The Price of Dedication

Texts:  Exodus 13:1, 11-16; Leviticus 12:1-8; Luke 2:22-35

WHAT IS THE PRICE OF dedication?

Today is Groundhog Day, and you could certainly say those men in the long black coats and tall black hats are dedicated to getting up at the crack of dawn on a cold morning to wake up a rodent.  I sometimes think they’re also dedicated to saying we’ll have six more weeks of winter regardless of the weather, but that’s another story.

  And I don’t need to tell you that tonight the Super Bowl is being played over in New Jersey.  Stick a microphone in the face of any given player and ask him what it will take to win, he’ll say it takes dedication.  By that he generally means wholehearted effort as an individual and as a team.  He means he’ll keep his focus on winning the game and bringing home that trophy, and not let anything distract him from it.

But dedication goes deeper and costs more than football games and folk customs.  On this day, the fortieth after Christmas, the Church has traditionally celebrated the Feast of the Presentation.  It marks the day when, as we read in the second chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke,  Mary and Joseph took the Child Jesus, their first-born Son, to be dedicated to God in the Temple.

It’s easy for us to get distracted by the cute baby aspect of this scene.  But what they were doing gives us an idea of the price of being dedicated to God.

Verse 23 refers us to a verse from Exodus 13.  There we read that, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Consecrate (or dedicate) to me every firstborn male.  The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether man or animal.”  In the name of the Lord  Moses commanded the people, “Redeem every firstborn among your sons.  In the days to come, when your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ say to him, ‘With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed every firstborn in Egypt, both man and animal.  This is why I sacrifice to the Lord the first male offspring of every womb and redeem each of my firstborn sons.’”

Ever since the beginning of salvation history, to “dedicate” something or someone to the Lord was to give it up to death.  The only way your firstborn son could live was if he were redeemed by the blood of a lamb.  That’s how the Israelites saved their sons in Egypt the night of that first Passover.  The Angel of death saw the lamb’s blood on the doorpost, and they were spared-- but the firstborn of all the Egyptians were slain.

Blood was the price to get God’s people Israel out of slavery in Egypt.  The price was blood for them to be dedicated to God.  They and their sons deserved to die, but God graciously allowed an innocent animal to die in their stead.

When Mary and Joseph come to Jerusalem with Jesus, they are acknowledging the price of being dedicated to God, by obeying the terms of God’s Old Covenant with Israel.  Jesus is Mary’s firstborn son, and his life is forfeit to God unless He is redeemed in accordance with the Law.

Mary in her obedience is also paying another part of the price of being dedicated to God as a Jew: the cost of purity.  The Lord commanded His people Israel that they were to be pure before Him, in order to come into His presence.  All sorts of things could make you ceremonially impure or unclean, and tops on the list was anything that involved the emission of any bodily fluid, especially blood.  When a woman had given birth to a child, any child, she had to wait a set number of days to be purified from her bleeding, forty days for a son and eighty days for a daughter.  Before that, she could not enter the Lord’s sanctuary.  And even then, there was still a price in blood to be paid, before she could again enjoy the full benefits of being dedicated to the Lord.  Leviticus 12 says, “When the days of her purification for a son or daughter are over, she is to bring to the priest at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting [later, the Temple] a year-old lamb for a burnt offering and a young pigeon or a dove for a sin offering. . . . If she cannot afford a lamb, she is to bring two doves or two young pigeons, one for a burnt offering and one for a sin offering.  In this way the priest will make atonement for her, and she will be clean.”

We see in Luke that by Jesus’ time, the priests were allowing the sacrifice for the woman’s purification to also serve as the sacrifice for the redemption of the firstborn son.  And so it is implied that Mary and Joseph couldn’t afford the lamb, and offered the birds instead.

But even with such allowances, being dedicated to God as an ancient Jew cost you something.  It cost you purity, it cost you obedience, it cost you sacrifices of blood as a substitution for your own life.  In return, you and your people belonged to God as no other nation did.  You enjoyed benefits and satisfactions that no other nation received.  It cost a Jew to be dedicated to God, but the price was worth it.

