Lent
5B 2015
Father Adam Trambley
March 22, 2015 St.John’s Sharon
You are a priest
forever, according to the order of Melchizedek. Now Melchizedek is one of
the more interesting Bible characters.
He has one short cameo in Genesis and is mentioned Psalm 110. Then seemingly out of nowhere he shows up in
the letter to the Hebrews. So here’s his
story.
Abram, before his name gets changed to Abraham, is hanging
out by the Oaks of Mamre. His nephew Lot
was living in Sodom, before it was destroyed.
Four local kings decided to get together and attack five other kings,
including the king of Sodom. Sodom and
its allies lost, and the attackers carried away Lot and all his people and all
his stuff. Someone who escaped the
attack finds Abram. So Abram takes all
his people, defeats the four kings, rescues Lot and his family, and gets back all
the stuff that had belonged to the other five kings. Then Melchizedek shows up.
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Melchizedek is King of Salem. He didn’t participate in the fight, but is
called a priest of God Most High. He
wasn’t Jewish. Nobody knew his people. All that we know is that his name means,
literally, “King of righteousness,” and he is king of Salem, which means,
literally, “King of peace.”
Righteousness and peace are good things to be king of, and we can
already see how this might point ahead to Jesus. Melchizedek brings out bread and wine, which
you might remember Jesus used, as well.
Then he blesses Abram, and Abram gave him one-tenth of everything.
The letter to the Hebrews notes that in this way Melchizedek
is more important that Abram, because he blessed Abram, not the other way
around, and Abram gave tithes to Melchizedek, recognizing him as a holy man of
God Most High. I’d make a couple
additional notes on Abram’s tithing.
First, Abram tithed not only his money, but he also tithed the stuff of
the five kings that he had reclaimed. Only
after he had tithed on it did he returned every remaining cent, or whatever the
equivalent was in those days, to the five kings and kept nothing for himself.
But first he tithed it. Second, he
tithed the first fruits of what he had received back to God through the
instrument of God Most High who appeared before him. Melchizedek served God most high, and he
happened to have shown up with a blessing, and Abram tithed to him. He gave his offering to God through some foreigner who was king of a different
country. Abram wasn’t going to benefit
directly from any later spiritual services from Melchizedek, or get to vote for
Melchizedek’s vestry members, or have a say on what colors would get woven into
the oriental rug in Melchizedek’s tent.
He just gave one-tenth of everything back to God because God had given
it to him and that is what God asks us to do.
Just like for us today, how and where we give is much less important
than the fact that we do give.
And that is the story of Melchizedek. Or at least it would be the story, except
that Psalm 110 says that “You are priest forever, according to the order of
Melchizedek” shortly after it says, “The LORD said to my Lord, ‘sit at my right
hand’” and “Princely state has been yours from the day of your birth; in the
beauty of holiness have I begotten you.”
If you think it sounds like the Psalmist is talking about Jesus, we read
the same idea in Hebrews. The question
then becomes what it might mean to be a priest according to the order of
Melchizedek, and what implications that holds for us.
Hebrews talks about Jesus being a high priest after the
order of Melchizedek as one who made one sacrifice for all time to bring us back
to God. According to the Old Testament
law, the priest mediates the covenant between God and God’s people. He takes
the people’s prayers to God and lets the people know God’s commandments. The priests also made sacrifices of animals
as atonement for the sins of the people.
Jesus is the great high priest that makes atonement for all people by
his one sacrifice of himself once offered.
Unlike earthly priests under the old covenant, who had to keep offering
sacrifices again and again, Jesus offered the perfect sacrifice, himself, and
no other sacrifices are ever needed to atone for sins. Through Jesus passion, death and
resurrection, atonement is made for the sins of the whole world, and, as we
hear in our reading from Hebrews this morning, Jesus is “the source of eternal
salvation for all who obey him.”
For the argument being made in the book of Hebrews, being a
priest like Melchizedek is important because Melchizedek was a priest, but
wasn’t a descendent of Aaron, the first Jewish High Priest, and he wasn’t under
the law at all, having lived long before Moses was even born. Yet if Melchizedek was a high priest
recognized by Abram, than we can imagine other high priests not descended from
Aaron or keeping all the sacrifices laid out by the Law of Moses. Jesus can be a priest according to the order
of Melchizedek, instead of a priest according to the order of Aaron. But Jesus is like Melchizedek in another way,
and this other similarity appears in our gospel today and is relevant to us. Like Melchizedek, Jesus served as a priest of
God to people who were not his own. Just like Melchizedek allows the foreigner
Abram to enter a relationship with God, Jesus allows those who are of a
different people to enter a relationship with God through his High Priestly
ministry.
