SERMON PREACHED at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 17th) 2024
READINGS
Hebrews 5: 1-10
Psalm 119:9-16
John 12: 20-33
[The wondrous thing about the small slice of the
letter or, I suspect, sermon to the Hebrews that we have read from [at St. Peter’s]
is that it can be made to mean almost anything. There is a long-standing
tradition when persons are ordained of delivering them a congratulatory card, reminding
them that they are “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”
The "who/what" of Melchizedek aside, beyond a fleeting Hebrew Scripural mention, tbere is a truth in the cards doled out to neo-phyte clergy. Yes, in orthodox theology that are priest forever in some way, but they
were on the day before their ordination as well. The English and Latin
languages have done us a great disservice, for different Greek words for
priesthood have slid into Latin and English usage, but I can safely say that it
is the intention of the church that those of us who wear our collars back to
front are not priests in any different way to the way in which you the people
of God are priests, and that is the priesthood into which we are baptised.
We are of course baptised into Jesus and he fulfils
the priesthood that the author of Hebrews is cryptically writing of. You and I in exactly
the same way, regardless of our neck apparel, participate in that priesthood.
There will be more of that on other occasions, but basically the unfortunate
English word describing the “priesthood” into which I am ordained and you are
not has nothing to do with the priesthood of Melchizedek.
But although I primarily want to talk about the gospel reading, and briefly at that, it is always worth checking the ways in which we can distort scripture. In the gospel reading the focus is the glorification of the true priest. There the word in Greek is hieros, from which we get hierarchy, the ordained priesthood with unfortunate collars is depicted by the word presbuteros, from which akmost ironically we get the word Presbyterian.
I remember well my head of seminary thumping the
desk and exclaiming there must be no hieros, no hierarchy in the church.
But of course there is in our denomination. It’s
just that there shouldn’t be. And I’ve made that clear as mud. Enough.]
What is of this glorification of which Jesus speaks?
Very little in John’s account of the gospel is weightless, and “glory” is one of his key words. John depicts
a scene foreshadowing in which God extends divine relationship with
the Jews to a relationship of God with all people.
Most of us belong in that category.
It is outsiders who have come longing to see Jesus.
It is to primaril them that Jesus addresses his thoughts on glorification.
“Glory” in the Hebrew scriptures was the sign and
prerogative of God. Jesus begins talking to the Greeks about it in the context
of prediction of his own suffering and death. Something very strange is going
on. To the Greeks the concept of a God suffering was impossible. To the Jews,
as we will see in Paul’s writings, the possibility of God’s death on what Paul
calls a tree, a wooden cross, was obscene.
Jesus here sets out to identifies himself with
God and God with impossibility, even obscenity.
We will be doing a lot of hard work in our liturgy over the next two weeks. Next week we will, though for most of the last 20 centuries the church has forgotten it, look at the way in which we have sought God in the wrong places.
Certainly, yes, the Hebrew scriptures speak of the glory
of God, the shekinah, in a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, majestic
and terrifying. As I was wonderfully reminded during my all too short sojourn
in the Northern Territory, there is little that is more majestic than
cumulonimbus clouds soaring tens of thousands of metres into the air. Bright light
of any sort in the night sky, such as the terrifying grandeur of a volcanic
eruption, or God forbid the towering inferno of a high rise building caught
alight, are a deeply unsettling sight
Yet Jesus turns the gaze of the Greeks and Jews
alike elsewhere. Next Sunday we will enact the desire to see him enter our world
and overthrow corruption. If I can find some palm branches in time, we
will at least symbolically cast them before his feet, as he comes to our place,
comes as a conqueror. Then he will turn that our expectations upside down, for
he will come in peace, and will continue in death.
Even the great passing miracle of the resurrection
which we will finally encounter on Easter day will be something no newspaper of
the time, no cameras, no human eye could capture.
We have much work to do these next two weeks, as we
journey towards the moment in which Jesus is lifted up from the earth and
begins the whisper that he is drawing all people – people far beyond the
boundaries that we like to set – to him.
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