But now, in this passage, Luke reveals that God is doing something new.  A time was coming and now had come when other nations could and would belong to God, too.  This had been prophesied now and then in the old days; our Call to Worship  passage from Zechariah is an example of it. It says, “‘For I am coming and I will live among you,’ declares the Lord.  ‘Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day and will become my people.’”

But if a Jew thought about this at all, it never seemed quite real.  That day of the nations being dedicated to the God of Israel was always “someday,” far off in the future.  Or it wouldn’t happen until the Lord came and  judged the nations in power and set up the new age.  But now, on this fortieth day after the birth of Mary’s firstborn son, an old man named Simeon comes up to her as she is dedicating and redeeming her son Jesus there in the Temple.  This holy, Spirit-led old man takes the Child in his arms and declares to all who can hear that now salvation had come.  Now the light had come, that would reveal the Lord and His grace to the Gentiles, and make it possible for them to belong to Him.  Now, through this Child, Israel would find its true glory, because through this Child Jesus Israel would live out the reason it belonged to God in the first place.

Luke says that Mary and Joseph marvelled at what Simeon had said about little Jesus.  They knew what it cost for them as Jews to belong to God.  But how could Gentiles ever belong?  What could their son have to do with that?

What, indeed?  But let’s put that on one side for a moment.  For Simeon is still speaking by the power of the Holy Spirit, and he tells Mary that this change in God’s covenant would cost many in Israel dearly.  For being dedicated to God means also being dedicated to all others who belong to God.  And there are and were many who want to feel that God belongs only to them and their kind.   Simeon says, “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.”  This baby Jesus, Mary’s firstborn son, would be the means by which God was introducing a new way, a new order of being dedicated to Him.  Those who received Him would rise.  Those who rejected Him would fall.

Simeon says, “The thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.”  Yes, that’s often how it happens.  Your relationship with some group or someone begins to go deeper, or some change comes in, even a good change, and very quickly you find out if you were really committed to that person or group, or if you were just there for what you could get out of it. You find out if you’re willing to pay the price of continuing to belong!

Mary belonged to God in a very special way.  She pledged to pay the price when she answered the angel Gabriel with “Behold, I am the maidservant of the Lord.”  She did what it took to make that journey down to Bethlehem when she was nine months pregnant, so the Christ Child might be born where it was prophesied.  She was willing to shoulder the responsibility of raising the Child who was Emmanuel, God with us.  But now Simeon says to Mary, “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”  With these words the Holy Spirit tells her that the cost will be much higher than she has thought or imagined.  The sword will pierce her soul, because she belongs to God and she belongs to the incarnate God who is her infant Son Jesus,  destined to be “a sign that will be spoken against,” given as a light for revelation to the Gentiles.

Which returns us to the question we left off before.  What could this Child Jesus have to do with bringing in the Gentiles to belong to God?

To answer that question, we have to ask another question that is the deepest one of all.  We’ve asked, what is the price for us to be dedicated to God?  The fundamental question really is, “What does it cost for God to be dedicated to us?”

God didn’t have to get mixed up with humankind.  He could have wound up the world and gone off and let it run, like some people believe.  But instead He chose to descend to us in care and love.  And He did that with our sins still on us, with our rebellion and selfishness still making us unfit and unclean in His presence.  The blood of lambs, bulls, and goats really could never take away sins.  But all those years and centuries the Lord graciously accepted that blood to atone for the sins of His people.  Imagine what it cost God in patience and forbearance, dealing all those ages with His rebellious chosen people and the wicked Gentile nations around them!

But He did more than deal with them.  He loved them, too, deeply and earnestly.  He loved them-- He loved us-- so much that when the time was right God paid the price of being dedicated to us by entering into the womb of a young Jewish woman and becoming a human being like every other human being, yet without sin.  God paid that extraordinary price!  As C. S. Lewis puts it, think what it would be like for you to become an ant or a slug!

