Jesus Is Greater Than The Greatest

Hebrews 3:1-6

Who are your heroes? The people you look up to and seek to model your words and actions after?

PBS did an eight-part series called “The Great American Read” that explores America’s 100 best-loved novels. One episode highlights books that feature heroic characters and explores why we love them – books like 1984, Charlotte’s Web, Don Quixote, The Hunger Games, and The Invisible Man. Literary experts, authors and everyday book lovers talk about why our favorite heroes are complex and relatable, from the everyday hero to the tragic and unlikely or anti-hero, saying things like:

-“A hero is who we all wish we were if we didn’t have our own personal limitations.”

-“I think when we hear heroes or see them or read about them, we think about qualities we wish we had. Courage, strength, fortitude, bravery.”

-“Reading about everyday heroes gives us hope and lets you know that you’re not alone in the good fight.”

-“I think we aspire to everyday heroes because we wish to be them… In moments of great tragedy we see people drawn to firefighters or emergency workers or the people who went beyond their job. They rushed in where angels fear to tread.”

-“The hero lifts us. It redeems what we try to do. The hero provides us an archetype that gives us a direction. ‘Let’s go this way. And we’ll be okay.’”

-“We’d like to believe there’s a hero gene in all of us.”[i]

Unfortunately, if you ask many today who their heroes are, they’ll mention not heroes but superstars – people with fame and popularity, but not necessarily people who have done something heroic.

Henry Kissinger describes the difference between heroes and superstars this way …

Our age finds it difficult to come to grips with figures like Winston Churchill. The political leaders with whom we are familiar generally aspire to be superstars rather than heroes. The distinction is crucial. Superstars strive for approbation; heroes walk alone. Superstars crave consensus; heroes define themselves by the judgment of a future they see it as their task to bring about. Superstars seek success in a technique for eliciting support; heroes pursue success as the outgrowth of inner values.[ii]

Let me ask you again – who are your heroes?

Today we’re continuing our sermon series from the New Testament book of Hebrews. Unlike the New Testament books around it, Hebrews isn’t an epistle, a long letter. It’s a written sermon, written by a brilliant communicator, a pastor seeking to encourage struggling Christian who, because of their faith in Christ, were coming under increasing pressure to turn back on their journey of faith and blend in better with the culture at large. And many were wondering whether life might be better, easier, if they did just that. It would soon become safer, that’s for sure, as persecution increased as well.

In the introduction to his sermon, this pastor lifts Jesus high, praising his superiority over anything this world has to offer, his superiority over even the angels. And because he is fully divine and yet in the incarnation became like us “in every respect,” fully human too, and suffered for us and like us, pioneering our salvation and identifying with us, he is the perfect bridge between a loving, holy God and a deeply loved by unholy humanity.

And now, as we begin Hebrews 3, he lifts up what for first century Jews was the greatest hero of their people and their faith … Moses. And he lifts Moses high, and then he lifts Jesus even higher. Turn with me to Hebrews 3:1-6.

He begins by addressing us in a way that communicates to us very clearly who we are as citizens of God’s Kingdom. “Therefore, holy brothers and sisters …” Wait a minute, pastor, it just says “holy brothers.” The word translated as “brothers” here has masculine and feminine forms and speaks more to siblinghood than to gender. The Hebrew equivalent was even used of more distant relatives like cousins. That’s why most translations include a little footnote that says “Or read brothers and sisters here.” The pastor is referring to family relationships.

Brothers and sisters speaks to community, to connection. Yes, there were painfully broken families in that day, just as there are today. Families in which siblings don’t speak to one another or children and parents don’t talk, or speak only rarely. Family relationships take maintenance, repair, and work, and that’s true in the body of Christ too. We hurt one another because none of us is okay all the time. But rather than cutting and running to another church, we need to put in the effort to apologize, offer forgiveness – to repair relationships and stick together.

Randy and Gary worked together every day at the furniture delivery company and didn’t know. Gary would lift one end of the couch and Randy the other. People said they looked alike, but they chalked that up to coincidence.

