Melchizedek 3
Before going a step further, I simply must revisit a point mentioned fleetingly above and even, in a way, backtrack on it.
I mentioned an "objection" possibly coming from the other side concerning Jesus' priesthood, inasmuch as Jesus was not from the priestly tribe.
On the other hand, the issue at stake here is probably not whether or not Jesus COULD be God's ultimate high priest, the "officiator" of the ultimate atonement. It is very likely that the epistle's immediate audience were convinced by the supernatural events accompanying the Crucifixion, centrally the rending of the temple veil, that the Holy of Holies had been breached by the Blood of the Lamb and that only the Lamb Himself could also have been the unseen Priest accomplishing the act.
The Hebrews writer, therefore, is using his readers' own certainty against them (more properly put, against their error, out of love for them), and he is doing so mercilessly, leaving them no out. "You can't have it both ways" is the essence of this argument. If Jesus is the supreme High Priest of the Final Atonement, as we all agree, then you who try to subject Him to the Law and squeeze this new covenant into the parameters, purview and prerogatives of the Law have a HUGE problem: Jesus' high priesthood is, going strictly by the law, ILLEGAL. He is not a Levite. But that's only half of your problem, Law-Gospel faction. Here is the other half....
The LAW and the TEXT, in "letter" and "spirit," utterly and conclusively DISALLOW any Levite, any priest after Aaron's order, ever to become this ultimate High Priest. Not only is Jesus "barred," as it were (unless He had incarnated as a Levite, but as you will see, He not only didn't, but COULDN'T), from service as a priest within the parameters of the Law, but the Levites are barred, by the very law that makes them priests, from EVER being the ultimate Lamb and Priest "who takes away the sins of the world." Yes, indeed, the Law of God prohibited Jesus from performing "levitical" priesthood at the same time as it prohibited any Levite from ever being the Messiah. If it's "illegal" for Jesus to be a levitical priest, it's also "illegal" for a Levite, in a manner of speaking, to be Jesus. (You see where this is going, I trust.)
Just as Christ the Lamb was sacrificed outside the city walls, the Atonement ultimately was realized outside the construct of the levitical priesthood. The "shadow of things to come" was not simply aspects of the Law prefiguring even greater things to be fulfilled within the Law's parameters; no, the whole Law itself was the shadow of greater things to come (or, as the writer puts it elsewhere, "the better covenant").
But I have failed to state why all of this is so. The reason for all the "illegality," why Jesus can't be a Levite and a Levite could never be "Jesus," is this: the Law STATES, and the Hebrews writer reiterates, that all the priests under the Law must (note, this is not optional, not an afterthought, but directly required) bring sacrifices for...their own sins. That's it. Jesus, the Sinless Lamb, could never do that. Though Jesus fulfilled the Law in His sinlessness, there is an aspect of the Law He could never have carried out: to bring sacrifice first for His own sins and then for the the sins of the people. He didn't have any, so He couldn't. You can't get around it. It's an explicit divine command: bring sacrifice first for your own sins, Levites. Jesus is categorically excluded forever; He can never be a Levite. And no Levite can ever be the Sinless Lamb (not to put too fine a point on it, we may justifiably say that the Law REQUIRES Levites to be sinners!).
The writer covers these points in verses 27-28.
And this is WHY, the writer insists, in this ingenious argument, that God "needed" a priesthood that was "other" than any priesthood the Law ever contemplated or was competent to contain within itself. The implicit point, that would not have been lost on these readers, is that, if the whole CRUX of the Atonement DEMANDS such an "outside-the-box" priesthood, then what on EARTH are you thinking about, Law-Gospel Faction, when you try to squeeze the LIFE of the "better" New Covenant (foretold by Jeremiah) into your fleshly, earthly, outmoded (and I mean that in the highest sense, the transcendant "mode" having burst into our world in the Son) precepts?
Speaking of "life," several times in this chapter the writer, again mercilessly, injects the "life" mode into the conversation. He's determined not to let his readers off the hook. Christ is RISEN. He is ALIVE. Levites die and die and die and die. If for that reason alone Jesus can't be a Levite! He only died once (just as all must die once...) and passed His priesthood on to...NOBODY. Indeed, His priesthood was realized precisely IN His death and, by His resurrection, became unpassing, fixed eternally, His alone. There is no provision for anything of the sort in the Law. This nuance is perhaps somewhat connected to the writer's surprising, seeming non sequitur of an analogy, i.e., about a will and the death of the testator. The analogy is jarring, being a sudden by-the-way kind of example taken from the daily lives of writer and reader in their own time, with no apparent connection to the scriptural argument. Yet the constant "life and death" mode of this chapter, the implicit issue being what a death, or the absence of a death, MEANS, does make sense of why the illustration would have come to the writer's mind. Melchizedek's lack of a literary/revelatory death MEANS something (only revealed later on). Jesus' conquering life, never to die again, MEANS something. The fact that this life could come ONLY through death, THE death, MEANS something. And the object lesson of a will crystallizes the point handily: the death of a Levite or a mortal High Priest conveyed the Law-bound offices to the next generation. The death of Christ conveys nothing of the sort. There is no parallel, no symmetry, no yin and yang. There is only transcendence here, the transcendence of an inextinguishable LIFE, which the writer underlines repeatedely in this chapter, overtly or by implication (vv. 3, 8, 16, 24, 25, 28). And (compare the argumentation of Paul in Galatians) the point that must have been screamingly implicit between the writer and readers here was this: IF this LIFE has already been RECEIVED by the testator's heirs, i.e., by ALL the believers in Jesus, whether Jew or Gentile, then by what possible criteria can you demand of the Gentile believers something more in order to gain the LIFE they already HAVE? (That is the whole crux of Paul's argument in Galatians, which is why Hebrews strikes me as so powerfully Pauline, in terms of its deep logic and theological horizon; if Paul didn't write it, as for various reasons it is said he didn't, I would argue at the very least that writing a letter like this was not "beyond his pay scale," he was certainly competent to write in terms like these to his fellow Jews, adopting a style radically different from that of his letters to Gentile believers).