But that’s not all He paid.  Again, Simeon ends his ominous prophecy by saying to Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul also.”  Also.  Who else’s soul will a sword pierce?  Who else will bear agony and pain and even physical death, for the sake of the new belonging that God is opening up to all peoples?  Why, it is this Child Simeon holds in his arms.   This Infant is the sign of God’s salvation that will be spoken against.  Jesus who is God in human flesh will pay the ultimate price for God to belong to us and for us to belong to Him.  Jesus who was God among us paid with His life, given for us on the cross.  He became the Lamb of God who made atonement for our sins and paid the price for our purification.  Not just for God’s chosen people the Jews, but for all whom the Lord will call, from every tribe, tongue, and nation.  “I will live among you,” says Christ even before His birth, “and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me to you.”

And since He has paid the price of being dedicated to us, we don’t need to pay anything to belong to Him.  Jesus has borne all the cost in His body on the Tree!  There is no more need to dedicate our firstborn sons to Him and redeem them from death, for God has dedicated His only-begotten Son to us, and His death has brought us all eternal life.  There is no need for us to sacrifice lambs on His altar, for Jesus is the perfect Lamb of God who once and for all takes away the sins of the world.  We don’t have to prove our purity, or pay our dues by exerting our own righteousness, for Jesus Christ is our righteousness, and He has covered the cost of our being dedicated to Him from now to eternity.  Every time we baptise an adult or a child, and every time we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we affirm our membership in Him and He confirms His unity with us.  The Old Covenant has passed away, the New Covenant in His blood has been made, and a new way of being dedicated to God is open to all peoples everywhere.

Shout and be glad, O Daughter of Zion!  Rejoice with great joy, O nations of the world!  For the Jesus Christ our Lord has come and lives among us.  He has paid the price, and now He belongs to us and we belong to Him forever.  Alleluia, alleluia, amen!

Christ's Resurrection and You: Where Is He Now?

Texts:    Hebrews 4:14 - 5:10; 7:23 - 8:2; Acts 1:1-11

    SHORTLY AFTER EASTER, I GOT a message on Facebook from my oldest niece.  She said she and some of her friends were discussing Jesus' resurrection, and they found that there was a question that stumped them all.  That is, where had Jesus gone after that? When did He die the second time?  Where was He really buried?  And where could she look in the Bible for answers about this?  She wanted to know for herself, and she wanted to tell her girlfriends, too.

    Immediately I shared with her the good news of our Lord's ascension that we are celebrating today, and pointed her to some verses that would assure her that Jesus had never died again.   I felt bad that I couldn't do more at the moment, since I was in the middle of something, but I hoped I'd given her even to start on.

    But I felt worse-- shocked and saddened, actually-- that my 40-year-old niece and her friends would have the need to questions like that at all.  She attends church regularly.  From what I know of him, her pastor seems to have his head screwed on straight when it comes to doctrine.  How could she even imagine that Jesus could have died a second time and not understand that He's in heaven even now in His glorified human body? How terrible for her to be thinking that Christ's victory over death wasn't final and absolute!

    But then I had to think: How much do any of us, even us Christians, think and know about the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ?  This past Thursday was Ascension Day.  How many of us commemorated it then?  We have the big celebration of Easter, then next thing we know, it's Pentecost Sunday and the Holy Spirit's coming.  And sometime in between, Jesus just seems to have slipped away.  Where did He go?  Where is He now?  I had to be glad my niece was asking the question in any form at all.

    Our reading from Acts shows us that Jesus did not merely slip away: He departed, and He did it openly.  Remember how in the Upper Room before His crucifixion, Jesus told His disciples that it was needful that He go away, so He could send the Holy Spirit to them. But for forty days after He rose they'd been seeing Him in that very physical resurrection body of His-- physical, except that in it He could transcend physical limitations like distance and solid walls and locked doors.  And it seems that the disciples were getting used to that.  It was just like old times, almost, having Jesus around eating with them and teaching them.  The disciples had to be shown that that time was coming to an end, that now a new order was to begin when Jesus would send the gift His Father promised, even the Holy Spirit.

