May 18 2025
Hebrews 12:1-17
As many of you are aware, Pope Francis passed away on April 22. His funeral Mass was held five days later on April 26th and more than a quarter million people watched as he was laid to rest. As Pope, Francis was the head of the Catholic Church, a church that almost 1.5 billion people claim to be a part of, and which makes up fifty percent of all Christian’s who profess Jesus as their Lord. This is why finding his successor was so important for the conclave which chose a new pope, Pope Leo, the first American to hold this office.
Now, as we watched the death of the pope unfold and then his funeral which was followed by the selection of a new pope, we who are not members of the Catholic Church are reminded once again, that the Catholic Church has many different customs which may appear strange to those of us looking in from the outside. As I consider all of the various aspects surrounding the death of Pope Francis, what surprises me most is that neither Pope, Pope Francis nor Pope Leo, are considered to be a saint according to the Catholic Church. So, needless to say, to be a saint in the Catholic Church is a very high honor indeed and a position which is not often and easily given.
Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the Bible defines being a saint as being a title all already have been given. Far from being some elite status achieved by a few, this being a saint, holy ones, this is a new way of being that is offered to everyone.Listen to what Paul writes at the beginning of his first letter to the church at Corinth, “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those made holy in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours…”. As we read this we must not forget that this is a church which Paul himself would say has more than its fair share of problems but nonetheless, he still regards all of them as being,”saints”. What this means for us is that if we are those who call Jesus their Savior is that we should know ourselves as being saints, God’s,” holy ones”, think about that for a moment. You see, as Paul explains to us in the third chapter of First Corinthians, ‘Do you not know that all of you are the temple of God and that God’s Holy Spirit dwells in you? So, if anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy them. For God’s temple is holy, and all of you are that temple.” God considers each of us to be a holy temple that has been found worthy of being a residence for the very Spirit of God to come and live in.
Now we are considering just what does it mean for us to be the holy ones of God because as we have listened to Paul speak to us from the first letter to the Corinthians, he has told us that Christ Jesus has became for us the wisdom from God, and then he adds these three words, righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Paul is telling us that this wisdom from above was most clearly seen when Jesus hung there upon the cross. There upon the cross, we witnessed how Jesus had become one of us, taking on our flesh and blood, so that he might be for us our kinfolk. Jesus came to us to be the ransom that was necessary to achieve our freedom. As our kinsman-redeemer, Jesus was not only willing to pay the price to achieve our redemption, but he also was able to give, not silver or gold, no, Jesus gave his blood, for blood is required for our forgiveness. You see, the wisdom from above knows that we must be set free from the curse of our past judgments, all those times when we judged another person to be for us nothing more as a stepping stone on our way up. You see, when we judge others in the same manner as we judge what we desire, then we never place the right value on them because their value is always connected to their usefulness to us. Yet Jesus, our very own kinfolk, has judged us to be of infinite worth to God, placing himself between us and the consequence of death, a death we rightfully deserved. Jesus judged us as being rightly deserving of death but instead of death we were judged as worthy of grace and mercy instead for Jesus did the unthinkable, and the death we rightly deserved, Jesus accepted this as his own.
Well the wisdom from above was not only witnessed as being redemption but Paul also says that as Jesus hung there on the cross what we also saw was righteousness. One must wonder just how a scene which appeared so terribly unjust, could be for us, the very place of righteousness. We find the answer to this question in one of the first teaching moments that Jesus had with his students. There on that hillside in Galilee, Jesus first spoke about how the people of the nations all chase and hunt about for what they will eat, what they will drink and what they will wear, but those of us who know the faithfulness of God are to know, without a doubt, that their Heavenly Father will supply all that is necessary for life. This is a certainty for all of us who have been to the cross and have seen the offering of the Son of God given for their sin. If the Father has judged us worthy of the offering of his Son, then most assuredly he will give us all that is necessary for life. Once we are certain of our Father’s faithfulness, then we are set free to go out and seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness. This seeking for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, is done by following three steps. The first is that we must stop judging. We simply do not have the ability to perceive people as we ought to. Jesus calls us to understand that it is simply impossible for any of us to live out the righteousness of God if we insist on using our own judgment. The second requirement is that we must be people who are in search of where God is bringing his goodness to overcome evil in our world. We are to be asking God, where are you working out your good in the world today. And we follow up by seeking and looking for where God and his goodness might be at work in our world. And we are to keep knocking until the doors open, and the goodness of God can enter there. The third requirement is that we participate with God in his work bringing his goodness to overcome the evil, by looking upon someone else and in their face, see our own face, one who is our equal for this is the righteous judgment of our righteous judge. The righteousness of the judgment of Jesus was forever made certain when his Father raised him to life through the power of the Spirit.And what was this judgment of Jesus? Paul tells us in the third chapter of Romans, that all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God but nonetheless, Jesus also judged that all of us are deserving of the grace and favor of God. So, when we are in the presence of another person, we can judge them with the judgment of Jesus and find that they too are someone who is worthy of grace. So, righteousness is found when we judge others with the righteousness of Jesus, the one who rightly judged all of us as being worthy of grace, love and mercy.
Well, the wisdom from above is also known to us, not just as redemption and righteousness, but also, holiness as well. This seems to make sense especially if, as Paul seems to think, that we are indeed saints, God’s holy ones. The importance of us knowing ourselves as being holy ones is found in the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus, where God says to us, “You shall be holy for I the Lord God am holy.” This sounds like an overwhelming charge, doesn’t it, to be called to be like God, so it comes as a relief to hear our scripture for today, where we learn that our Heavenly Father trains us, a training which is for our good because this training will enable us to share in the very holiness of God. Now why this should be worthy of our attention is that the writer of Hebrews, goes on to say, that without striving after this holiness we will miss out seeing the Lord.
