The Bringer of Newness--August 16, 2021

 

The Bringer of Newness--August 16, 2021

"When he said above, 'You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings,' (these are offered according to the law), then he added, 'See, I have come to do your will.' He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. And it is by God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." [Hebrews 10:8-10]

I think we are more afraid than we let on that things could be different.

And I think we are afraid even to face the reality of what it costs God to bring the newness we deeply need but also deeply fear.

Because, at least as the writer of Hebrews has insisted, it costs God everything.

We heard in the opening verses of this book the bold idea that Jesus is the very fullness of God's being, like the perfect and complete image of God, rendered, not in oil paints or pen and ink or photograph, but in a human life.  Jesus is what God's melody sounds like, so to speak, when played in the key of humanity.  And yet this Jesus is offered up as the way to end the old arrangements that have kept us at odds with one another and with God.  Jesus bears our own deathliness as the way of ending our hell-bent self-destructiveness.  His own death isn't meant to prop up the old systems that required constant refueling with more death, but rather to bring an end to them.  The death of Jesus--as the writer of Hebrews calls it, "the offering of his body"--doesn't mean, "Look, here's another sacrifice, so let's keep this whole sacrificial system going forever," but rather the opposite.  The cross is the sacrifice that ends all sacrifices, and the system around which people had built their lives (and their pictures of God) that was grounded in those sacrifices.

In a way, this whole passage reminds me of a bit of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.  Given just a few days before the surrender of Lee and the end of the war, Lincoln did an interesting bit of national civil-religion theology.  He said that the terrible system of slavery needed to come to an end, and that it seemed the cost in blood and treasure of the war itself might just be the necessary payment for bringing that wicked system to an end.  Lincoln offered the possibility that it might be God's will that "all the wealth piled up by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil be sunk," and that "every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword."  In other words, Lincoln was framing the Civil War itself as the means of ending the cruelty and injustice of the system of slavery that had been in place for centuries before.  And while we can certainly discuss some other time how much Lincoln saw the war in terms of ending slavery at the beginning, versus how much that became a convenient framing as the war went on, it's at least fair enough to say that at the end of the war, he understood that the outcome would make possible the abolition of slavery everywhere in the Union.  The war became the price for ending the enslavement of millions, as Lincoln saw it, even if no one exactly knew why such a price had to be paid.  

Now, of course, part of what made that chapter in American history so precarious is that for an awful lot of our ancestors at that time, the idea of ending "the way it's always been" was so scary they couldn't even imagine a new ordering of things.  They couldn't imagine a new way of building an economy that wasn't based on exploiting the labor of enslaved people, or the cheap goods that came from that labor.  They couldn't imagine a new ordering of society where people were not deemed less-than because of their ancestry or the color of their skin or the curl of their hair. They couldn't imagine an end to the old system, and so they feared what it could look like to see it crumble.  (And for that matter, whatever glimmers of that "newness" there might have been in the Reconstruction era were stifled shortly after when White southerners took back power and brought back much of the old system with new names and subtle differences.)

I think the writer of Hebrews sees something similar going on in Jesus' death at the cross.  In Jesus' death, we have God's willingness to pay the ultimate price in order to end the old system that seemed dependent on death.  God doesn't demand a certain number of soldier die on a battlefield to rectify things, as Lincoln speculated in his address.  But rather, God offers God's own life in the person of Jesus, as the means of bringing sacrifices to an end, once and for all.  And it really is nothing short of tearing apart an old system and bringing about a new order--abolishing the old and bringing forth something new.

It can seem pretty surprising to consider that as the Bible tells it, God is the One tearing down those old systems, and God is the One bringing forth newness. We are so used to thinking of God as the white-bearded fellow tasked with propping up whatever the status quo is, and that God's job is to keep things the way they are.  We are used to picturing God as the one who makes things "go back to normal," or who restores things to some "good old days" way we picture in our memory.  But more often than not, the Scriptures speak of God as the breaker of old systems, the abolisher of old orders, and the creator of the new.  And Jesus is the face of that newness.

As someone who knows how comforting it can be to clutch onto the familiar--or at least how relatively comfortable we can tell ourselves we are with the devil we know rather than some future we cannot picture--I get it, how frightening it can be to think the sentence out loud, "It doesn't have to be this way."  I know how scary it can be to see the old systems we've been stuck in for a very long time rooted out and pulled down, because at least we know how those routines go.  But maybe today is a day to allow God to bring some newness to us, and to hear God's assurance that we don't have to be afraid of it.

In fact, maybe today is a day to recognize the lengths God has gone to and the costs God has paid to make that new creation possible--a creation, and a new kind of relationship, not built on death, but on the end of death.

What else could that newness look like for us today?

Lord God, bring your newness among us today, and give us the courage to embrace it.