(Lincoln’s Inn, 6th Sunday after Trinity, July 28, 1854.)
‘For every high-priest taken from among men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins: who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity. And by reason hereof he ought, as for the people, so also for himself, to offer for sins. And no man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron. So also Christ glorified not himself to be made an high-priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, to-day have I begotten thee. As he saith also in another place, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec. Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared; though he were a Son, yet learnt he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him; called of God an high-priest, after the order of Melchisedec,’— Hebrews v. 1-10.
Every reader has perceived that two priesthoods are spoken of in this passage, and in the Epistle to which it belongs; one is designated by the name of Aaron; one, by the name of Melchisedec. But it should be observed, that in the case of the two priesthoods as in the case of the two Covenants, of which I spoke last Whitsunday, we are told, first of what is common to them both; then of the points which distinguish them.
I. Having spoken, at the end of the last chapter, of Jesus as the High-priest who had passed into the heaven; who was touched with the feeling of men’s infirmities; who had been in all points tempted like as men were, yet without sin; through whom they might draw nigh to God with full assurance of faith; the writer proceeds to declare the characteristics which must meet in the priest, those which belong to the very nature and essence of his office. Every high-priest taken from among men, is ordained for men, in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sin. There is great carefulness and elaboration in this definition. Each clause, and each member of each clause, has been weighed and stands out distinctly. Where there is any vagueness the vagueness is suggestive; we see why there could not be greater accuracy without a further and higher explanation; we are led on towards that explanation.
The Jew would feel instantly,—the words of his Law being his instructors,—that he must learn what was implied in the existence of the priests generally, from that which was true of Aaron the high-priest. He must not ascend to him from those who belonged to his race and progeny; he must understand them from what was first declared of him. The high-priest, therefore, forms the subject of the definition; of him it is said that he is taken from among men; He must be one of the race; he must not be above it, if by above is meant estranged from it—having interests of his own or a character of his own, which keep him at a distance from any of its members. And this because he is ordained for men. He is to act for his people, he is to represent them. Every sentence in the books of Exodus or Leviticus, which treats of the functions of Aaron, assumes this to be the case. He bears the names of the twelve tribes upon his breastplate; each man who comes to the door of the tabernacle claims that he should speak and act for him. He was to speak and act for the nation, and for the individuals who composed it in various capacities. Even the leper who was separated from the congregation, who proclaimed himself unclean, had a right to demand the inspection and help of the priest. But however various, however earthly, some of those duties might seem to be, they all imported that he was ordained for men in things pertaining to God. His existence presumed the existence of an Invisible Being with whom men had to do: presumed that this Being was not separate from men, but was governing all, even the vulgarest events of their lives. The priest stood forth before his countrymen as a continual witness of this truth. If God was not; if He was a great way off; if He was only an ultimate postulate, a Hercules’ Pillar of the universe; not a living, acting, working Being; not one seeking to keep up an intercourse with His creatures; then the priest meant nothing. His name and position were alien; he had no business in the world, and the world had no business with him. Still there is a phrase necessary to denote him, which is perplexing, and which is intended to perplex us. He is ordained, or set up. Who ordains, or sets him up? How does he come among a people, or gain any authority over them? Do they establish him? Does a mere law or decree of one age or another establish him? Whence, then, proceeds the decree? How does it dis-tinguish its object? Whence arises the obligation to obey it? These questions must not be answered for awhile. It is the very design of the Epistle to make the Jewish Christian pause and consider whether he knew the answer to them, and how it might be arrived at. In the meantime the writer proceeds to a point in his description about which there could be no hesitation. The high-priest is appointed ‘to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.’ This, all would admit, was his principal, his characteristic, function; whatever else he did must find its explanation in this. The men from whom he was taken, the men for whom he stood, required that he should present their gifts and their sin-offerings to Him from whom they believed their good things came; to Him against whom they believed they had sinned. If he was God’s priest, if the office was not a dream, it was not only man who demanded the gifts and the sacrifices. God demanded them; God appointed them. Again, whatever was his function whatever special act he had to do—there was a condition or character presupposed in that work; presupposed in all that had been said of his being taken from men of his speaking for men,—of his presenting offerings for the sins of men. He must have the capacity of sympathising with them. He must know what they are wanting, suffering, seeking for. This sympathy cannot be limited to the wise, to those who know the right and the wrong, to those who have an apprehension of the Divine Will. It cannot be limited to the well-behaved, the respectable, the orderly. It must be emphatically with those that are ignorant and out of the way. And it cannot be obtained at second hand; not through the condescension and tenderness which a being exempt from peril may feel for those who are exposed to it. The only security for the kind of compassion which his service demands from him, is that he himself is compassed with infirmity; that he knows the evil, inwardly, intimately, which other men suffer for, and need to be loosed from.
