The King’s Way: I’ve Been Redeemed

 May 4 2025

Hebrews 9:11-28

         As many of you know, I watch a lot of detective shows, so it is inevitable that the police in these shows will have to deal with a hostage situation. You know, the bad guy is holding someone against their will and they will only release them if certain demands are met like a duffle bag full of unmarked bills, some pizza and a get away car. Now when you watch shows like this you might begin to wonder, what would that be like, to have someone take you by force and then call somebody you love and tell them to cough up some serious cash, or they’ll do you in? Ultimately, what must be determined, is just how much are you and I worth, right? And not only that but somebody has to come up with the amount of what that bad guy thinks you’re worth. Think about it, just who are you going to call?I mean, just who is it that you know who is not only able to pay to get you back but who is also willing to do so. It is hard to say some days just which of these might be the real problem if I find myself in such a situation. 

         Well, it is fun to let our minds think about these things if only for a laugh, because most of us will never find ourselves in such a situation. Yet, we are forced to wonder about what it would mean for us to be a hostage, because Jesus, at the end of the tenth chapter of Mark, tells us, that he, the Son of Man,“…came not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.” The service of Jesus is that he would give himself in exchange for us, we who were bound by a force we were unaware of, in order that we might no longer be bound to a dead-end life, free at last to live in awe of the One who found us to be of equal worth to himself. This is an image of what is called throughout the Bible as being redeemed. Last week, we heard Paul write about the wisdom of God, the wisdom that is most clearly seen at the cross where the image of a battered and broken man has been forever etched into its surface. What the world could not witness is that there on that cross is our King who fought a battle for us. Our King defeated the enemy who had kept us bound forever in the slavery of sin, fear and death. In doing so, this King demonstrated, in the clearest way possible, the wisdom of God.  As Paul writes in this first chapter of First Corinthians, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no one might ever boast before the face of God.” Paul is here writing about our King named Jesus, who seemed to be so foolish, this one who held all power in his hands yet still, was willing to set aside that power in order to be nailed to a cross. This King appeared so weak hanging there between heaven and earth, unable to even breathe let alone move. Oh, Jesus, our King, how lowly and despised your whole life was, this one whose birth happened through strange circumstances being born in the lowest of places, to live a life without even a place to call home, a life that in the end was betrayed by his closest friend, and abandoned by the rest. His was a life the world could say had come to a tragic end, death and burial in a borrowed tomb. As Paul said, this Jesus his life ended up dead, a life that had come to nothing. Yet, in his death, in his nothingness, this whole world came to nothing, all so that a new world might be created. This life given in this way was given in order to demonstrate just how foolish is the wisdom of this world. Or to put it another way, the cross is the ultimate expression of just how magnificent the wisdom of God really is for there we witnessed the King’s way of life. It is his kingdom that comes when this wisdom of heaven is lived by us here on earth.

         At the end of the third chapter of the letter of James, we find the clearest statement concerning the wisdom of God. The wisdom we receive from above is, “…first pure, then peaceable, gentle, confident, overflowing with mercy, bearing the fruit of goodness, impartial and sincere.” If we stand back from this description, and we imagine such wisdom working in a human life, it becomes quite obvious that what James has done is to describe the life of Jesus. This is very similar to what we are told at the beginning of the first letter of John, the very opening introduction of the first chapter, where we are told, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the word of life- the life was made real to us, and we have seen it, and testify to this life and proclaim to you-the eternal life…” This life which was lived out before watching and listening people was a living demonstration of the wisdom that was there from the beginning, the wisdom, in other words, that created the world. As Paul says again from the first chapter of First Corinthians, “…our King Jesus is our wisdom of God.” Our King, Paul tells us, lived a life which always made choices that reflected the wisdom from above so that those who knew Jesus, could say that his heart was pure, and he sought peace and wept when peace was refused. Jesus was gentle, receiving the little children and the prostitutes, the sinners and the outcasts. He was confident in his Father, trusting even unto death. And so our king was known by everyone as being one who overflowed with mercy as he took upon himself our judgment to prove such mercy to us.  He was authentic all the way to death, his life poured out to bring about the good which defeats evil. 