It occurs to me that one might, in our day, object: "But if you say Jesus could never have fulfilled the commandment to bring sacrifice first for his own sins and then for the nation's, doesn't that completely invalidate the idea Christians love to tout, that Jesus fufilled the whole law? Doesn't the entire premise of his supposed 'perfect righteousness' come crashing down on that point?" The thoughtful answer to that is, of course: "Poppycock." The objection doesn't even work on its own premises: "Ah ha, so you're saying that because of Jesus' sinlessness He must have gotten something WRONG, precisely by failing to bring sacrifice for His...er, sins."
How can sinlessness be a fault, a failure to live up to the standards of God's righteousness? Such an argument is on the same level of absurdity as the argument that, because some of the witnesses didn't exactly sync in their timetables, Jesus couldn't have risen from the dead.
Fulfilling the Law NEVER meant doing absolutely everything the Law mentions. There are tons of things in the Law that Jesus never did, things that were contingent on peculiar occurences or were "if"-commands, i.e., "if and when A happens, then you must do B." (Note, however, that the command to the Levites never says, "If you have any sins..."; rather, the entire construct of the role itself is bound up with the offering of sacrifice first for their own sins.) And even deeper than that, there were commandments in the Law that Jesus didn't need to execute precisely because His holiness made them moot. When Jesus touched a leper, rather than needing to undergo His own ceremonial cleasing He made the leper clean. If anyone had wanted to accuse Jesus of law-breaking, all Jesus had to do was say, "Fine. Show me the unclean man I touched. Where is he?" How can the living Cleansing Himself be unclean? One goes, after all, to God for cleansing. The contact doesn't make God unclean. But now we are getting into other nuances, nuances that surely hover around everything going on here between this writer and his readers.
To wrap this all up.... I mentioned in Part 2 that God made the Melchizedek Event "worse" by making it "blatant." I was referring of course to Psalm 110:4. That is a simply shattering, devastating, catastrophic divine utterance for the Law-Gospel position. The explicit pronouncement by God that there IS (not was but is) an "order of Melchizedek," that He will make a mysterious Someone "priest forever" in this order, and the divine seal and imprimatur that "he has sworn and will not change his mind" leaves NO out, no exit, no wiggle room. In verse 28 the writer gives the knife a last twist by reminding the readers that this "solemn affirmation" came "after the law." In other words, if it wasn't "bad enough" that the Melchizedek Event preceded the Law and just "hung there" as an utter inexplicable anomaly unprovided for in the Law, the conundrum is magnified exponentially by God's overt endorsement and elevation of the event "after the Law," i.e., once again outside the box, seemingly detached from and independent of the Law's provisions. Were it not for Psalm 110:4, one might say the event in Genesis was a one-off, an outlier, a pre-Law approximation of something to be better established by the Law itself. One might even have looked at Melchizedek as a prefiguring of the Levites and the Davidic dynasty (though how the Levites and Davidic dynasty could, in Abraham, have given Melchizedek a tithe and been blessed by him would remain an uncomfortable and awkward aspect of the matter). But God's pronouncement of the Melchizedek Order AFTER the Law, seemingly as if the Law never existed and there were no such thing as Aaron, the Levites, the Tabernacle, borders on theological incoherence, chaos. It makes no sense at all. Certainly it makes no sense of the TEXT and the LAW. Not, at least, until the Answer, the Word, becomes flesh and accomplishes what no one could have foreseen, and makes sense of everything. As only God could have.
Sense. Sense indeed. It is to come back to their Christ-enlightened senses that the writer begs his readers in this epistle. If he is merciless and unsparing in his argumentation, it is because life and death are at stake, and the Truth cannot be the pawn of religio-cultural sensibilities. It doesn't MATTER if you don't like the inextinguishable life of the better covenant poured out in grace on all who receive Him. It doesn't MATTER if you hoped it would be otherwise. It doesn't MATTER if Jesus shatters the neat category your minds had carved out for Messiah. NONE of that matters. God is not the servant of either your categories or your comfort. Our God is a consuming fire, and it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The Lord Jesus never apologized to anyone for touching (and by the way cleansing) the unclean leper. The living God never apologizes to anyone for raising up to Himself "a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek" and through Him ushering in "the better covenant." As we say today, "You can't argue with success." Theologically speaking, you can never ever impeach the "Son made perfect forever."