‘By reason hereof,’ the writer goes on, ‘he ought, as for the people, so for himself, to offer for sins.’ The sacrifice is not something which has to do with them and not with him. It has not more to do with them than with him. On the contrary, the sacrifice for the nation can only be presented by a man who is one of the nation—a participator in its evil doings, and in its punishments. And he is not fit to present the sacrifice for any individual if he thinks that he is exempt from the secret root of the evil, whence the evil that individual confesses has been derived; if he supposes himself free from the possibility of falling into his evil act; if he does not think that the principle is more malignant, more directly opposed to God, than the act is.
But the word that was left in a certain dimness and mist must be cleared up. The idea of the priest is not satisfied by this description of the sympathising man; any more than by the description of the mere official who presents the gifts and sacrifices: ‘No man,’ it is said, ‘taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God, as was Aaron.’ A great many, unquestionably, had taken this honour to themselves, in every country of the world; they had claimed, on the strength of a sagacity and knowledge above their brethren, a right to teach them about invisible things, about the gifts and sacrifices which would make them most acceptable to the rulers of the world above or below. But they had all assumed a vocation; they had all brought tokens, such as they were, of a divine appointment. Only so far as they could make these tokens credible to the people for whom they professed to speak and act, had they been honoured at all. Everywhere, therefore, people confessed that the true priest should come to them, though he must also come from them—that God must send him; though he must not be a superior angel or demigod, who knew nothing of them and could not care for them. The writer, without saying that the priests of other nations had not a divine vocation, without saying that they may not have mixed the falsehood of their hearts with truths which came to them from heaven,—assumes that the high-priest of his nation, that Aaron, was called of God. He was writing to Jews; he had not, therefore, to make good the position. Nor might he, perhaps, have taken that pains, if he had been addressing Gentiles. To each race—to all men—the calling must make itself good by the effect which it produces, by the testimony which is borne of it in the hearts of individuals and in the life of societies; if God does not support it by better evidences than those which are put forth by apologists, they will prove very impotent indeed. The Jew, who had been faithful to his light, knew what he owed to the conviction that God had established an intercourse with His creatures; that he had not left them to grope in idolatry and devil-worship—propitiating malignant powers, in groves and high places, with human victims. The Gentile who had been involved in that misery, did not want arguments to persuade him that, if he was raised out of it, God must point the way, and lead him along in it. But the Jew did want to know that the law, which had appointed Aaron and his sons to their work, had some deeper foundation than itself, or than an arbitrary purpose in the Lawgiver to select one people and exclude others. The Gentiles did want to know that the law which appointed Aaron was not one that said to them,—‘You have no part or lot with God; there is no priest or sacrifice appointed for you. You must go on making priests and inventing sacrifices for yourselves, and so become each day more ignorant and out of the way, more alienated from the ’mind and will of Him who created you, more incapable of finding Him out.’ I say, both Jew and Gentile wanted to be told whether there was an actual, original, eternal relation between God and them; or whether it was an artificial, legal, formal relation, which institutions had created, and which would perish if they perished. But, if possible, the Jew required this information more than the Gentile; for if no such eternal relation existed, the holy men of his land had been walking in a shadow, had been uttering visions when they had seen nothing; had been deceiving their countrymen and themselves. Those who put the Law and the Covenants, and the Sacrifices and the Priesthood, for the God who had appointed the Law and the Covenants, and the Sacrifices and the Priesthood, or supposed that they created the bond between Him and His creatures, of which they bore witness, were hastening towards the deepest unbelief— far more rapidly than those who had come to fancy that all the divine signs and ordinances were mere names and fictions.