This is the life that Jesus lived, and as this wisdom was encountered by people they noticed that this wisdom had three dimensions to it, as Paul tells us when he states that this wisdom from God, is, “…righteousness, holiness and redemption.” Now, while these are great terms to use to elaborate just how the wisdom of God affects us, they are, nonetheless, words used by those in the church which no one can seem to explain. I mean, if someone asked you, just what does it mean for someone to say, or sing, “I’ve been redeemed”, what would you tell them?  Well, surprisingly, the meaning of what it means to be redeemed is found in this hostage situation all of us find ourselves in, a fact that we only discover because Jesus told us that he was our ransom. You see, if Jesus is given for our ransom then we can also say that something very serious is holding us against our will. We may be surprised to find out that we are slaves, perhaps as confounded by those believers of Jesus in the eighth chapter of John, who insisted that they had never been enslaved by anyone, how could Jesus say that he is the one who could set them free?

Well, what these followers of Jesus and us as well, were to remember, is an old practice which was done within families. In the Bible, this practice is referred to as kins-man redeemer. This practice is found in the twenty fifth chapter of Leviticus, where we are told that if one of your family becomes poor, and on hard times and they sell themselves to a stranger, they can be redeemed. A brother, or an uncle or a cousin, any close relative with the means to do so, could pay off their debt and thereby redeem a family member who had been sold to a stranger. All that was needed was a desire to help and the means to buy them back. When I read this I cannot help but think of the prodigal son. I mean, in light of what is in the Law, we have to wonder just, why the elder brother did not go out to the far country and try to buy his younger brother out of the slavery caused by his indebtedness? The answer, as we might have guessed, is that the elder brother judged his wayward sibling as not being worthy of the time and effort to set him free. The elder brother could justify his callous disregard for his brother by saying that his brother had wasted his money on wild living.    

Even so, the eldest brother still proved the point that redemption, this buying back of someone, only happens when we judge that person as being worth the cost. The freedom of the person trapped against their will hinges on someone else’s belief that someone considers that they are worth the price that this freedom will cost. Well, Jesus determined before the foundation of the world, that we are worth the infinite cost of his life, because this is the cost required for our release. When we know this then we have to wonder, just what happened that we have ended up in slavery desperately in need of a savior to come and set us free? One of the best answers I have found is something I recently heard on a video series about the kingdom of God taught by Pastor Greg Boyd. He is of the opinion that when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree, as found in the third chapter of Genesis, the very fruit God told them specifically not to eat, their eyes were opened. This is when Adam and Eve became like God in that they were now able to judge just as God is the judge over all of us. The only problem is that Adam and Eve and all the rest of us, do not know how to judge, rightly. You see, when we judge one another we do so according to the same standards that determine worldly wisdom. These standards, are found in the third chapter of Genesis, when Eve looked at the tree, and she saw three things; first, that the tree was good for food; second, that the tree was pleasant to the eyes; and finally, that its beauty captured her thoughts. These are the very same three aspects we find in the second chapter of John’s first letter. John tells us that these three; the desire of the flesh, the desires of the eye, and the pride of our possessions, these are what define life according to the world’s standards. Well, when these same standards are used in our relationships with each other, evil enters into the world. We witness this when Adam is confronted by God who asks him, point blank, “Have you eaten of the tree that I commanded you not to eat? This question requires a simple, yes or no, answer but Adam instead turns to Eve, points his finger and exclaims, “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate.” What Adam is doing is using Eve as a means to escape the punishment that he knows is waiting for him. You can almost hear Adam say to himself, “Come on God, let Eve be punished, she’s the one who is really at fault here”. Adam had judged the life of Eve as being worth nothing more than cheap goods which could be thrown under the bus whenever the need arises. It is not hard to understand how just one generation later, Cain, the second son of Adam and Eve killed his brother Abel out of his anger toward God. 

