The Epistle for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Heb. 9:11-15

This is a very mysterious passage to modern people, and it is so not for the superficial reason that it operates with a type-antetype schema, treating the atoning sacrifice of Our Lord as a copy of something in the OT sacrificial system, in a way that may seem to us both unnecessarily elaborate and really quite antiquarian. I am wading through a thick modern life of Thomas Cranmer, who was burnt in the mid-sixteenth century for what he thought about the atonement. Both sides in the reformation period did that to people for their opinions even about a question which we might call trivial, the exact mode of Christ’s presence in the Holy Communion. We tend to congratulate ourselves on being more advanced; we wouldn’t dream of burning anyone at the stake for anything, in fact we are under pressure in modern society to be so tolerant that people now scream discrimination when they sense a breath of disapproval even of the grossest sins. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as necessarily better: they burnt people because they thought opinions about the Real Presence and how we can be sure of our salvation absolutely central to their lives. Henry VIII, far from being a lustful and wicked man, spent his life, over a thirty-five year intimacy full of deep theological discussion with his Archbishop, trying to avert the wrath of God and to set his faith and life in order before God, of Whom he was in the utmost awe. All those people, virtually without exception, were in the utmost awe of an angry God, and gave themselves one way or another to the life-consuming task of pleasing Him. Sometimes we think that because we are not legalists we are more spiritual than they were in ancient Israel. After the long apprenticeship through which they were led, with their noses being rubbed in their own sinfulness daily through the sacrificial system, Israel was spiritual as modern people are not. So the writer to the Hebrews starts from certain premisses, which we need to come to terms with if we are not to dismiss all he says as much ado about nothing.

We believers in this city are always lamenting how hard it is to preach a religion which starts with a man on a cross and is to issue in a life turned outwards from ourselves, towards service to God and our neighbour. We hear “theological” used as an adjective for what is irrelevant, just a churchy mind-game. We see very little hunger for God, plenty of cupboard love, so that desperate people flee to church when down and out, but once picked up and dusted down a bit they are up and out again in short order. We tend to blame some abstraction, West Coast hedonism, secularisation, for this. I am not sure that we can pass the buck in this way. The awe of God is not natural to us sinners, and that includes us who are in church. What is natural to us is to blame God, be angry with Him, think of Him as owing us something, ask Him to justify Himself to us. The whole of Hebrews makes little sense unless we see that Christ’s atoning death is provision for us who are to blame, with whom God is angry, to whom God owes nothing, for whom justification is needed before we can even pray to the Father and hope that He will hear us; a God entitled to an unblemished offering; a God Who is a consuming fire.

We are currently much concerned with wrong sexual orientation and its outworking. We are disturbed when our church leaders appear to be fellow-travellers with the immoralists. We need to realise that the blatant boasting about their perversion which some indulge in is just a manifestation of the disorientation called sin from which we all suffer. If anyone here got converted completely disinterestedly for God’s sake only, I apologise. Some forty-one years ago, I, very religiously brought up, but without the Holy Spirit, gave as much of myself as I knew to as much of God as I knew (this is a classical definition of conversion, and in my case there was rather little knowledge of either). It took me six months to grasp, and this had to be learnt the way we all must, the hard way, that I had got converted because I was unhappy, and that in so far as this was my action, it had been for me, not for God. In other words, even as I turned from all known sin, the deeper root of sin was still active and growing in me, in my assumption that the Christian life was for me and my happiness. I had desired very little if at all the cleansed conscience and the service to the living God of the end of this passage. I had wanted just enough grace to get by. I understood this only as the Lord did what He does, I now know from all my friends, to all of us, knocked away the props one by one, and when I was now getting nothing at all for me out of being a Christian, turned round and asked me, “And now will you still go on with me?”

Let’s orient ourselves to the Epistle to the Hebrews and its assumptions, foreign though they may seem. Let’s free ourselves from the attitude which says, “How much rope can I get and still call myself a Christian?”, and give ourselves to asking “How may I please Jesus Christ today?” As we do, and desire with our whole heart that ‘cleansed conscience’ and that ‘life of service to the living God’, it will become less necessary for Him to discipline us in painful ways, so that we may leave our bad, wrong-headed habits behind.