March 18, 2018 “Melchizedek” – Hebrews 5:5-10

Hebrews 5:5-10
“Melchizedek”
March 18, 2018 – Fifth Sunday in Lent

He drops a slobbery tennis ball in your hands. You wind up, throw it as far as you can, and that furry little guy charges after it. In a moment he’s back, tail wagging with joy, ready to do it all over again. Almost every dog owner has played this game. You throw the ball or the stick or whatever, and your pet jumps over furniture, runs through mud and weeds, even dives into the water to retrieve your thrown offering. She gleefully grabs it and rushes back to return it to you. Your dog, at least, could play fetch all day.

That dog-like experience is just what God means for us to enjoy. Our text from Hebrews this morning centers on the idea of priesthood. A priest makes sacred offerings. A priest brings back to God what God has given. You and I are meant to be priests.

God placed human beings in the heart of His beautiful creation, “in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it,” we read in Genesis 2:15 early this year. Take what God has given and offer it back to Him in joyful work and care. That’s what we were made for, but we’ve failed. Out of need and greed, we have taken God’s gift of a beautiful world and run off with it, ripping it apart for own ends, and offering back pollution and extinction and ugliness. We have failed in our priesthood for the earth.

We were also made to be priests for other human beings. Adam was given Eve to care for and to help him and to walk together with God. They received children to nurture and lead back to God. Siblings were made to love each other and love God together.

That priesthood of humanity has also failed, from the start. Adam and Eve led each other away from God. In his very attempt to make an offering to God, Cain failed in priesthood for Abel, murdering him and saying “Am I my brother’s keeper?” denying his priestly responsibility for his brother. Like disobedient dogs, we’ve taken the tender sticks of each other’s lives and slunk away to quietly chew our family or friends to shreds.

Most of the history of religion is an attempt to repair our broken human priesthood. Throughout the ages, we’ve recognized our failure to join in the joyous game of fetch that God meant for us. So the role of priest has been institutionalized, assigned. God allowed and directed this. As we also read this year, Moses appointed priests in Israel, designated to do what God means for us all to do, to offer back to Him pure, holy and beautiful sacrifices of the blessings He has given us. But as we will read more about this fall, that specially appointed priesthood was as faulty and corrupt as the general human priesthood.

Our priesthood fails because we all, including whatever priests we appoint, are sinful. We’ve failed to play the joyful game of receiving and giving back. We’ve disobeyed. Psalm 119, verses 9 and 10, told us this morning that the way to be pure is to live according to God’s word, to not stray from His commands. But we all run off to our own ways instead of returning with our priestly offerings to God. As Jeremiah 31:32 said, we’ve broken God’s covenant, played our own games instead of his.

So the writer to the Hebrews says in verse 3, just before our text, that human priests had to offer sacrifices for their own sins. They failed as much and as often as those they were supposed to represent. Verse 4 tells us that no one can take the honor of priesthood on himself. You can only be a priest by the call of God. No one can make himself a priest because, in general, no one is really worthy of it.

That all means that religion, in and of itself, is not going to restore what we’ve lost. Even by choosing and appointing priestly representatives to do what we should have been doing all along, offering God’s gifts back to Him, we still are not what we were meant to be. It’s like thinking we can all become athletic by sending off a few fine physical specimens to the Olympics every few years. Even if they win, and most of them won’t, their performances won’t make you and I into athletes.

Neither does the performance of sacrifices by a religious athlete, by a priest or pastor or whatever you call it, transform the rest of humanity into the priests God intended us all to be. As most of you know way too well, clergy have their own failures. Even if they succeed a bit in living according to God’s word, it doesn’t change everyone else.

That’s why our text today opens verse 5 with the one exception to all this priesthood gone bad. Christ Himself became a priest. Like anyone else, He did not take it upon Himself. Even though He deserved it and was more qualified than anyone, He became our high priest by the call of God. Jesus accepted God’s desire that He offer back to God the gifts we have all been given. But Jesus is a priest with a difference.