To help us to understand this strange idea of holiness, we need to again, remember what Paul tells us in the third chapter of First Corinthians where he says, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy them. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” Let’s pause here to consider what Paul has said. It becomes clear that the reason why we are of infinite worth to God is that each one of us is a living temple capable of being a place where the fullness of God might abide. Jesus was offered by the Father to be the means by which his temples might not perish. We could say then that the Father judged us to be of infinite worth through the giving of Jesus to be our kinfolk. In doing so, Jesus, our righteous judge, judged all of us as being equal in worth to himself, the very Son of God. He did so that we might know ourselves as being equal to each other. And through the blood shed by Jesus, the blood which has purified us, we are now judged by the Holy Spirit as being worthy of being his place of residence.
For all those who may have been terrified of just what the judgment of God might be, at the cross we discover that the judgment of God, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is a judgment that declares us as being worthy of bearing the holiness of God, a truly amazing judgment for all who know their fall from glory. So, holiness is a characteristic given to us which we are called to maintain, not something that we must achieve. The writer of Hebrews though also speaks of those who have failed to obtain the grace of God, of those who have a root which springs up in a person so that they end up a bitter person which in the end, defiles a once pure and holy temple. To understand just what the writer of Hebrews means we must look at what the situation is that has caused the writing of his letter. The church the writer is writing to has had some terrible experiences, They have been publicly exposed to scorn and affliction. They have been imprisoned and they have watched as their property was plundered. They have come to the point where they are ready to walk away from Jesus.Not only that but they also have begun to treat those who have persecuted them with contempt, which is understandable, isn’t it? It would seem normal to get angry at those people who just would not stop bringing the evil of this world against them. Certainly we can sympathize, and believe that this church should see their persecutors as those they should judge as being unworthy of receiving any love from them. What would be the trouble if they would just write off this bunch of people who sought to harm them?
Well, this is the dilemma that this church found itself in and so the writer of Hebrews, in no uncertain terms, tells them of the foolishness of this way of thinking. He says, “It is impossible, in the case of those who have been once enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come and then have fallen away-to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm, holding Jesus up to contempt.” Here the writer of Hebrews is stating, in no uncertain terms, that if these good folks had been blessed by God, having seen the light, and been blessed by the sweetness of our hope of heaven, and have had the Holy Spirit unite them in love and have feasted on the holy word of God and have experienced for themselves the very power of the coming age, and then they turn to someone and refuse to extend this same blessing to them, there just is no coming back from such actions. There is no way to straighten out a mind and a heart that has become that twisted and perverse. The reason why this is the absolute truth is that when we refuse to offer the life of blessing to just one person, then we have called into question the work done by Jesus upon the cross. Has the offering of Jesus upon the cross destroyed the curse all of humanity suffered under since the wrong judgments of our ancestors, or has the cross accomplished nothing at all? Was Jesus simply a man accursed by God according to Jewish law? Or has Jesus indeed brought about a world where every family has the hope of blessing just as God promised Abraham one day would happen? You see, how the world judges Christ and him crucified, is dependent upon, not just our belief that the cross has indeed broken the curse and now the blessings of God can flow out to every tongue, tribe and nation but it depends even more so on those who live out this truth, otherwise the truth about the cross will suffer.
The writer of Hebrews speaks to this temptation to withhold blessings from those who would persecute us when he says to them that they must see to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God. In the original language, the writer of Hebrews is speaking more to those who have fallen away from standing before God. This is in contrast to the witness of Jesus, who we are told at the beginning of this twelfth chapter that he was able to endure the cross because of the joy that was before him. This joy that Jesus focused on was the joy of his Heavenly Father, who rejoiced over this one who is and always will be the good and faithful servant and Son. In the midst of the pain caused by those who persecute us as followers of Jesus, the pull of this joy becomes weakened. We let our eyes fall away from the face of our Father to look at the gods of this world. Instead of being pure in our devotion to our Heavenly Father we now find ourselves divided in our allegiances, and this division in our hearts is much like an evil plant that has become rooted within us. If left to grow, this, “plant”, will lead us further and further away from the God who longs to bless all of us. In the end, all that is left is a harvest of bitterness and weeping at the loss of the blessings God desired to give to us.
You see, we must be about the blessing of others if we have known and can say that God has indeed blessed us. This proves to be especially true when we encounter those who judge us as being unworthy for they simply can find no use for a life that refuses to follow this world’s wrong way wisdom. Yet those who persecute us, and harm us, these are the ones we absolutely have to go out of our way to bless because this is the way of holiness. If you don’t believe me, listen to the words of Jesus, who says to us at the end of the fifth chapter of Matthew, “You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may receive an inheritance from your Father who is in heaven. For your Heavenly Father makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good. And your Heavenly Father sends rain on the just and on the unjust. If you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than every one else does? Does not every person, in every nation merely love those who love them? You therefore must reach the goal to love all people, just as your Heavenly Father loves all people.” You see, to be holy as our God is holy means that we must be those who love all people just as our Heavenly Father loves all people. When we bless those who curse us, this is when we can know our Heavenly Father is right there steadying our trembling hands and unsteady legs that just want to run, instead of looking this jerk in the face and love on him just like our Father first loved on us. Yet, we know that we must do so because the Holy Spirit has first judged us to be holy and if this is true then we must live like this title of holy is the truth about who we are. And only as we are truly holy can the cross be seen as being holy, the place where God gave those living under the curse of wrong judgments, the gift of his blessed presence all because he has judged all of us as being those who are worthy of his love. So let us go forth and bless because Christ and him crucified has forever defeated our curse! Amen!
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