Sermon for 2006 January 15, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet

Bible readings: Isaiah 60:8-end, Hebrews 6:19-7:end

Over the course of my career in the broadcast industry I have attended and conducted some really bizarre interviews. Of course I can’t name any names, but one of the oddest experiences I had some years ago was a piece of pay bargaining between my boss and a candidate we were interviewing. Everything had gone really well and we liked the candidate and she liked us but there was just that thorny question of pay to sort out. The candidate said that she would expect no less than (shall we say) £25k. To which my side said sorry but we weren’t in a position to offer more than £21k. Well, perhaps £24k said the candidate. Well we could push it to £22k said the boss. Well let’s compromise on £23k said the candidate. To which the boss in a master stroke said "make it £26k"! It was brilliant – the feelgood factor for the candidate was amazing.

Not many human transactions are like that but a common message from our two Bible readings today is that God does work in that way. He takes what we hope for the most and instead of grudgingly nearly meeting it he goes beyond and through what we could have dared ask. The path to those promises might not be straightforward but that is the way God wishes to take us.

In our first reading, from Isaiah, the prophet dangles in front of us a very worldly vision of wealth and power such that the average human being might often dream of. Being endowed with splendour. Having the wealth of the nations brought to you. The glory of Lebanon will come to you. You will drink the milk of nations. You will be brought gold instead of bronze, silver instead of iron. Phrases calculate to excite his hearers. The equivalent for us might be on a personal level, a dream house, a respected and revered place in society, or on a national level it might be the dream of Britain becoming top nation again!

But in our post-modern world there is also something a little distasteful about those promises of Isaiah. They’re very jingoistic, aren’t they? They’re perhaps even more uncomfortable given the recent history of Israel. They speak of past sufferings and promise glory – more than glory, a top place among the nations. And it would seem that many in the modern state of Israel have taken that vision too literally. Of course that is a huge debate in its own right, but I would hope that those who are going to be in power in Israel would take on board what comes next in Isaiah’s vision, where it’s leading to, because it certainly doesn’t end with that nationalistic bit. And if we take the reading beyond Israel through the New Testament and into the church, we must also look to what comes next:

It’s so much more, so much better, than you would get if you stopped halfway through the promise. It even means that how you measure power will become meaningless. What is the greatest source of power and energy we have? – it’s the Sun, but here Isaiah is saying

A heavenly vision of God’s promise. But how can this come about?

In the New Testament we had rather an enigmatic reading which helps to throw some light on how this can happen – how God can go beyond our usual expectations. It hinges on a discussion about priests. Through the history of Israel we had priests who were mediators between God and the rest of the people. A priest had credentials – he was descended from the tribe of Levi; Moses and Aaron were good examples of this. The high priest had a limited possibility to go into the inner sanctuary of the temple which symbolized the presence of God. It was a symbol of access to God, but very circumscribed and partial. Jesus is called a priest, a high priest, but he isn’t associated with this family line through Levi. He is compared with someone much more shadowy, someone we know very little about. This man is Melchizedek. He had no lineage, we know nothing about his birth or death, his credentials, but he was the man who blessed Abraham and to whom Abraham gave a tenth of everything – so in a rather humorous aside the writer of Hebrews suggests that this unknown priest actually had a higher status than Levi because of a kind of seniority through Abraham.

This man had an interesting name too, Melchizedek, which could be taken to mean King of peace and King of righteousness – those two words again. The normal priestly line had become to some extent corrupt. Jesus is associated instead with this man who had not suffered corruption and who gives us this tantalizing idea of being a priest for ever. Jesus is not like a normal priest with his limited access to God. He is a priest for ever and he enters that inner sanctuary, that place of access to God which we ought not to enter, and he does it on our behalf and then – and this is wonderful – as our forerunner. Which means we go in there too! The promise of the priests was something that perhaps most people would have been prepared to settle for – a kind of appeasement of God through sacrifices – which is what a lot of religious faith in the world has concentrated on, even the Christian church sometimes. But the promise of Jesus as our priest and forerunner is far, far greater.

What that means for us is both quite simple and also beyond what we can really imagine. It means that someone who is King of peace and King of righteousness can rule in our lives. Even if that is not what we thought we were asking for. Jesus really did bring both peace and righteousness – in his life and death and rising again he throws light on that shadowy figure of Melchizedek and brings the promises of Isaiah to fruition. And we are reminded by these two readings that those promises do not come true through earthly power and status, even religious power and status, but they come true by God going through them and beyond those things; like breaking the sound barrier, the consequences are amazing. And this is a kind of warning or a reminder that when we ask for things we do not really know what we are asking for – or that whatever we do ask for sincerely, God can go beyond it towards what he craves for us – hearts and lives of righteousness and peace.