So this wrong way of judging human life placed all of creation under a curse. The blessed life cannot be found in a world where the worth of a human life is determined by how useful someone might be to someone else’s plans. No, the blessed life is only found when God steps into our human story, as one of us, in order that all might know that every human life has an infinite worth. Every person is a pearl of great price that God knew was worth giving everything, even his very Son, in order to purchase and make his own. You see, the wisdom of God that came down from above in the life of Jesus, judged that we were worth the price necessary to free us from our slavery. The price that had to be paid is that the very Son of God had to humble himself, take upon himself our broken humanity  and become for all of us our kinfolk redeemer. The price he came to pay is his life, the giving of his very blood for this is what the wisdom from above demanded that he should do. Jesus demonstrated the wisdom from above when, as our scripture tells us, he, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without blemish to God, the Father, so that we might be purified, our thoughts no longer focused on the dead works of this world so that now we might serve the living God. What we find is that redemption is yet another way that Jesus, as the Son of God, intercedes for us. As our scripture tells us, Jesus is the mediator, the one who is fully human to represent us, yet one who is fully God so that he might be for us, the man in the middle, and also, the God who stands with us. Jesus knew that the evil of this life must be dealt with, forgiven and put away so that a new life ordered by the wisdom from above might take its place. Jesus knew the price that had to be paid, as we read in the seventeenth chapter of Leviticus, the eleventh verse, where it is written, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given blood to you upon the altar to make a way for us to have a life united together for it is blood which makes this unity possible through the life which is offered.” The price then is clearly a life for a life, a life given as a ransom which is paid to set us free, but not just free but free to at last to have a life united with God. The world’s wisdom scoffs at the actions of Jesus, this giving of one’s life so that others might be set free to find life, this seems to make no sense. Yet what the world does not understand is that we were made for a greater life than one marked by how much eating, drinking and making merry one can get away with before the quarter runs out. We are people who are called to put our life in the middle for someone else just as Jesus, our kinfolk has done for us. You see a life that is willing to offer themselves for just one other life, is a life that demonstrates the power of the wisdom from above.

Most of us are aware of the story of Moses found at the beginning of the book of Exodus. God had called Moses to go down to Egypt because he had heard the cries of his people who were enslaved by cruel masters. God, through Moses, defeated the king of Egypt and set his people free, and they walked out of Egypt through the Red Sea. This act of redemption by God finds its importance not just in the liberating of an enslaved nation, but this act was also to influence how one acts with strangers. Listen to what is written in the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus, the thirty-third and thirty-fourth verses: “When a stranger travels with you…,you shall not do them wrong. You shall treat the stranger who travels with you as one of your own and you shall love them in the same manner that you love each other.”  And why should they bother to go out of their way to be so kind to the strangers among them? The answer is this: “You were once strangers in the land of Egypt.” I believe that God is telling them that when they were down in Egypt, they had no one to be for them their kinsmen redeemer. But when they cried out in misery, God heard their cry. At this point, the people of Israel were strangers to God but even so, God was willing to step in, and set them free. And since they had witnessed and remembered this mighty act of God, then they too were to do a mighty act themselves. The strangers among them were people who were far from home and kinfolk, no one to call on if they found themselves in a tight spot. So God says to his people, us included, be people who listen for the cries of others just as God listens for your cries. Be people willing to serve and love others for Jesus came not to be waited on, but instead he came to serve and give his life for us. Be people who are willing to give life for Jesus gave his life for you. You see, we are never really free until we in turn, help just one stranger find freedom from the fear and anxiety we have all experienced when we also were far from home, a stranger, who needed someone to stand with us. When we are a redeemer for a stranger, the world will never have to hear us say that we’ve been redeemed because our stepping in for someone else will surely prove that God has surely redeemed us. So, go, redeem, and in this way, give God the glory and honor he so richly deserves. Amen!