Many churches throughout the world use a Bible reading schedule called a "lectionary." It's just a fancy word meaning "selected readings." Posts like this reflect on the readings for an upcoming Sunday or other Church holiday, as found in the historic one-year lectionary.
Jesus is the high priest of the Christian faith. So we are told in Hebrews 2:14-18. Why is it significant that Jesus is called the high priest? It's critcally important particularly because the high priest is the one who makes sacrifice for himself and for his people. He is, first and foremost, one of the people.
Jesus, as the high priest, is absolutely human, though without sin. He has no need to make sacrifice for his sin, but goes directly to making sacrifice for our sin. And it's what we need. Since we bear sin, both our own and that of our ancestors brought to us through the fallen human nature, we need someone else to approach the holy God on our behalf with an offering.
We need that person to be one of us. It won't do to send someone without an intimate knowledge of our frail humanity to stand before God. We need someone who is human. Entirely human.
There have been plenty of movements within Christianity over the generations which have tried to defend the deity of Christ, and which have done so to the extent that they deny his true humanity. We, with the author of Hebrews, must remember that Jesus is really, truly human. There's nothing non-human about him. In his life, in his death, in his burial, and in his resurrection, he is entirely human, like us, except that he has no sin.
This allows him to stand as our representative, the one who can bear our sin for us.
For Jesus to bear our sin he must be sinless himself. Otherwise, he dies for his own sin, not for ours. This he has accomplished by being truly God. But if he isn't human, he can't die for us either. So he must be also truly man.
What kind of a Lord is this Christ? He is the one we can't entirely understand. He is also the one we do entirely need. So we accept the fact that this truly divine, truly human, person has humbled himself to submit to the penalties of sin which we deserve, so we can receive his resurrection by grace through faith.
Jesus is for you.
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