Not for the sake of his sins, but for the sake of our sins, which he has taken upon himself and for which he suffers, does Jesus pray for the forgiveness of sins.  He positions himself entirely for us.  He wants to be a man before God as we are.  So he prays also the most human of all prayers with us and thereby demonstrates precisely that he is the true Son of God.  --Bonhoeffer, Psalms, page 51.

Thus we are redeemed.  We cannot claim that we are anything other than vile, contemptible, inconsiderate, untrustworthy sinners separated from a holy God; yet by the sacrificial and high priestly prayer of Christ Jesus, we are cleansed and forgiven.  And by the grace of God, we can then go and minister to all the other heels in this world.