    Moreover, the disciples had to understand where Jesus had gone.  He couldn't just fail to show up one day, and never return.  St. Luke leaves no room for any theories about Jesus quietly retiring to the countryside like I heard somebody or other theorize recently, or going off to India to become a guru, like the New Agers believe.  Jesus made sure the disciples saw Him physically taken up before their very eyes.  A cloud enveloped Him until both He and it were no longer visible.  This was no ordinary cloud of water vapor.  The disciples were Jews and knew their history. They would certainly realize that this was the cloud of God's presence that led the children of Israel in the wilderness, the cloud of glory surrounded Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration. This cloud was a visible manifestation of the presence of God Himself, and in it Jesus stepped directly from the realm of this world into the heaven of God His Father.

    But you can't blame the disciples for standing there looking "intently into the sky as he was going."  Or for keeping on looking after He had disappeared.  We'd do the same.  It took two men in white--angels-- who suddenly stood there with them to tell them that Jesus had been taken from them into heaven.  The angels promised, too, that He would come back in the same way they'd seen Him go-- riding on the clouds of heaven.

    And between the time of His ascension, and the time of His return in glory, where is our Lord Jesus?  He indeed is in heaven, at the right hand of the Father in glory.

    So what is He doing now?  Has He finished with us, now that He is high and exalted?  Is He simply back to enjoying the rights and privileges of being the Son of God, with never a thought for His people here on earth?  Never think it!  There's a 19th century Welsh hymn whose chorus is a dialogue between the men and the women of the congregation.  It begins with the question, "Who saved us from eternal loss?" ("Who but God's Son upon the cross?") and it ends with the women asking, "Where is He now?" and both men and women sing together, "In heaven interceding."

    That's exactly where He is, and exactly what He's doing there.  This is the meaning of Christ's ascension, and the wonderful truth our verses from the Letter to the Hebrews reveal to us.  Jesus is indeed the One who intercedes for us before the Father.  He is our great High Priest who even now represents us to God, Who even now can point to His one, perfect, and everlasting sacrifice that forever will atone for our sins.

    In Hebrews 4:14 Jesus is described as our great high priest who has gone through the heavens.  The ancient Jews understood that there were ranks of angels and other heavenly beings, and ranks of the heavens in which they dwelt.  Paul speaks of this in 2 Corinthians 12, when he tells about a man in Christ-- himself, actually-- who was somehow caught up into the third heaven, the paradise of God.  By saying that Jesus had gone "through the heavens," the writer makes it clear that our Lord has gone all the way into the divine Holy of Holies, all the way into the presence chamber of almighty God.  Nothing stopped Him, nothing disqualified Him; Jesus is right there sharing His Father's throne.

    Therefore we have every reason to hold firmly to the faith we possess.  So we trust and believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins, and that His blood atones for all our unrighteousness, redeems us from death, and makes us holy before God.  We have faith in Jesus, our great High Priest.

    I think we Christians, especially we Protestants, have gotten so used to the idea of Jesus as our Intercessor that we forget it means He is our High Priest and that we need one just as much as ancient Israel did.   They needed a high because they were in themselves unholy in God's sight, under His wrath, and they needed sacrifice offered for them so they could be accepted by God.  So do we.  Not just anyone could make this offering. The high priest represented all the people, especially on the Day of Atonement when he took the blood of the sacrifices into the Holy of Holies.  He was one of them, a Jew like they were, but he had a special appointment from God.  The priest was to be God's chosen man, who could identify with the people and he with them.  That's what we need as well.

    The Jewish system found its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, incarnate by the Holy Spirit through the Virgin Mary.  He is definitely is a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses.  In Hebrews chapter 1 we read that Jesus the Son of God took on true flesh and blood and shared in our humanity. He wasn't an angel or a mere divine appearance, He was a man like us.  Like us, on this earth Jesus was tempted in every way we are.  But unlike Aaron and his descendants, Jesus did not fall into sin. Unlike them, He did not have to first sacrifice a bull for His own sin-offering before He could make atonement for the people.  Jesus our sympathetic High Priest  was holy and without sin.  Therefore, He can represent us in heaven as an Intercessor who is totally acceptable to our holy God.

