In the name of God ☩
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
When
I sat down with these readings to prepare this sermon, what first caught me was
what Jesus said, “[The one who will betray me] is the one to whom I give this
piece of bread.” Maybe “caught” isn’t the right word, as it was more than that.
It was more like that phrase arrested me, implicated me, challenged me. I
thought of all the times that I’ve received the gracious piece of bread that Jesus
offers, realizing that I am one of his betrayers. Deep and dark thoughts for
this Holy Wednesday, I know.
In
sitting with the other readings, something in those three verses from Hebrews
kept calling for my attention. The angst that I felt about the betrayal was
directly addressed by the line “Consider him who endured such hostility against
himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart.”
That’s exactly what I needed, to not grow weary and lose heart.
What
allows me, and all of us, to not grow weary or lose heart in the heaviness of
Holy Week is the fact that Jesus is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, as
Hebrews puts it. It’s an interesting title to give Jesus – pioneer and
perfecter. By pioneer, the unknown author of Hebrews means that Jesus is at the
beginning, he is the source of our faith. It’s not that we decided that we needed
to be saved and asked God to save us, instead, from the beginning, God set out
to save us. As our pioneer in faith, Jesus is the model for faith. God did not
proclaim a set of laws from on high and tell us to follow those rules in order
to find salvation. No, God took on flesh and came among us so that we could be
in a relationship. Religion is not about rules, it’s about relationship. And as
the pioneer of our faith, Jesus establishes this relationship.
But
Jesus is not only the beginning of our faith, he is the end of it. Jesus
completes our faith for us. So even though Jesus as our pioneer has blazed the
trail for us, he has also run the race for us. This detail is an important one
in Holy Week to bear in mind. This week isn’t only about what Jesus shows us. The
Cross is not only about showing us something – namely how deeply God loves us. Certainly,
when we look at the Cross, we should see the love and glory of God fully on display.
But our salvation does not happen passively; it comes from direct action by God.
The Cross not only shows us something, it does something. That’s why it’s
important to claim Jesus as the perfecter of our faith – he actively perfects
us through his perfect endurance of the Cross.
And
what Jesus is actively doing is reconciling. He’s setting aside my betrayal. During
Lent, we sang a hymn a few times that was written by the Anglican priest and
poet John Donne, and it’s been resonating with me over the past several weeks. He
writes, “Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun, which was my sin, though it
were done before? Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run, and do run
still, though still I do deplore? When thou hast done, thou hast not done, for
I have more.” That’s where we are if Jesus is only the pioneer of our faith. He’s
paved the way, but we’ve gone off course. Despite the fact that we seek to
follow Christ, we betray him.
But
in the final verse, Donne writes, “I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
my last thread, I shall perish on the shore; but swear by thyself, that at my
death thy Son shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore; and, having done
that, thou hast done; I fear no more.” Here, we see that Jesus is the perfecter
of our faith – that having done that which he has done, we need no longer to fear
our sins and our betrayal. And this is because in Jesus, God actively takes up
the Sin of the world and nails it to the Cross. Earlier in Hebrews, we read that
“For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the
true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of
God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest
enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; for then he would
have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it
is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the
sacrifice of himself.”
This
is how Jesus is the perfecter of our faith, he fulfills the sacrifices and
erases the debts that our betrayals cost us. Instead of being at a deficit,
Jesus gives us the righteousness that we ourselves do not have in order to
rectify the balance. And I realize that atonement theology, of which I am
speaking, is something that many Christians struggle with, especially those
from traditions that are described as being on the liberal end of things. We heard
in Hebrews that Jesus “endured such hostility.” The word for “hostility” in
Greek is antilogia, it is anti-logic.
It doesn’t make sense. How is it that the death of Jesus gives us salvation? It
defies logic how our sins are absorbed by the sinless one. But thanks be to
God, we don’t have to understand it for it to be true.
The
writer of Hebrews was writing to a Church that was in the midst of persecution,
hence the call for endurance. Though we are not being persecuted in the way
that those Christians were, that doesn’t mean that life is easy. A little
endurance would do us some good. And so Hebrews tells us so that we might not
grow weary or lose heart, we should look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of
our faith. And the word for “look to” is an important word. It isn’t a simple glance
that is being recommended, but rather an intense and focused gaze. It is
looking with the sense of anticipation in the way that you watch for meteors in
a meteor shower. It’s what tonight’s collect has in mind when we prayed that we
might be “confident of the glory that shall be revealed.”
Tomorrow,
we enter into the Triduum, those three holy days that encompass our Lord’s Last
Supper, Crucifixion, Burial, and Resurrection. As we do so, remember that the
way to not grow weary or lose heart, the way to not be overwhelmed by our brutality
and betrayal is to fix our eyes on Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, the
beginning and the end, the pioneer and the perfecter of our faith. In looking
at Jesus, not only will we see things like God’s mercy and love, but we will
also know that God is actively bringing about our salvation. And confident in
this glory, we will be ready to follow Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, into the joys of Easter morning.
