Monday • 1/24/2022
Monday of 3 Epiphany, Year Two
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 41; Psalm 52; Genesis 14:1–24; Hebrews 8:1–13; John 4:43–54
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)
The main thing is that we have a high priest.
“Now the main point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a minister (the Greek is leitourgos, or quite literally, a liturgist, a worship leader) in the sanctuary and the true tent that the Lord, and not any mortal, has set up” (Hebrews 8:1–2).
“Now the main point in what we are saying is this:….” Nowhere else is the Bible quite as clear as this, is it? I believe there’s one thought to ponder from today’s readings: “We have such a priest”: “we have … a high priest, … a minister/liturgist/worship leader in the sanctuary.”
What does that mean? Negatively, it means we do not have to figure our life out on our own. We do not have to “climb a stairway to heaven” for access to God. We do not have to attain competency to negotiate our own soul’s standing with God.
Positively it means (ranging over today’s passages in no particular order):
“…It is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer” — Hebrews 8:3. A pressing reality for us humans—every one of us — is that there is guilt for things done that shouldn’t have been done, and for things not done that should have been done. There is also a shame over a nagging sense of unworthiness or defilement or unlovability. This guilt and this shame our high priest Jesus Christ has taken into himself on the Cross. There he has absorbed them and disposed of them, winning for us absolution and release. By Jesus’s priesthood, we 1) are freed in conscience, 2) made worthy to stand before God, 3) cleansed from sin, and 4) counted altogether lovable — Hebrews 8:12.
“…not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors … This is the covenant that I will make … I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts” — Hebrews 8:9a,10a). There is a waywardness of the human heart that can only be fixed by Jesus doing an internal work: by his indwelling presence, our liturgist from on high plants his laws in our minds and inscribes them on our hearts — Hebrews 8:10.
“And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High”— Genesis 14:18. Reading Genesis 14 typologically (that is, as an anticipation of Christ, as does the writer to the Hebrews), our Melchizedekian priest brings us “bread and wine” from God’s holy altar (Genesis 14:18; Hebrews 13:10), blesses us in the name of God (Genesis 14:19–20; Hebrews 2:12), and receives the offering of our lips and our lives (Genesis 14:20c; Hebrews 13:15–16).
“Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your son will live.’ The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. 51 As he was going down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive. 52 So he asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him, ‘Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him.’ 53 The father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, ‘Your son will live.’ So he himself believed, along with his whole household” — John 4:50–53. The healer of people’s souls is not restricted by his lack of physical presence.
I pray that you and I rest in who Jesus is, in what he has done, and in what he continues to do in our lives. May we know he has come down to raise us up from death to life, from guilt to pardon, and from shame to God’s embrace. May we know freedom from wayward wandering, and, instead, the joy of responding to the inscribing of Jesus’s character into our minds and hearts. May we know the ongoing blessing of his heavenly ministry to us — at the Table, in the Word, and in our worship with our lips and our lives.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
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