On the one hand, Jesus comes down from heaven. He is the eternal Word through whom all
things were made. That Word becoming
flesh and dwelling among us, taking the form of a slave like us, means that
Jesus work is with creatures a lot more different from him than Abram was from
Melchizedek. But on the other hand,
Jesus is also very clearly acting as high priest to people who were not the
Jewish people that he came from on his mother’s side. The beginning of John’s Gospel says that he
came to his own, but his own did not know him.
Then in today’s Gospel passage we have a reading at a key turning point
in Jesus’ ministry.
Our reading is from chapter twelve of John’s gospel. In chapter eleven, Jesus raised Lazarus from
the dead. This caused many people to
believe in him, and worried the authorities.
The Jewish officials are concerned that Jesus is becoming too famous and
will stir up enough trouble that Rome will take away their power. So they decide to kill Jesus, and also to
kill Lazarus, which seems highly unfair since he just came back from the dead. Then in today’s reading, something else
happens that cements Jesus’ understanding that it is now time for him to be
lifted up to his glorious death and resurrection. The trigger is not what the chief priests and
scribes think. Instead, some Greeks come
to Philip, a disciple of Jesus with a Greek name, and ask to see Jesus. Philip gets Andrew and together they go to
Jesus. Jesus response is, “The hour has
come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and
dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.” Not only Jews, but also non-Jews – the
Greeks, the sheep Jesus has in other folds – have heard his voice and have come
to him. So now the hour has come for
Jesus to bless the people he has humbled and emptied himself to become one of,
the people that include both his own Jewish people and the people of every
race, tribe, nation, and tongue. Like
Melchizedek, Jesus is going outside of his own to reconcile other people to
God, and Jesus is doing it at great cost to himself. Jesus ministry is that of the grain of wheat
falling to the ground to give life, and it happens after the Greeks come
looking for him.
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| From the Chapel of St. Paul in Damascus |
We are all called to follow Jesus’ example and be priests
according to the order of Melchizedek.
The Great Commission instructs us to baptize all nations, teaching them
what Jesus commands. We are called to
use our own particular gifts to help bring people closer to God in whatever
ways we can. Like Jesus and Melchizedek,
many of those people we are called to help will not be our own people. Now who those other people will be is
probably different for each of us. Some
folks here might be called to minister to people outside of our networks of
family and friends. Other folk might be
called to help people outside of the church know about God – in fact if you are
going to evangelize people, we almost always have to do that work outside of Sunday
morning church. That work might entail
working with Randy to build relationships with guests at the Saturday lunches,
or going to Cana’s Corner on Friday nights, or volunteering with West Hill
Ministries or in other non-churchy places where we meet new people and begin to
love them the way Jesus loved them.
Still others here might actually be called to be part of a mission trip
to another city or another nation. If we
are going to spread the gospel everywhere, at least somebody here is certainly
called to reach people with different languages and cultures in this country
and in other countries.
When we follow the examples of Melchizedek and Jesus to go
out to others in ministry, we will also end up following Jesus’ example to be a
grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies so that it bears much
fruit. In some extreme cases, this dying
is literal, and many people are being persecuted and killed throughout the
world for sharing the good news of Jesus in oppressive lands. But more often this dying is a dying to self
as we have to give up a whole lot of what we want if we are going to be able to
love people in another situation. Just
spending time with new people can make many of our introverts uncomfortable,
and people can seem scared to death of talking with strangers. To help others find God, we usually have to
let go of things that might be important to us, or comfortable to us, or the
way we like things, so that we can meet people where they are, in their comfort
zones, and meet their needs instead of our own.
Those sacrifices are part of planting of the seeds of our own lives that
have the potential to bear fruit thirty, sixty and a hundred-fold for the
Kingdom of God.
What God Most High spoke to Jesus, he also says to each of
us. “You are my beloved child” and “You
are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.” Do not hesitate to go to other people to help
them find God, and do not be afraid to fall to the ground and die, just like
Jesus, in order to bear much fruit.
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