23rd January, 2011

BRUCE C. WEARNE

Read Hebrews 9: 13-28

The sin that this covenanted ritual had to reckon with - the blundering ignorance among God's people that neglects His ways and forgets His promises (8: 9) - had to be overcome if they were ever to stand before Him with integrity and present their gifts and sacrifices. They needed cleansing. And, from their rituals they needed to gain the assurance of the forgiveness of the Lord, as well as being encouraged by a fixed hope that He was keeping His promises, busily bringing about complete restoration.

That, then, is what the blood and the sprinkled ashes of the heifer were to signify to them. By this sprinkling, the worshippers ritually shared in a prefiguring of death having the covenantal promise that this was how access to grace would be found (Exodus 34: 6-7). It would indeed signify their own bodily death and, as such, these ritual cleansing activities allowed those sprinkled to be in the proximity of the Holiest of Places. Then they could participate in the rituals depicting and proclaiming their true situation which, indeed, their Lord dearly wanted them to know about and understand.

Such liturgical participation was made possible with powerful symbolic constraints upon their bodily (SARKOS) attendance. We might in retrospect - taking our lead from the writer - put it this way: the people were ritually cleansed to engage in a symbolic prefiguring of the Good News.

It was not the gifts and sacrifices which made restitution - they represented the hope that since God required them, He will indeed accept them as their genuine gifts and sacrifices. If God accepts these offerings then the cleansing of those presenting them is surely under His control, and is fully part of His intention that they be fully involved in a process that is well under way - the writer says that they announce that the time of reformation is nigh!

And so, such sacrifices were, for their own time, notifications that "the time is at hand! Repent and believe the Gospel!" (Mark 1: 15). But the liturgy was incapable of purifying the people's consciousness. What it could do was to represent and prefigure the purification process, the cleansing from the guilt of sin, and make the people thankful to the Lord for His promises. The people were learn as part of this vital historical cleansing process, constrained by a strict liturgical discipline. But now, "Christ (has) arrived as High Priest of the good things to come by means of the greater and fully completed tabernacle", and it can be gladly affirmed that now, as far as the Almighty is concerned, His people are always conspicuously within His presence - our lives are called forth as affirmations that Christ Jesus has entered into that place which the Holy of Holies represented, and He has done so "on our behalf" (9: 24). "The way" is now to be proclaimed (Acts 9: 2,19: 23) because there is now One who does take note of His way (Psalm 95: 10) and indeed is "the way" (John 14: 6). The service of the living God has now been thrown wide open. In this High Priest, the Lord God has arranged for a venue, a place (TOPOS) from where His people can indeed "taste and see that (He) is good! Happy are those who take refuge in Him!" (Psalm 34: 8)

The liturgies of the former covenant with its blood-sacrifice formed the consciousness of the faithful so that they would know that the Lord, in His time, would purge them of the death that had worked its way deeply into their lives, into their thinking (9:14, SUNEIDESIN). But now their entire life could be one of living sacrifice (Romans 12: 1-2), an ongoing liturgy of praise and thanksgiving.

This "place" occupied by Christ is not some creaturely spot that has to be identified by human ingenuity. This "place" is where complete and total responsibility for human waywardness has been assumed and accepted. And Christ did not come to that place carrying anyone else's blood. It is now the heavenly seat of Priestly oversight, on watch perpetually over all of God's people, for all of God's people. The sacrifice which this High Priest offered was in fact His own suffering, an offering that thereby dispensed with sin altogether, with a purging of the deeply rooted decay and rot that had worked its way into their consciousness, into their lives.

His death, therefore, releases those who, under the former covenant, could not ever be released merely by its proscribed liturgies. This is a deliverance from that same decay and rot which these liturgical disciplines could only highlight but never remove. This High Priest, by His death, overcomes death, and so the task for those whose sins He bears, is to actively anticipate His appearing. They do that "on active service" since Christ now offers the "good things to come" as His gift to those who, depending completely upon Him, live in the hope of His immanent arrival (9: 11).

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