Who is Jesus? Pose the question to your neighbor and you’ll
get one answer. Ask someone else and it
will be a different answer. If you ask
friend who doesn’t go to church, and she knows you do, she might feel pressure,
thinking you’re looking for a “right answer.”
If we went around the room here and had every person write down their
response, we’d get a number of different ideas.
Many would be similar to one another, but there would be different
points of emphasis. Even among 80-100
people who worship in the same church every week, the answers to such a basic
question, who is Jesus, would vary.
We won’t get a complete answer to
this seemingly short question in the verses we read in Hebrews this
morning. To get a full picture, we’d
have to go through the Old Testament, the four Gospels and Acts, Paul’s
letters, and the rest of the New Testament to see it. And we’d have to understand everything we
read and have the capacity to hold together all the aspects of who Jesus
is. The short question is bigger than
any we could possibly answer.
But, please try. Get a pen and the section of your bulletin
for comments, and begin writing your definition of who Jesus is. It might be worth it to spend the entire time
this morning writing your understanding of Jesus. Your faith life might get a boost if you take
what you write here this morning and continue working on it throughout the
upcoming week. Who is Jesus?
Hebrews 1 doesn’t give the complete
answer, but it does give an important part.
Hebrews is regarded as an epistle, a
New Testament letter, but it’s really a theological treatise which begins,
“Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets,
but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.” For a moment, stop to digest the claim made
here. God has spoken to us.
The Raiders of the Lost Ark tells of the adventurous World War II era
archaeologist Indiana Jones. He has to
fight Nazis and escape from tombs full of poisonous snakes in order to find his
way to God. When he finally gets to the
point that the ark is opened, he has to close his eyes. It’s too much to see. In one of the Star Trek movies, the Enterprise
under the leadership of Captain James T. Kirk flies beyond the reaches of known
space in search for God.
You and I cannot match the exploits
of the great Indiana Jones, and you and I are not even archaeologists. We’re not starship captains, and in fact
there aren’t really starships, and truth be told, there is no edge of known
space. But these and dozens of other fantastic
stories tell the same story, one believed by a lot of people, maybe many who
here. We accept this notion that God is
“out there,” “inaccessible,” “unreachable.”
In a sense, it’s true. Human beings cannot work their way to God or
figure God out. But, as Hebrews asserts,
there have been prophets. God has spoken
through the mouths of those prophets. We
made this point a few months ago as we studied the prophet Hosea. God wants us to know His heart and mind. God has sent prophets. God has given the Bible. God has given visions to people like Daniel
and Peter and Paul. We don’t need to
undertake a harrowing, death-defying quest.
We need to sit and listen because God has spoken to us. I am not sure people who don’t participate in
church or read the Bible know this. God
loves us and wants us to know it.
The primary concern[i]
of the author of Hebrews is to show that while in the past God has spoken
through prophets and scriptures and kings and priests, in the last days, God
speaks through the Son. The New
Testament perspective is that the resurrection of Jesus initiates the “last
days,” the end times. The era of the
church, which we are now in, is the prelude to the end of history. We don’t know when Christ will return to
initiate the final resurrection, but we believe he will, and we believe we are
living in the end times. There’s no
telling how long it might be, but we are in the last days, God is the
communicator, and Jesus is the messages and the way the message is
communicated.
As
you’re working on your own answer to the question “who is Jesus,” maybe a part
of the answer is this. Jesus is God’s
means of communication. God is the
communicator and shares with us truth, and Jesus is the message but also is the
medium, the way the communication is conveyed.
He is called “the son” in Hebrews 1
and then is named in 2:9. The Hebrews
author declares 7 affirmations, truths about the person, work, and status of
God the Son. First, the Son is heir of
all things. God bequeaths to His Son,
the Lord Jesus, possessions of everything in existence. Second, all that God
created, the entire universe, every living thing – all of it – was made through
the Son. Third, when we see Jesus, we
see God. “He is the reflection of God’s glory, and the exact imprint of God’s
very being” (1:3). Fourth, also in verse
3, Jesus sustains all things. Colossians
1:17 says, “in him all things hold together.
Jesus is creator and sustainer.