The writer validates the extraordinary and different priesthood of Jesus by quoting two psalms in verses 5 and 6. In verse 5, a quotation from Psalm 2:7, we learn that Jesus is not only priest, but the very Son of God. In verse 6, from Psalm 110:4, we’re told that He is not only a priest, Jesus is a priest forever, “in the order of Melchizedek.” By making His own Son our priest, and by making Him our priest forever, God created a way to bring you and I back into the priesthood we were always meant to have.

God knew we weren’t playing the game right anymore. We’re like bad dogs told to go fetch. We keep running off with the ball and doing what we want with the blessings God has thrown to us. So in Christ, God submitted Himself, as it says in verse 7. God in Jesus humiliated Himself, like a man who teaches his dog tricks by doing them himself, sitting up and begging, rolling over, and fetching the stick and carrying it home in his own mouth.

God sent Himself in His Son Jesus. He came running into our world to find and fetch back those things God expected you and I to offer back to Him. God’s Son became His own priest. In other words, God let His own Child become a dog.

That’s why in verse 7 we find the author of Hebrews describing what we are remembering in Lent, the sufferings of Jesus. The divine Son, God’s own child, came down to where we are and offered up agonizing pleas to God above. “Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death.” Jesus the Priest offered up His own tearful agony in the garden and on the Cross.

What Jesus ultimately gave back to God was what you and I should have been giving all along, obedience. Verse 8 says, “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” It was humble, dog-like obedience that Christ gave back to God, obedience, as Philippians 2:8 tells us, to the point of death, even an excruciating, humiliating death by public execution. God’s Son came running to grab hold of that stick we call the Cross and to carry it back to God in faithful obedience.

The good news for you and me is that what Jesus came to fetch for God was not just His own obedience, but ours too. Humbly dying on the Cross, Jesus offered not just what God expected of Him, but what God expected of us. Jesus died in perfect obedience, but verse 9 explains that, “having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” What Jesus fetched for God in the end, was you and me.

As our perfect priest, Jesus not only caught hold of the stick of the Cross to bring it back to God, He caught hold of us as well. When He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, Jesus Christ was trotting home with you and I held gently between His teeth. Jesus was bringing us home to God. That’s why He said in our Gospel text in John 12:32, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

Jesus is our high priest. He sacrifices to God all the obedience we’ve failed to offer up in our own priestly roles. Whatever and whoever God has tossed our way that we have failed to carry back to Him, Jesus catches up in His own dash for the Cross and triumphantly carries them home to His Father in His resurrection. Whatever you and I were meant to give, Jesus gave it. Whatever sacrifice you and I were to make, Jesus made it. Whatever duty you and I were meant to perform, Jesus performed it. Whatever we were supposed to fetch, Jesus fetched it, and in doing so He fetched us. He drew us to Himself.

Humbly, patiently, obediently, Jesus played the good dog for all of us who’ve been bad dogs. As our perfect Priest, He played the game God has always wanted to play with you and me. For us, Jesus returned all the blessings we’ve been given but have run off with and ruined. He took those blessings and sacrificed them back. He dropped the soggy mess of our lives back into the hands of God. And by doing so, Jesus brought us home. He saved us.

In The Gospel According to Peanuts, Robert Short argues, as I’m suggesting today, that a dog is not a bad image for Jesus Christ and especially for a Christian.[1] There is something about the humility and faithfulness and loyalty of a dog that evokes the very best of humanity, the very kind of beings you and I were meant to be. Yet I need to tweak this canine metaphor just a bit to tell the whole story of how the priesthood of Jesus works to bring us salvation, to bring us back to God.

Every smart aleck sophomore will tell you that in English “dog” spelled backwards is “God.” But if we’re going to play with this image of Christ as faithful four-legged friend, we need to play it the whole way. In His dog-like humility, Jesus hid His divine nature. Jesus is a priest forever because He is the One who is forever, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. The Dog who came to fetch us for God is Himself God. And as God, Jesus is eternal. What He is and does is forever. His priestly offering of obedience in our place goes on and on, without end. “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

I’m not too afraid to play with this image of Jesus as a dog fetching us for God, because the author of Hebrews played around himself. This whole business of Melchizedek is a riff on the fact that in Genesis 14:18, the mysterious figure of Melchizedek, “priest of God Most High,” simply appears in the narrative to give Abraham bread and wine and receive the offering of a tithe back from Abraham. We’re told nothing about Melchizedek, where he came from or how he became a priest of God or how he ended up.