    With Jesus as our high priest, we can approach the heavenly throne of grace with confidence, knowing we'll receive mercy there for His sake.  Verse 2 of chapter 5 says that the high priest "is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness."  Jesus knows what it's like to be in this mortal flesh.  Again, He does not have to offer sacrifices for His own sins, but in verses 7 and 8 we can see how in His heart and in His flesh He suffered for us, how as a Man He truly had to go through the ache and agony of sorrow over our sins, how finally He had to submit to the torture and death of the cross.  Jesus the Son of God earned His high priesthood as the Son of Man, and so, even now, He is in heaven sympathizing with our weaknesses, dealing gently with us when we go astray, and representing us in matters relating to God.

     But we see in 4:4 that it wouldn't have been enough for Jesus to be our fellow-human, if God had not personally chosen Him.  God called Him to the honor of the high priesthood, just like He called Aaron in the early days of Israel, so long ago.  In the words of Psalm 22, the Lord God has said,

    "You are my Son;
        today I have become your Father."

And in Psalm 110 God says to Him,

    "You are a priest forever,
        in the order of Melchizedek." 

    Jesus Christ has been appointed by the Father to be our representative forever.  He's not like the priests of the line of Aaron of the house of Levi. The Aaronic priests could not continue in office forever; they were mortal and one after another, they all died. In contrast, God says that Christ is a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.  Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, is referred to in Hebrews 7:3 as being "without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life."  Figuratively-speaking, he is deathless, and so he is a walking prophecy of the Son of God who lives forever and exercises the same kind of priesthood that never ends and never can be destroyed.

    We don't have to worry about Jesus our High Priest dying a second time and leaving us with some inadequate or unsympathetic successor.  No, because He lives forever He is able to save completely everyone who comes to God through Him, because He ever lives to make intercession for us.

    Let us take comfort in these words.  I know my sin, and I know I need a lot of interceding for.  And I think you realize the same thing about yourself.  There will never come a time when Jesus our ascended Lord stops pleading for us before the Father.  He always lives, and because of that, Jesus can keep on interceding for us.  At the same time, interceding for us is what Jesus always lives for!

    Jesus meets our every need.  He has ascended to the Father: as verse 7:26 puts it, He is exalted above the heavens.  So while He has experienced human weakness and can sympathize with us, at the same time He is holy, blameless, pure, and set apart from sinners.  That's the kind of high priest we need.  Jesus is acceptable in God's presence and so His prayers on our behalf are acceptable to God.

    Jesus is qualified to be our eternal high priest by His merciful humanity, by His divine appointment, by His suffering and intercession for us here on this earth, by His deathlessness, by His purity and holiness, and by His ascension to the throne of God.  All these qualities were required in the One who was to be our Intercessor and Advocate before God the Father.  As Hebrews 8:1 states, "We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven." This is a sanctuary much holier than the Most Holy Place of the tabernacle or the Temple could ever be.  Jesus serves in our behalf in the very presence of God; this is what He ascended into heaven to do, and what He now lives and enjoys living to do.

    So now, whenever you are in trouble, whenever you are tempted, whenever you think the world, the universe, and God Himself are all turned against you, think.  Remember.  You have a great High Priest, Jesus the great High Priest, Who for you has gone through the heavens to the holy heart of God, and even now He sympathizes with your weakness and deals gently with you.  No sin that you can repent of  is beyond His power to forgive, for He sacrificed Himself for sins once for all when He offered Himself.   When you're convinced that you can never be good enough for God, think.  Remember.  Jesus is your holy and blameless High Priest, and He credits His perfect obedience to you.  When you don't know how or what to pray, think. Remember.  Jesus is there, even now, representing you to His Father and yours.  He is able to save you completely, for He always lives to intercede for you.

    So let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.  Christ our crucified and risen Lord has gone through the heavens and has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.  "Where is He now?"

    "In heaven interceding!"