Lent 5 - Hebrews 5:1-10

In Matthew 18 Jesus tells a parable about a shepherd who goes after one of his sheep. “What do you think?” he says, “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? [13] And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. [14] So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”
Now Jesus' parable is a little weird. Let's admit it. If one sheep is lost you cut your losses and thank God for the 99 that you still have. Would you really leave the 99 that you still have and risk loosing them by leaving them to fend for themselves out in the wilderness while you went off in search of that one stupid little sheep that got himself into trouble in the first place. It really doesn't makes sense.
And that is the point that Jesus is trying to get across. The actions of Jesus our Good Shepherd are (in our mind) a bit reckless. What he does defies explanation. What he does defies logic and reason. He does things that smart businessmen wouldn't ever think of doing. He takes risks that you and I could not imagine. Yet that is who he is and that is what he does. He would have no risk be too great that it would keep him from doing all he could to keep from loosing even one of his little lambs. This is Jesus. This is our Good Shepherd. And This is profoundly comforting.
This is comforting especially after the text I preached on for last week's sermon. Do you remember? The text was hard. It was hard. Hard for you and me to get our heads around. Hard for you and me to understand. God sent snakes. He sent them. He didn't stand back and let them come. He didn't turn his head for a moment to pretend he didn't know what was happening. He sent them. He bent down and whispered in the ear of those snakes, “Do you see those Israelites there? Go bite them.” God motivated them to do what was not in their nature. Snakes are frightened of people. They hide from people. The slink away under a rock when people walk by. God caused these snakes to come. It is the same thing he did when he sent Satan to afflict Job. It is the same thing he did when he sent Nebuchadnezzar to march his armies against Jerusalem and tear it to the ground. God sent bad things to afflict his people. That is challenging. That is hard to wrestle with. That is hard for us to understand.
In our minds, in our shallow understanding of ourselves and of god, a loving god should not do that. He should not cause pain. He should not create suffering. He should not be the one who is stirring the pot and causing the strife, he should be the one who brings peace and calm and prosperity. He should bless, not curse. Last week, you might have been tempted to think that you heard me wrong, that I did not say God sent the snakes or that God sent the disaster. Or if you heard me correctly, you might have been tempted to dismiss what I said. “I think our pastor has gone a little too far – perhaps he is spending too much time watching the Spartans in the NCAA tournament and not enough time studying his bible. We'll cut him a little slack here and hope he brings it back around after the tournament is over.”
It's not me. Your struggle is not with me, with what I have said, your struggle is with God. That is what the text says. You can read it for yourself. In the Hebrew text it is the same word used when God sent Adam and Eve from the Garden after they sinned. He drove them out, cast them out. Or when Noah sent the dove out the window of the ark to see if there was any dry land. There is purpose and intention with this sending.
We are tempted to believe that this truth is a horrible truth. We are tempted to believe that this undermines everything we have ever learned about God's love and his goodness and his kindness and his mercy. We are tempted to believe that this must mean that God is extreme. Remember what we have said. God is reckless. God is drastic. God is extreme. But not because he wants to be. God is reckless and drastic and extreme because he has to be. Because he needs to be. God is simply doing what he needs to do so he can get us to turn from our sin and repent.
You see, we are tempted to believe that the more serious sins are the sins of adultery, theft, abuse - you know, those things that other people do, those things that we look down on other people for doing, those things that we love to gossip about. Those things are sin. But we know they are wrong and most of the time when people commit those sins they are ashamed of them and want to confess them. Most of the time the sins that damn us to hell are not those sins. Most of the time the sins that damn us are the sins of pride, the deepest sin that lives in the human heart is the sin that says “I have done nothing wrong. I don't need forgiveness for what I have done.” Remember what John writes in his epistle. If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
It is God's will to break us of that sin. It is God's will that we confess our sin, all of our sin, even the sins that we have hidden away deep in our hearts that no body else knows about, even those sins that are so deep we do not know about them ourselves. God knows those sins are deadly and because he loves you so greatly he will not let those sins take you away from him. He loves you so greatly He will not be content to stand by and watch as those sins take you to hell.
