[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, on the Twenty-First Sunday of Pentecost, October 17, 2021 (https://stmarysphoenix.org)]
✠ In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen
To say Jesus is the focus of the Christian religion is to engage in some degree of understatement. Our New Testament, the words of the Prophets, our hymns, the Eucharistic Divine Liturgy, all of it revolves around the person of this Jesus of Nazareth. The whole Christian attitude we can sum up in the first verse of the hymn Ad regias Agni dapes, which we have in our 1982 hymnal as number 174:
At the Lamb's high feast we sing
praise to our victorious King,
who has washed us in the tide
flowing from his pierced side;
praise we him whose love divine
gives his sacred blood for wine,
gives his body for the feast,
Christ the victim, Christ the priest.[1]
Moreover, we have these same themes presented to us today in both our Gospel and Epistle readings. We have the theme of the High Priest, who intercedes before God for humankind. We have the theme of the Victim, who suffers as a sacrifice. We have the theme of the Servant of All, who by definition is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. We have the theme of the Ransom, the price paid to deliver us from captivity.
The role of High Priest is straightforward. A priest is one who intercedes, that is, walks between the human and the divine. A priest deliberately goes where humanity normally does not, to try to bridge that gulf between the limited mortal and the limitless immortal. The priest is the one who makes intercessory prayer, that is, prayer on behalf of others. The priest is the one who offers up sacrifice, that is, a gift from humans to God out of what God has given to them to acknowledge their dependence and in some small way repay their debt to the immanent yet transcendent. The Epistle today puts it this way, “Every high priest chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.”[2] Our Lord offered up not just “prayers and supplications,”[3] but also offered Himself, bridging the roles of both High Priest and Victim.[4]
Now, when we talk about Victim, we really do not mean the modern sense of the target of a violent crime, accident, deception, or abuse. We must in this case embrace what is now a secondary but is the older and fundamental meaning of the word, and that is the object of a sacrifice. St. Paul writes, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,”[5] an allusion to the great Passover sacrifice that in his day was enacted yearly at the Temple in Jerusalem, which itself was a continuation of the first Passover sacrifice on the night Egypt’s hold over Israel was broken, where the blood marked a house as belonging to God and as a signal for the Angel of Death to “pass over” the house and spare the inhabitants, and where the flesh provided strength and sustenance for those who ate it to escape their captivity. This image is what St. Paul in his Passover analogies, what the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Evangelists in recording the story of the Passion, wished to convey to us, that Our Lord Jesus is the Passover sacrifice , whose blood marks us as His own to spare us from eternal Death, and whose flesh is our sustenance for the journey to escape our captor.
The theme of the Servant of All is one we have visited several times this autumn already. This charge is delivered not only in our Gospel this morning, where Jesus said, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all,”[6] but we hear the same words also in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke.[7] A few Sundays ago we also read another account in St. Mark’s Gospel where the quibble about who was greatest came up, and in that “teachable moment” Our Lord told them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”[8] Here in today’s Gospel He also tells the Disciples, He tells us, that this is His purpose, “…not to be served, but to serve.”[9] While He was among us, Our Lord taught, He healed, He restored, He raised the dead, all for no payment or remuneration, He offered prayers and supplications to God for us, and most importantly, “to give his life a ransom for many.”[10]
A ransom. What is a ransom? The Greek word used here, λὐτρον, means not just a payment made to release a prisoner of war or a kidnapping victim, but in that day, it had a specific and immediately evident meaning. This ransom was the monies paid to release a slave and purchase that slave’s freedom. Slaves were not free to escape and then have the protection of the law. A prisoner of war could escape and if back in areas controlled by his or her side of the conflict be free without a ransom. A kidnapping victim could escape and have the weight of the law and law enforcement to protect that freedom. An escaped slave, however, had no such protection. A slave, escaped or not, was legally, de facto and de jure, owned by another party and had no legal or military protection preventing return to bonded servitude. A slave could only expect two means of delivery: manumission and death. Israel was in that position regarding Egypt. Humanity is in that position regarding Sin and Death. In either case, release, redemption, could only be won by a ransom. Israel was redeemed from Egypt at the price of the slaughter of Egypt’s first-born and the Passover sacrifice. We are redeemed by the price of the destruction of Sin’s first-born, that is death, and the ultimate Passover sacrifice, that is Jesus Our Lord.
When the sons of Zebedee, James and John, asked Jesus if they could sit at His right hand, He asked them if they could shoulder the load that He shouldered. When they answered that they could, they likely had no idea what that load entailed. That load is weighty: Our Lord is High Priest, Sacrifice, Servant, and Ransom. Sober reflection on my part yields no small degree of trepidation, and it should. Discipleship in the Kingdom of God is pricey, and Jesus told James and John that whether they really understood it or not, they indeed would shoulder that burden.[11]
Granted, they would not shoulder that whole burden. No mere human could be humanity’s High Priest; there could only be one and that is Jesus. There could only be one Sacrifice, one Ransom for many, and that is Jesus. The title of the Servant of All belongs to Jesus. So how could James and John, or for that matter disciples in this day, such as you, such as me, shoulder this burden?
We have a High Priest in heaven, but we too, as His disciples, are a “royal priesthood.”[12] We the Church, the Body of Christ, the redeemed, play our own role in walking between the human and the divine, interceding on behalf of the world. Our servanthood that Our Lord mandates for us, to heal, reconcile, feed, shelter, clothe, advocate for the sick, the friendless, the poor, the hungry, the homeless is where we walk between the worlds. We bring the news of release from Corruption’s slavery to those who have lost or never had hope. We make real the sacrifice Jesus made on the Cross in our lives and actions. When called on, we even suffer hardship, abandonment, disdain, and even harm to bring that word of hope to those who have no hope. St. Paul put it this way to St. Timothy, “I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him.”[13] Or, when he wrote to the Roman Church, “Whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.”[14]
My dear friends, Christ is all these things so we too can be all these things. Christ is all these things so that we may be free, free from the eternal death that was to be our lot, and free to proclaim that news so that others may shake off the fetters of Sin and Death and enjoy everlasting Life in the presence of our God and Creator.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] “At the Lamb’s High Feast We Sing,” The Hymnal 1982, New York, Church Publishing, Inc., 1985. No. 174, st. 1. [2] Heb. 5.1 [3] Ibid. 5.7 [4] Ibid. 5.8-9 [5] 1 Cor. 5.7 [6] St. Mk. 10.42-44 [7] St. Mt. 20.25-27, St. Lk. 22.25-26 [8] St. Mk. 9.35 [9] Ibid. 10.45a [10] Ibid. 10.45b [11] Ibid. 10.39 [12] 1 Pet. 2.9 [13] 2 Tim. 2.10-12 [14] Rom. 6.7-9