Passion Sunday
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse….You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising [sic] nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
These words come from the great Anglican writer, C.S. Lewis in his work Mere Christianity. And though Lewis never swam the Tiber, he certainly was a man faith in Christ.
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| C.S. Lewis |
The author of the “Letter to the Hebrews” starts by contrasting the sacrificial system of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the sacrifice of Christ in the Heavenly Jerusalem, the temple built without hands. The Aaronic priests would offer sacrifices throughout the year of many types: atonement, peace offerings, grain offerings, thanksgiving sacrifices, votive sacrifices (those connected to vows made), etc. Goats, sheep, bulls, lambs, grain, wine, oil: all these things would be offered according to what God revealed through Moses and the sacrificial system expressed in the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And these did bring about ritual purity: the cleansing of the flesh.
But our Lord offered Himself not with a dumb animal’s blood, but with His own Precious Blood, the blood of a truly unblemished lamb. And His sacrifice, made once for all, did not only cleanse the flesh, but cleansed the conscience, the soul. All sacrifices were meant to bring a person into right relationship with God. They were vicarious ways of saying that the person offering was giving up his life to offer it to God. Christ’s sacrifice was not vicarious, though, in the sense that He offered something else. He offered Himself, and in Him all who would be united to Him. And it wasn’t only to temporarily bring us into right relationship with God, but to change us to be like Christ, adopted sons and daughters in the Son of God, which opened for us eternal union with God in heaven, the ultimate goal of right relationship with God.
In the Gospel, too, our Lord distinguishes Himself from all others who came before Him in Judaism. And the Jews notice it. They ask if Christ is greater than Abraham and the prophets. And through the back and forth, the Lord affirms that He is greater, leading up to the climactic phrase of this passage, “Before Abraham came to be, I AM.” This hearkens us back to the great Theophany to Moses on Mt. Sinai, when God reveals His Name to Moses, “I AM WHO AM.” And the Jews recognize this, because they immediately pick up stones to stone the Lord to death, the penalty for blasphemy. Christ claims not simply to be a great rabbi who authentically interprets the Law and the Prophets, but the one about whom the Law and the Prophets referred, the source of their power and authority.
What does this have to do with us? Well, while we’re all here, so we must acknowledge in some sense that Christ is different than any other religious leader, it is very easy in our mind and practices to treat Him simply like another guru. It is easy to think simply of laws that we need to follow and prayers we need to say, without recognizing the adoration that we owe to the Lord and that we are not simply listening to another faith teacher, but dealing with the Lord who made all the universe.
It is also very easy to pick and choose the religious leaders and minds to whom we want to listen. We like this cardinal versus that one; this author more than another; give one blogger more credence than a different blogger. And faith always come through someone else, so others participate in fostering our faith. But we can so often get caught up in lower-level rules and practices, without having any real reference to Christ and what He specifically teaches. Especially as Americans, we have recently tended to read religious leaders and what they promote through a political lens. Do we go back to what Christ reveals, He who is God, and evaluate religious leaders and authors by those standards, rather than the ones with which we are more familiar and likely more comfortable, that is, how does this match up with my view of life and my political outlook? In other words, to what do I give more weight: the Gospels or my favorite blog?
Jesus is not just another religious leader. He’s not only qualitatively different, but categorically different because He is the one who shares Divine Revelation as well as the source and content of Divine Revelation Himself. May we be most concerned with the One who simply reveals Himself as “I AM”: God the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