- Accordingly, this is the subject to which the writer of the Epistle continually recurs, and which is prominent before all others in our text. But now that we are come to the point, at which we pass from that which is common in the priesthoods to that which separates them, you will observe how skilfully the transition is effected, and how much pains are taken that we shall not forget the resemblance between the eternal priesthood and the temporary. ‘Even so,’ he says, after asserting Aaron to have been a priest who did not take the honour to himself, but was called to it by God— ‘* Even so Christ glorified not Himself to be made a high-priest, but He that said unto Him, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten Thee.’ Here was the original and divine appointment,—that which lay beneath the divine decrees and ordinances which had been established upon earth, and which, by their nature, were confined to particular nations and tribes. This eternal and absolute Will of God is the root from which all the order of the universe proceeds. But this Will can only express itself in a divine Relation—’ Thou art my Son.’ The Sonship of Christ is the basis of all intercourse between God and man. The possibility of a priesthood—the fact of a priesthood—rests upon that relation, and not upon any law spoken on Sinai, or at the door of the Tabernacle. The writer of the Epistle had been already exhibiting this Sonship as the foundation of the Jewish economy. He now fixes on that part of the economy which, though it had been confined by tribe barriers, had yet always seemed on the point of bursting through those barriers, and asserting its divine character. He takes a well-known passage from one of the Psalms; he claims it as a witness that faithful Jews demanded another kind of priesthood from that which they prized and loved as God’s gift,—that they demanded it because God Himself had educated them to feel the need of it. He investigates the nature of the priesthood which the Psalmist must have intended to indicate by the name Melchisedec. He shows, from the time to which Melchisedec is assigned in the book of Genesis, and from the brief record of Abraham’s homage to him, that he could not have belonged to the chosen race, or have holden his office in virtue of any tribe designation. Nothing is said of his parentage or birth, or of the origin of his authority—yet he is called a priest. And the Psalmist recognises a priesthood like his, as the one from which every other is derived as that for which every other must be a preparation. Bringing the two passages of the old Scriptures together, the writer of the Epistle affirms that they explain each other. The order of Melchisedec is established by the words, ‘Thou art My Son’ The manifestation of the Son is the fulfilment of the Psalmist’s longing; the revelation of the priest for men in things pertaining to God, of Him who is in the truest, fullest sense called of God to be a high-priest.
But how could one so called, possessing so transcendent a dignity, sympathise with those that were ignorant and out of the way—not as a stranger, but as one sharing their guilt, compassed with their infirmity? This is the question with which the last passage in the text grapples. ‘Who in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared; though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.’ You will recognise in this description just what every higher painter has striven to set forth in the Man of Sorrows: not only a passive, submissive sufferer; but one who agonised, who resisted unto blood, who trod the winepress alone. The strong crying and tears, the sense of death, are just what the Evangelists present in a few simple, awful words, when they relate the night in Gethsemane; just what the Church has attributed, not to a single moment of our Lord’s life in the flesh, but, in a most wonderful sense, to the whole of it. The conflict, as it is set before us, here as well as there, is intensely personal. Anunutterable horror is assailing the Son of God; He is crying for deliverance from it. What is this horror; how may we dare to conceive of it? The words on the Cross utter what it was; but for them we must be silent. The sense of separation from the Father; the sense of a mass of evil, around, above, beneath, pressing upon Him, belonging to Him, which was contrary to God, which was tearing the world from God—this, surely, if we may trust the words of inspiration, was that death—that eternal death—from which He cried to be delivered. But in entering into that anguish, in bearing that death, in casting Himself upon His Father to deliver Him from it, He was entering into human anguish, He was bearing man’s death, He was acquiring that compassion for the most ignorant, for those who had wandered furthest from the divine fold, which none can have who is not compassed with infirmity. What sacrifice could be like this? what could a High-priest of the universe offer that was so absolutely His own; so much His very self? And yet, what sacrifice could a high-priest of the universe offer, that was so entirely for the sins of the world? Thus, therefore, is that mighty difference between the two offerings, which I dwelt on in a former discourse, inseparably connected with the difference between the two priests. The one enters into the holy place every year, with the blood of others; the other comes in the end of the world, to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. We are told there, that the blood of bulls and calves could not put away sin; because sin is separation from God, and their blood could establish no connexion with God. Here we have the whole reason why His blood could take away sin; because He who offers it is one with God; because under all the pressure of that which divides from God, He cleaves to Him, trusting in Him through all, certain that neither life nor death, nor principalities nor powers, shall be able to separate Him—or therefore the nature which He has taken—from His Father’s love.