My friends, don't be foolish. We all know human nature, we all know how deep our sins lie. We all know the pride that live in our hearts. It is our own foolishness that will look around at the suffering of other people, it is our own foolishness that will measure one suffering against another and say – “Ooh! Look! This person is suffering a lot. I wonder what sin he has committed. It must be really bad if God has got to strike him so hard.” That's what Job's friends did and God rebuked them and called them the fools that they were. That very thought grows from pride. You ought to confess it and all its ugly friends that live in your heart and beg God for mercy.
Our text this morning is from Hebrews. Chapter 5, the first 10 verses. The Epistle of Hebrews connects the Old Testament covenant with the temple, the priests and all the sacrifices with the work of Christ, with Jesus and who He is and what He has done for us on the cross. As our text says, God gave priests to his people to serve as the go between, an intermediary, or an ambassador. Someone to go before God on behalf of the people and bring their gifts of repentance that were requests for forgiveness. The Israelites would come, bring with them their sacrificial lamb, perfect and spotless, and the priest would take this gift into the temple and slaughter it before God and burn it on the altar. God accepted this sacrifice – God gave his Word that whenever His people came to the temple, whenever the people came close to where God was, in spite of their sin he would permit them to live and he would accept the life of the lamb in their place.
This was a good system. The people were sinners. People have been sinners ever since Adam and Eve. It is risky and dangerous for sinners to be anywhere near where God is because God is just, he sees those sins, even the ones that we have hidden away in our hearts that we are not even aware of and he knows that they must be punished. The sacrifice was a substitute, a stand in that suffered God's wrath so the sinner could be forgiven. And when the people brought their sacrifices to the priest, the priest did not look down his nose at them, the priest did not judge them or deal harshly with them. The priest did not say, “Didn't I just see you here a few days ago? What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into that you need to come back so soon?” Because the priest himself was a sinner. The priest was weak, and wandering just as the people were weak and wandering. That' what our text means when it says, “He was able to deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward because he himself was beset with weakness.” It was the job of the priest, every day, before he could sacrifice for anyone else, he had to to sacrifice for himself.
While that made the priest gentle, it also made him weak. It also made the entire system weak because as an imperfect priest, he could only offer imperfect sacrifices. As imperfect priest offering imperfect sacrifices, he had to sacrifice every day, multiple times every day. The temple was, in effect a slaughter house where the blood of lambs and bulls ran freely.
So God gave us a new priest, a better priest, a priest who experienced human weakness, in all its frailty and in all its limitations. God gave us a priest who suffered with every temptation that we undergo, with every trial and tribulation, with every pain that we feel. God gave to us Jesus. And because Jesus has suffered the way that we suffer He deals gently with us. He doesn't ever say, “I saw you here just last week.” He doesn't ever say, “I have forgiven you for that sin already.” He doesn't every say, “You don't deserve my forgiveness.” He doesn't ever say, “I forgave you last time, this time you're going to have to earn it.” He just simply forgives.
But that forgiveness is not free. It never is. Forgiveness always comes with a price. There is sin and that sin needs to be satisfied. It needs to be paid for. But not by you. Jesus the new priest, the better priest, the gentle priest takes your sin and for it he offers a sacrifice. Not an imperfect sacrifice, not a sacrifice that will need to be repeated the next time you sin, but a perfect sacrifice, an eternal sacrifice, a comprehensive and complete sacrifice. A sacrifice that covers all your sin for all time even for all ages, even until the end of the age.
And so here's the thing: our sin has been forgiven. It has been washed away, it has been covered, it has been taken away from us and it is gone. We are no longer guilty of it. There is no price that we need to pay. That doesn't mean that you are not a sinner, that doesn't mean that you and I have stopped doing things that are worthy of punishment, it means that we do not have to suffer the punishment for it. There is no punishment for sin. Therefore when you suffer, God is not punishing you.
God is teaching you. God is teaching you to repent. God is teaching you to know your own heart and to know your own sin. God is teaching you to know how far you have fallen, but this is not so to make you feel bad, this is not to make you worry or panic, this is to make you see how deeply he loves you. This is to confront you with how far you have fallen so that you can see how far he has gone to save you.
Remember, we are like those wayward sheep. We wander off. We get lost. We are so lost that we don't even know we are lost we just keep going and getting ourselves more lost and further away from home. But he finds us. No matter what it takes, no matter what the cost, he searches us out, he brings us back because he would have it no other way.
Amen.