So over in Hebrews 7:3, the writer imagines it’s as if Melchizedek has no father or mother, no genealogy, no beginning or end, as if he’s somehow eternal. It’s just imaginative fooling around in regard to Melchizedek, but it’s the sober truth about Jesus. He’s “dog” spelled backward. He’s God. He really is eternal. His priesthood really is forever. Which means He really can be the source of eternal salvation for you and me.

It’s almost enough today, to leave you with this image of the God-dog Jesus Christ coming to retrieve you and me. Francis Thompson picked it up in his poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” imagining Jesus like a dog pursuing each of us, wanting in relentless love and tenderness to catch us and carry us safely home. If you take nothing else away than that, that God has come after you to save you, come after you with all the tenacity of a faithful dog willing to endure all sorts of suffering and humiliation to bring you home, then that’s almost enough. I pray you will respond to Him. I pray you will let Jesus catch you up in gentle jaws of grace and bring you back to the Father who is waiting to receive you.

But there’s just a bit more to see today. God’s intent all along was for you and I, and all human beings, to be priests. That was how He designed us, to continually and eternally offer back to Him the good things He gives us. That’s where we truly find joy, playing that game with Him. He throws out blessing after blessing and we retrieve and offer them back in loving and obedient sacrifice.

So it’s not just Jesus who is the priest, who is the dog in this game. Verse 9 says He “became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” That’s how it’s supposed to turn out. As Jesus offers back to God the obedience we’ve failed to offer, He carries us back to God to begin a new life of our own obedience. Just as in our text from Ephesians 2 last week, the grace we receive in Jesus is meant to blossom into our own good works. By fetching us for God, Jesus enables and teaches us to fetch for God ourselves, to be the priests we’re meant to be.

So please think today about your own priesthood, your own sacred game of fetch that you were meant to play. What might you retrieve from the field of your own life and give back to the God who saves you? It begins with simple obedience, offering back a change in your actions, the forsaking of bad habits and the cultivating of good ones. The first thing to fetch back to God is our own selves.

You may also need to offer someone else back to God. That’s part of learning to forgive. You let go of anger or jealousy or resentment and simply place a person who has hurt you in God’s hands rather than in the grip of your own teeth. Or it may be that you just can’t find a way to help someone you love and care about. They’ve run off with their own lives in wrong and harmful directions. All you can do, all God wants you to do, is to play the dog, play the priest, and offer them back to Him in prayer.

You can also offer this world back to God. We were meant to be priests of creation, stewards for God of everything He has given us, whether it’s houses and cars or mountains and rivers. Christ died and rose to fetch both us and our world home to God. We can join in the game by using our possessions and our corners of creation in loving and faithful service. We can join with others to care for this planet He gave us and give it back to Him clean and beautiful.

We often say we give back to God by offering some of our money. That’s true. But you also serve Him by giving back to Him your talents, whether it’s writing a poem or digging a trench, planting a flower or planning a meal. We will offer back to God the guests He sends us this week by caring for families who need a place to sleep. Whatever you have, it will be better, will be more fun to have it, when you find a way to carry it back to God.

I said at the beginning that your dog could play that game forever. He or she will keep bringing that ball or stick back for you to throw until your arm hurts and you are too tired to play any longer. But our God never gets tired. He means that precious game to go on forever. His Son Jesus is like Melchizedek, a priest forever. He will carry us back to God when we are too weary or sore to carry ourselves. He will gently bring our world back to its Maker when we have exhausted our own strength to care for it. And He will renew us as faithful priests even after we’ve failed Him again and again.

Let’s be priests, priests like Melchizedek, priests like our great High Priest Jesus. Let’s not get tired too soon of bringing joyful offerings of our world and of each other to our Lord and Master. He loves us enough to keep throwing it out there for us forever. Let us play our role, let us keep bringing it back to Him. Let us be priests. Let us go fetch for God.

Amen.

[1] (New York: Bantam Books, 1968). See pp. 86-101.