Prophet, Priest, and Propitiation
A Sermon for Passion Sunday
Anthony G. Cirilla
Today’s Epistle and Gospel readings combine to make a powerful statement about the identity of Christ. The statement in the end of the Gospel lesson is so powerful that the people who heard it wanted to kill Jesus for saying it. The statement from Jesus that inspired this reaction, “Before Abraham was, I am,” was inflammatory for a reason you are probably familiar with. When God appeared to Moses, he told him, I am that I am. Jesus did not say before Abraham I was, or even before Abraham I was known to God. He says, Before Abraham was, past tense, I am, present tense. He not only claims to be greater than Abraham – he claims here identification with the nature of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Such a claim was not just strange, but if false was blasphemy of the highest order. But only two chapters previously to this one, Jesus had performed the miracle of feeding the five thousand, and there had likewise said something shocking in John 6:54: “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day,” and we learn in chapter 7 that the Jews were seeking to kill him for this reason. In both of these situations, Jesus had claimed qualities unique to God alone: to be eternal, and to be the source of life. We can only conclude that either Jesus Christ was indeed who he said he was, or he was a blasphemer of the most shocking audacity. But Christ had already worked impressive miracles, and God does not give such power to blasphemers. So we are left from Christ’s statement that “Abraham rejoiced to see my day” with only one conclusion: Because Jesus was the second person of the Trinity made manifest in the flesh, his teachings are true, his worship is good, and his sacrifice for our sins is beautiful. In this world, our minds are confused about the truth, our hearts are unable to love goodness, and our works are unable to make us righteous. But in today’s Scripture readings we see that he can fill the three roles we need to restore us to the true, the good, and the beautiful things of God. He is our greatest prophet, our highest priest, and our final propitiation. We see all three of these roles at play in today’s readings, and we will see that all three are possible precisely because Jesus was God in the flesh.
Because Jesus was God, he is the greatest prophet who ever spoke. In the original sense of the word, a prophet was not primarily someone who told the future, but someone whose mission from God was to remind the people of God that they were in error and point them to the right direction. Sometimes we hear people say that Christ was not God but that He was a prophet. But as we saw, he said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” No other prophet of the Old Testament would say such a thing. If Jesus was wrong about this teaching, then he was the worst prophet in history, because prophets do not tell lies. The reason prophets cannot lie while acting as prophets is because their message comes from God, and Hebrews 6:18 tells us that it is “impossible for God to lie.” Satan is the father of lies, and to even be able to tell a lie means that something in you is missing. Never have you caught someone in a lie and felt you admired them more for it, but if you’re honest with yourself, you know that you have at least been tempted to lie. But to those who admit that Christ is a prophet, which is true, then they must also see that this prophet identified himself with God. This means that Christ, both God and God’s greatest prophet, confronts us with an essential truth as he puts it to the Pharisees: “And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me? He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.” We must, at some point in our lives, be confronted with the question – Who do we say who Christ is? Consider the basic definition of what it means to be a Christian in Romans 10:9: “If we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we shall be saved.” But saved from what? The answer is our own sin, of course, the sin that would separate us from God. But this means that it is not enough to only believe that Jesus is God, that He took on human form and ministered here on Earth for three years. It isn’t even enough to believe that He was raised from the dead. He has to be our Lord, and that means we have to believe his words are true. Well, this raises another question. How do we know what the words of Christ are? Because those words are in Scripture. Often Christians puzzle over the authority of God’s Word, as in the Bible. But it is worth considering that in the Gospel of John, he identified Christ by the name the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But where else other than Scripture can we turn for Christ’s words? We have no recording of him, and no human is alive today who heard him. God requires that we listen to His Son, the world’s greatest prophet, by means of the Word. That means that we must believe, by faith, that God’s Word is the true record of the sayings of the Word of God. The reason for the Old Testament is to bare record of Christ’s coming and his nature as the Messiah. The Gospels prove that He is that Messiah and what he taught us about salvation, and the Epistles bring us deeper into how we can delve more deeply into a Christ-centered life. The question, Who do you say Christ is?, is directly linked to, What do you think the Scriptures are? For Christ’s prophetic words to rebuke us in our sin and make us long for the salvation and sanctification which comes from Him, if our minds are riddled with doubt about the authority of God’s Word, we will not hear our shepherd’s voice with the same impact it should have. If God the Son in His providence could make the universe, and Incarnate Himself as a little baby, and live and die and rise from the dead and Ascend to the Right Hand of the Father, then it is no big deal for Christ to ensure that His Scriptures reflect the truth He wants us to believe about Him. Whenever you find yourself wondering if God’s Word is God’s Word, consider Christ’s question: “And if I say the truth, why do you not believe me?” Just as Jesus taught the truth of His Father, the Holy Spirit inspired the truth about the Son to be written as a sure foundation for faith. If God the Son is to be the prophet of our lives, then we must read, inwardly digest, and believe the record of His Words in the Word, so that we will not taste death.
Because Jesus is God, he is the greatest priest who ever led worship. After all, if a merely human priest were enough to lead true worship of God, then the Old Testament system would have been sufficient. Our Epistle tell us, “CHRIST being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” When we think of Christ going to the Cross, a fitting way to think of that action is as our priest who is building the spiritual temple for him to intercede between us and the complete holiness of God. As the cross beams of a church building strengthen each other and hold up the roof, so the beams of the cross to which Christ was nailed became the moment when Christ began to pave the way for the Communion of Saints to worship God in Heaven. As the nails pounded into the flesh and ripped open the veins and made the blood flow, Christ was making his blood into our wine and his body into our bread and offering a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice of a pure nature no priest has before or since been able to offer. No other priest could also be the sacrifice, but Christ was the priest who died on the first Christian church ever built – the torture device of the cross. He was the first and last priest to be able to make himself into a temple – to let his side be split open from which water would flow like the baptism which sprinkles the saints. And that temple of bloody sacrifice is why, instead of the blood of bulls and goats, is why we can approach and be fed the real spiritual food of Christ’s body and the real spiritual drink of Christ’s blood, because the Cross was a cornerstone of a cathedral that reaches up to Heaven, where Christ now stands at the right hand of the Father. And as our priest he still stands with the sacrificial power of the Cross, so that when we come to the altar rail and take from the Lord’s Table, we know that we are being spiritually cleansed and fed by our high priest, Jesus Christ the righteous.Finally, we see in today’s lesson that Christ is not only our prophet who tells us the truth about our sinful condition and that He is the priest who applies the sanctifying power which cleanses us of our sins. Our prophet and priest is also our propitiation. You might say that he is the doctor who gives the medicine and the medicine which cures the illness. The author from Hebrews tells us, “For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” The Old Covenant used animals for sacrifice because unlike humans they could not be accountable to sin, because animals do not have consciousness and conscience the way humans do, so they symbolized innocence. Yet the innocence their blood carried was one without knowledge and without wisdom. But the shed blood of Christ carried in it the knowledge of the greatest prophet whose words were true, and his sacrificed body held the perfect worship of the high priest. To only have true words and good worship is to be the most beautiful sacrifice possible – as the epistle puts it, the only answer that can be offered for sin which is itself without the spot of sin. So as the author of Hebrews writes, “And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.” When we listen to the true words of our true prophet, and follow the good worship of our high priest, and let wash over us the beautiful blood of the only propitiation for our sins, our consciences will be clean and we will glorify the Father the way the Son does. With Christ as our true prophet, our good priest, and our beautiful propitiation, we not only have the promise of eternal life in service to the living God, but we can dwell even now in the temple not made by hands but by the hands of our mediator, Jesus Christ. Amen.