A fifth affirmation of Jesus the Son
in the opening verses of Hebrews is purification; sin taints God’s good
creation, but Jesus purifies us, washing our sin away and putting his holiness
on us. The theme of Jesus’ covering of
our sins introduced in 1:3 will develop in much greater detail throughout
Hebrews.
The
sixth affirmation follows the sequence of the Gospel story. Jesus purifies us in his death on the cross,
taking the penalty for our sins on himself.
After the cross and burial, he was resurrected. After resurrection and appearing to the
apostles, he ascended and now sits in body at the right hand of God the
Father. God is currently present in the world
through God the Spirit. The Son is
currently in Heaven and will return in His glorified body at the end to
inaugurate the final resurrection.
Seventh
and finally, the Son is superior to the angels.
They carry God’s messages to human beings. They are not restrained by the limits of
natural law. Angels seem vastly superior
to us, but, we, not angels, are the ones created in the image of God. And Jesus, God in human flesh – fully man and
fully God at the same time – lived the perfect human life. He goes before us as the superior one,
worshiped by and by Angels too.
·
Heir
of all things
·
Agent
of Creation for everything that exists
·
Reflection
of God
·
Sustainer
of all things
·
The
one who makes sinful human beings pure and holy
·
Seated
at the right hand of the Father
·
Above
all supernatural, heavenly beings
This
is the Jesus we meet in Hebrews chapter 1, the means of God’s
communication. He is the messenger and
the message. To hear what God is trying
to say, we must listen to Jesus.
Hebrews
2 adds that though Jesus is now crowned with glory, he has gone through
suffering and death. God is immortal;
God cannot die. Yet in Jesus, God shed
divinity and took on human flesh and like you and me was vulnerable to disease,
hunger, heartbreak, disappointment, and sorrow.
The end of 2:9 says he tasted death for everyone; for you; for me. The Son completely identifies with our
greatest struggles; sometimes people see pain and evil running rampant
throughout the world and have a hard time believing a good God could possibly
exist. In Jesus, that good God suffered
in every way that humans do.
This
leads to the third part of the conversation in Hebrews. It’s the old adage: if a tree falls in the
forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noisy crash. It’s a simple equation for sound. There has to be a sender, a medium, and a
receiver. The sound waves are produced,
they travel through something – air, solid material, water – something. And then the sound is completed when the
sound waves are received. So, God speaks
and the sound travels through Jesus.
Who’s the recipient? God’s
church.
The
moments of divine communication in the Bible fall within the bounds of
religious practice. When Peter met the
Roman Cornelius, Cornelius had been praying in an attempt to connect to
Judaism’s God. When Philip baptized the
eunuch from Ethiopia, the man had been reading Israel’s scriptures. When Jesus confronted Saul the Pharisee on
the road, Saul’s work of arresting Christians for being Christians was an act of the synagogue. The reason so many people embrace
spirituality while rejecting organized religion is we all have a longing for
God, but the church, like human institutions, is broken.
Still,
Jesus, the holy God, took on frail human flesh.
The Holy Spirit started the church in the synagogue through flawed
people like Peter, Philip, and Paul, and non-Jews like the Ethiopian and the
centurion. Yes, our church in particular
and churches in general are imperfect, flawed, and broken. But the God Indian
Jones battled Nazis and vipers to find has reached to human beings – those in
the church. God has spoken through Jesus
to the church.
This
is not to say that God ignores people outside the church. Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the
world. God sends us to the world first
and foremost to announce that people can have forgiveness of sin and salvation
from death when they turn to Jesus. That
is the great commission: go and make disciples of people who don’t know God. Yes, God loves the world.
God’s
starting point is the word He has spoken through Jesus to the church. Hebrews was a theological essay written for
persecuted Christians in order to encourage them by clarifying their knowledge
of the Savior, Christ Jesus our Lord.
Begin
developing your answer to the question, “Who is Jesus?” Read Hebrews.
And for that view of the exalted, divine Son, read Colossians 1 and
Revelation and the Gospel of John 1. To
move through the exciting, surprising twists and turns of God walking in human
flesh, read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the rest of John. Jesus is the God who loves you and me, the
one who gives us life. I urge each one
of us this to invest time in re-discovering Him.
AMEN
[i]
George Guthrie (1988), The NIV
Application Commentary: Hebrews, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI), p.54.
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