Sermon for Passion Sunday

“When Christ came into the world, he said: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, 'Here am I; I have come to do your will, O God”
I have been thinking a lot about sacrifice this Lent. Not sacrifice in the colloquial sense, the sense we use it in, but in the real sense. Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent, sometimes called Passion Sunday. The whole of Lent is intended to lead up to the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it is today that what is going to happen is really brought home to us. The readings at the 9.45 service are designed to make the actual events live for us, most especially the gospel passage in which Jesus faces his own death: “Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name! Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” His task, which had been before him all his life but placed somewhere in a vague future, is suddenly weighing heavily upon him. He suddenly has to wrestle his human will into conformity with his divine will, or, if you like, come to terms with what was before him and what was within him. That is what the devil – “the prince of this world” is doing in the scene. Had Jesus felt no reluctance about the job and the way in which it was to be carried out, the devil would have had no handhold, no point of attack; and he clearly had. Of course; because Jesus may have been true God, but he was also true man; one would have to doubt his humanity had he never run up against the devil. We are now in the deepest part of Lent, and the time for speaking, for preaching, for healing, is at an end. All that is left is God’s glorification through the sacrifice of the Son, and he knows it.
And that’s where the readings we have heard at this service fit in. They are the theological commentary on the event narrated in the 9.45 gospel. If, as the poet Hopkins says, each mortal thing expresses its self in what it does (Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:…myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came) that is even more true in the case of Jesus, the Son of God who became incarnate to do what he is: to be God to us, God with us. And to be the sacrifice that sums up, completes and ends all the sacrifices offered until then.
The sacrifice we heard about in the first reading was not the first sacrifice; but it was one of immense significance, as it sealed the first covenant, the Old Covenant, which is summed up, completed and ended by the New Covenant in the blood of Jesus.
As to our second reading, the letter to the Hebrews is a poetic explanation of how the life, and specifically the death and resurrection of Jesus both fulfils and ends that Old Covenant and everything that it comprised. You need to know your Old Testament very well indeed to understand all the points it makes, but once you do, it changes from a beautiful but rather obscure piece of poetic writing to an extremely clear and rigorously thought out treatise. What it really is is a sermon, though I’m not sure how people nowadays would take to a densely argued sermon taking a good hour to deliver. It may, or may not, have been actually sent as a letter. It has been attributed to St Paul, but honestly the Greek is simply too good for it to have been written by someone who thought in Aramaic, as he did. Various authors have been suggested, from Apollos to Priscilla (writing as a man so that people would not dismiss the piece as worthless). I don’t think it really matters who wrote it. It has been in the Canon of the Scriptures since the earliest days, and that is enough for me.
If you want to know how the Jews of the first century struggled to reconcile what they had learned at their mother’s knee, from their teachers and in their synagogues with what they were now hearing from Jesus and his disciples, the letter to the Hebrews is the place to go. Over and over again the author gives a well-known event or character from the Old Testament and then its fulfilment in Jesus. At the end of the book a receptive Jew could be in no doubt that the Lord really had visited his people.
But for those of us who have never been Jews, who are not really that bothered whether Jesus perfectly fulfilled the prophecies and types of the Old Testament (because for us it is the New Testament that matters and the Old Testament that we read for context and background) …is the epistle to the Hebrews just a historical religious curiosity, with not a lot of relevance to our lives? Well, you might say so if you are the sort of Christian who thinks that all we need to do is be reasonably nice people and go to church occasionally. God is unbelievably merciful, so that may even be true, but how much such people miss!
In fact, it is relevant in two very different ways: in what it tells us about Christ and how our salvation was achieved; and what it tells us about how to deal with suffering. Both are particularly appropriate in Lent and most particularly today as we move into Passiontide.
The death of Abel at the hands of Cain is extremely important. We are told the myth of the fall of Adam and Eve – the first sin being depicted as a refusal of love and a move towards pride and disobedience – but it is with the first murder, of Abel by his brother Cain, that we see its effects. Effects that are reversed, objectively for all of us, and subjectively for each of us as we accept Christ’s grace, by the death of another innocent at the hands of his brothers. God heard Abel’s blood crying out from the ground where it had been spilt, but the blood of Christ, true God and a willing sacrifice, outshouts it, so to speak. That sacrifice reversed everything, turned everything upside down. God’s mountain is no longer the physical Mount Sinai, but the spiritual Mount Zion; God’s presence is no longer seen in darkness, thunder, terror and death but in the brilliance of heaven – or rather, of eternal life, a life in which we already live if we so choose. Because Jesus Christ willingly walked through the darkness, the thunder, the terror and the death, it no longer has any power over those who follow him. Our life makes sense because God lived it. Our sufferings make sense because God suffered. And our death made sense because - God died.

So let us enter into Passiontide with gratitude and mindfulness, and show our willingness – no, our longing – to be with him and follow him wherever he goes.

O God of endless mercy, by our annual celebration of these mysteries you rekindle the faith of the people consecrated to you; increase the grace which you have given us, so that we may fully understand what baptism has cleansed us, what Spirit has given us new life, and by whose Blood we have been redeemed. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.