Who Needs Melchizedek?  5th Sunday in Lent, Year B

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-12; Psalm 119:9-16; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

This is the final week in the Elves’ review of Orthodox Christian belief leading to Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and the celebration of Easter.  Jesus’s last public dialogue in John’s Gospel is confirmed, or explained, in the portion plucked from the anonymous letter to the “Hebrews.”  John’s Jesus says, “Whoever serves me must follow me, for wherever I am, my servant must be there also . . . if I’m elevated from the earth, I’ll take everyone with me.”  Whoever wrote the letter to the “Hebrew” community in Rome says, “he [Jesus] became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him . . .”  This leader’s interpretation of Jesus’s death and resurrection is that Jesus did not claim the power and the glory of high-priesthood.  That was bestowed upon him by God himself – just like it was bestowed upon Melchizedek.

Both the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Hebrews are products of the leadership of communities in the late 1st to early 2nd Centuries who were struggling with the developing legend surrounding the death of Jesus.  John’s community may have been more involved with the separation from Judaism of followers of the emerging Christian way.  Depending on the timing of the Gospel, John’s community may also have been dealing with a double whammy: not only were they separating from traditional Judaism; traditional Judaism was also redefining itself without the stabilizing influence of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The recipients of the letter to the Hebrews were more likely to have been dealing with persecution on the part of Romans of the emerging Christian religion.

The subject matter in the letter to the Hebrews might seem to be similar to the situation Jeremiah was writing about:  Both were addressed to communities on the edge of exile, who were in danger of unraveling and giving up on God’s rule (Jews in destroyed 6th Century b.c.e. Jerusalem), or the promise of Jesus’s return (persecuted Christians in 1st Century Rome).  The similarities end there.  The writer of Hebrews was enamored with the legend of the mysterious high priest Melchizidek, who (so far as scholars have been able to discover) had no parents, and never died.  His only claim to legitimacy appears to be that he was not from the lineage of Aaron – who constructed the golden calf, thereby being the first to break God’s Covenant with Moses.  Once more, anti-Semitism appears like a faint watermark behind the printed words.

It seems a mighty stretch of imagination to pick an obscure reference from Genesis 14:18 and Psalm 110:4 upon which to hang an argument about the divinity of Jesus as the Christ.  But of such is orthodoxy often made.  We will get to do it again in October for Proper 24.

The only scripture worth taking seriously in this group of readings is Jeremiah 31:31-34: “The New Covenant.”  Of course the prophet Jeremiah, left behind in Jerusalem while most of the Jewish population was exiled to Babylon in the 6th Century b.c.e., was not talking about Jesus – who was born 600 or so years later.  He was talking about a new Covenant with God that would be honored by faithfulness to God’s justice on the part of the people.  The “new covenant” would not depend on Temple worship, but on individual response to God’s law.  “I will put my law within them,” Jeremiah reports, “and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

Jeremiah was not worried about orthodox rules for worship.  Nor was he talking about some god-like priest-king who came from nowhere and lives forever as high priest to an amalgamation of the Canaanite deity El Elyon and Yahweh (“the order of Melchizedek”).  Jeremiah was trying to assure that Judaism would survive.  That could only happen if each individual person were to take on the responsibility to act in accordance with God’s law.  The Psalm Jeremiah would sing is Psalm 119:  “I treasure the word in my heart, so that I may not sin against you. . . . I delight in the way of your decrees as much as in all riches. . . . I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.”

Jeremiah’s situation may have been similar to Third Millennium Christianity, which John Shelby Spong suggests will have to either change or die. Should exiles from Christian Orthodoxy reclaim the myth of a dying-rising god for a post-modern world?  Or does sustainable life on 21st Century Planet Earth depend more on teasing out the story of Jesus’s life and teachings from two millennia of misquotation and misinterpretation?

From inside his own Jewish tradition, Jesus taught that the law of the Universe (God’s law) is distributive justice-compassion.  God’s law (the rules of the universal order) shows no partiality.  The rain falls on the just and the unjust.  The sun shines, the winds blow, the earth turns.  Because human consciousness can choose to live outside the realm of distributive justice-compassion, Jesus also taught a radical abandonment of self-interest (“Love your enemies.”)  Instead of unjust systems bringing war, famine, disease, and death (Empire), humans can choose non-violence, justice-compassion, and peace (Covenant).  The downside, as Jews and Gentiles alike have learned through experience, is that choosing Covenant often gets people killed.

John’s Jesus says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  Some Christians have interpreted this to mean not only salvation from hell in the next life, but indifference to injustice in this life.  “I know I’m going to heaven because I believe in Jesus,” a co-worker once told me.  “Why should I care what happens to anyone else?”  I submit that this is the kind of Christian who long ago abandoned Jesus to his fate.  As the writer of Matthew’s gospel suggests in his apocalyptic description of the final judgment, the ones who will inherit the kingdom of God are the ones who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, extend hospitality to the stranger, visit prisoners – in short, those who abandon their own self-interest in the service of justice-compassion.  These are the ones who accompany Jesus on his final walk to crucifixion and death.  These are the ones in whom and with whom Jesus rises into incarnation.

Luke’s version of the saying does not include allusions to “life in this world” versus “eternal life.”  Luke’s Jesus says, “Whoever tries to hang on to life will forfeit it, but whoever forfeits life will preserve it.”  When the Orthodox Christian interpretive gloss is removed, the conundrum that contains the truth is revealed.  In the context of Jesus’s life and death, and prophetic Jewish tradition, in the service of distributive justice-compassion, whoever hangs onto life under the rules of Empire will end up selling out to the systems of injustice.  King Saul comes to mind.  Even the great King David learned that lesson the hard way.  So did Judas.  But whoever gives up the safety of imperial control lives already in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion.

Jeremiah’s task was to convince the people that what mattered to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was justice.  Under Jeremiah’s “new covenant,” wherever they happened to be, and under whatever conditions, if the people lived in accordance with God’s justice, God would restore them to the land, and with it, the Temple.  For post-modern, 21st Century exiles from Christian orthodoxy, whenever anyone radically abandons self-interest in the service of distributive justice-compassion, the “new covenant” is established; a kenotic spirit rules; God’s kingdom has come.

There is no need for a “high priest on the order of Melchizedek."

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