Therefore, these strange, amazing words are added. ‘Though He was a Son, yet learned He obedience by those things which He suffered.’ Everything which threatened that obedience, brought it out more fully, more perfectly; each new experience was to Him a new lesson in trust and dependence. Nothing was anticipated; each moment brought its own battle, its own strength, its own victory. The effort of faith that was needed for the boy would not have sufficed for the youth; but it was perfect for its own occasion. The temptation after the baptism could be answered with the words, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve;’ the temptation in the garden could only be met with, ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me;’ the temptation on the Cross must be overcome with, ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit.’ In each state there is a new exercise of obedience; but the complete Son is only manifested in the final one.
And having been heard in that strong crying, and having been perfected through that death, ‘He is become the Author of eternal salvation to all that obey Him.’ In His own person He has vindicated for them the right of Sonship; the privilege of fellowship; the salvation from that death which consists in separation from God; the eternal life which consists in union with Him. The Priest has asserted His name, has made the Sacrifice, has established His office. That office is to last for ever; founded upon His filial relation; embodied in His self-oblation; holding mankind now and always to Him who created us in His image, who has delivered us from the foes which assailed His only-begotten Son, who in Him has adopted us to be sons. Oh, never for a moment let us think of the Sacrifice apart from the Priest; or the Priest as separate from those for whom he prayed, that they might be one with Him! Never let us think of the Priest as another than the Son who was before the worlds were; or of the Son as doing any work but that to which the love of the Father called Him, and His own obedience fulfilled!
It is this idea of sacrifice, not as first rising from man to God, but as coming down from God upon man—as exhibited in His acts, as expressing and accomplishing His will—which I have been tracing through the histories of sacrifice which the Bible records, beginning from that of Abel; and which I have contrasted with the proud sacrifice, whereby man seeks to escape from the punishment of the sin he has committed, and to convert God to his own evil mind. All who trusted God and gave up themselves, felt that there must be an obedience, and a sacrifice which was the ground of theirs; an obedience and a sacrifice which was essentially divine, and, therefore, essentially human. We have now reached the climax of these histories. I shall endeavour, indeed, to show you in two more sermons how all our present life, how all our thoughts of that which is to be for ourselves and the world, are determined by this great principle. But for the satisfaction of the awful doubts and anxieties, of which all schemes of sacrifice have been the expression, my text of this afternoon is sufficient. It solves the great sphinx riddle. That riddle presents itself under various aspects to various minds. There are some who feel themselves lost amidst the multitudinous forms of Nature, and of that other world which Art has called into existence; and who ask whether there is no Centre on which the soul can repose, without hiding itself in its own darkness and solitude? Believe that the Creative Word is the source of that endless variety of objects, of those thoughts which are ever creating or begetting new thoughts, and new images; believe that that Word has been made flesh and dwelt among us, and you have the Centre you seek. You need not refuse to reverence Nature or Art, and yet you may find your life and dwelling-place in God. There are some who feel that a crowd of events and incidents and activities is pressing out the life of Individuals; that all personal sorrows and hopes are stifled amidst general interests,—and who would fain assert that each soul is sacred and infinite. Believe in one, who was in all points tempted like as we are; who bore the sins of each man on Himself; who was heard in that he feared; who has entered into the presence of God, to utter the cry of every captive, to present the blood that is shed for every man; who is yet the King of all, the Head of the Church, the Priest of the Universe; and you can find that the individual man is only the more distinct, and the more wonderful, because he is but one of a Society. There are some who are overwhelmed by the miseries of the earth, on which mountains of evil seem to have been growing, from the day that Adam fell. Believe in that strong crying of the Son of Man, and the Son of God. Believe that it was heard against sin, death and hell; then we shall be sure that every tyranny, and every anarchy, is falling before Him; that every enemy of the earth and of God must be put under his footstool; that peace and freedom must prevail wherever strife and slavery have been, because God has willed it, and Christ has done his will on earth as it is done in heaven.