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The Seventh Sunday Of Easter
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Scripture citation(s): Hebrews 12:18-29
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Hebrews 12:18-29
✛
The Unshakeable
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Hebrews is one of the harder books of the Bible to understand, yet at the same time, thanks to its poetry and allusiveness, I find it often compellingly attractive. This evening, as we return to the 12th chapter (we did the first half of it two weeks ago), the writer (who is anonymous) launches into the summary of his entire message. He does so with an extended comparison: Ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire. The author does not name it, but that is Mount Sinai, also called Mount Horeb, whereupon God came to deliver to Moses the Ten Commandments. The author is saying that is not where you have come. It, this mountain of old, was a physical mountain, thus something that might be touched, and when God descended upon it it burned with fire. There were other signs that accompanied the ancient theophany: blackness, and darkness, and tempest, and the sound of the trumpet; and there was also the voice of words, and although he leaves it unsaid, the author is referring to God’s words that were spoken to Moses. According to the tradition, the people were so terrified by this nearness of God, that they intreated Moses to cover his face when he came out of his place of meeting with God, because they could not stand even to see the face of the man who had spoken with God.
The giving of the Ten Commandments—the foundational moment in the new way that God had inaugurated with Abraham, a new way that was to be a way of law, of order, of justice—this giving was a fearful thing. But in Hebrews it is a point of contrast with something that is even more important, something that has to do with Jesus. Again, the force of this epistle is accentuated by its never saying this explicitly. It hardly says “Moses” and never says “the Law” or “Mount Sinai” or, on the other hand, “the blood of the cross” or “the resurrection and ascension of the Lord”; these things, unsaid, are all the more powerfully present to the reader.
He began: ye are not come to that ancient mountain of the giving of the Law. That was, as we have it, verse 18. The subsequent verses stretch out what you have not come to. Finally, the suspense is lifted in verse 22: But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. Not to Sinai, but to Zion, to God’s city, to the Jerusalem that is heavenly. Zion, the named place of Jesus’ sacrifice, is contrasted with the unnamed Sinai, the place of the giving of the Law. And it is not a mere mountain in the country, but a city where there is God, a city that is, again, named, Jerusalem, called a heavenly city because it has a divine, and not human, origin.
It is to this place, the author says, that we have come. And what do we find? An innumerable company of angels . . . the general assembly and church of the firstborn—Jesus, as yet unnamed, is elsewhere known as the firstborn of all creation, as he is the first to have risen bodily from the dead and, thus risen, the first to ascend into heaven; but he is not alone, he has with him a general assembly and a church. And we have come, it goes on to say, to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and (at last he is named!) to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant.
So we have come, not to a terrified assembly at the bottom of a mountain where God is giving his law, establishing the new way of law that he had begun through his training of Abraham and his descendants, but to an assembly of angels and human beings as they are supposed to be—judged to be just by God, gathered around Jesus who has brought into being a new covenant that is marked by the blood of sprinkling. This is the sprinkling of Jesus’ own blood, which speaketh better things than that of Abel. The reference is to the sacrifice made by Abel, the shepherd son of Adam and Eve, a sacrifice which, in chapter 11, Hebrews has said Abel offered by faith, and that it was a more excellent sacrifice than Cain’s, and that even though he, Abel, is dead, through his sacrifice he yet speaketh [11:4].
Better than this, is Jesus’ sacrifice: for Jesus is not dead, and his sprinkled blood (the language is borrowed from the Jewish ceremonies of the Day of Atonement, done at Jerusalem; Jesus has indeed brought about Atonement)—Jesus is not dead, and his sprinkled blood speaketh better things than that of Abel, even though Abel through his sacrifice yet speaketh.
So the contrast: we have come to Jerusalem, not Sinai, and in Jerusalem not to the annually-repeated day of Atonement, but to Jesus’ sprinkled blood that speaketh better things, through which indeed the new covenant is mediated. It is the image of the blood speaking that the author then turns upon to make his homiletical point. See that ye refuse not him that speaketh. In the first time, at Sinai, the people did not remain faithful to the words of God; as a result, they escaped not. Much more, says the author, shall we not escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven.
God is speaking, the author says, in order to shake things; and God is shaking things in order that it might be revealed, and there might remain, those things which cannot be shaken. The new covenant in Jesus, that city of the living God, that heavenly Jerusalem, is something that will never be shaken. There will be fire—God himself, according to Hebrews, is a consuming fire—but even through the fire, through whatever shaking there may be, that to which we have come, that to which Jesus has brought us, shall not be shaken.
Now all this writing from Hebrews is high-level, tightly-wound, allusive and poetic. But it speaks to us with down-to-earth clarity. Do not turn away from God. Do not turn away from Jesus. Do not turn away from the cross. To do so risks utter annihilation, a dire consequence from which we shall not escape. Rather, as he says, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.