Randy had been researching his family history. He was an adopted son, and a new law in Maine allowed him to finally see his birth certificate. He learned that both his parents had died but that they had another son, born June 10, 1974. Then, on a furniture delivery run, it happened again. A customer commented on how much Randy looked like Gary. Randy started nonchalantly asking Gary some more personal questions – like when his birthday is. “As soon as he said his birthday, I knew,” Randy said later. Gary is his brother.

Here they had grown up in neighboring towns and attended rival schools – only a year apart in age – and never known about each other. It was a shock to both of them.

“Phenomenal,” said Gary. “I still can’t wrap my head around it.” A co-worker, Greg Berry, said, “There’s nothing like family, especially when you don’t have one. Now they’ve got it.”

But that’s not all. After their story appeared in the local paper, “a teary-eyed woman showed up at the brothers’ workplace clutching a birth certificate.” She was their half-sister, born five or six years before the two men to the same mother. “After all these years,” she said in an interview with a reporter, “here I am 41, and now I finally found my brothers.”

That’s what we’re like in the body of Christ! Men and women meet at church and find that they are really brothers and sisters – that there is a striking family resemblance, a deep, inexplicable bond. And finally we can start being the family we never knew we had.[iii] Yes, we annoy one another, and accidentally hurt one another’s feelings. But we work to keep annoyances from becoming bitterness and resentment. We put in the work and stick together.

Life in the kingdom of God is not a solo affair. It isn’t “every man and woman for themselves.” In our current climate of distrust of institutions (and let’s be fair, institutions have earned a lot of that mistrust), people are trying to follow Christ apart from the church. That’s like one of my kids trying to be a Goodwin without ever seeing their family. They may have the legal name, but are they really a Goodwin, practically speaking? No! Because family isn’t about a legal designation, it’s about relationship. And we have regular family reunions so that we remember who we are. Every Sunday.

If you take the ember away from the fire, it soon goes out. God doesn’t intend for us to follow him, to live as citizens of his kingdom, to go against the flow of our culture, alone. He gave us a family, because he knows we’ll be tempted to quit and we’ll need someone to keep us going.

But we aren’t just brothers and sisters. We are “holy brothers and sisters.” How many of you think of yourselves as holy? Most of us don’t. I mean maybe Saint Joy and Saint Susan. They have to put up with Gregg and Ralph and Ed. Yeah, they’re holy. But the rest of us? Not so much.

We don’t FEEL holy. We know we still struggle with sin. We depend on the grace and forgiveness of Christ daily. But the truth is, we ARE holy, whether we feel holy or not. We’re holy not because we’re good but because Jesus died with our sin on himself and gave us his holy nature in return. We’re holy because Jesus made us holy, not because we did it ourselves. That’s what grace is! That’s why we call it the gospel. “Gospel” means good news!

And as “holy brothers and sisters” in Christ, we are to fix our eyes on Jesus. The pastor tells us to “consider Jesus.” The word translated as “consider” means “to give your full attention to” or “to observe continuously.” He doesn’t want us to look at Jesus every once in a while … when life gets tough or we’re scared or confused. We’re to pay close attention to Jesus, to fix our eyes on him, all the time.

Have you ever seen a dog that’s well trained to “heel.” It’s walking along beside its handler, and its eyes are constantly going from looking around to looking up at its handler. It is constantly checking in. “Where are we going? What do you want me to do? I am keeping in step with you.” Most of our dogs haven’t “heeled” well. We used to take them to Sand Lakes Quiet Area and let them run. We don’t take our new dog, June Bug, there. She’s fully grown at less than 7 lbs. If we let her loose she might get eaten by a … squirrel.

But our big dogs, we used to take them and let them run. And they’d take off on their own. Most of the time we couldn’t see them, but we could hear them. They’d run off into the woods one way and then the other. Over hills and down into valleys chasing whatever they’d found. Every once in a while, they’d check in, but for the most part they were doing their own thing. You know, on two occasions, we heard yelps and then they came running back with a mouth and face full of porcupine quills. They’d gotten into trouble. Why? Because they weren’t right with us. They didn’t have their eyes fixed on us.

And he calls Jesus the apostle and high priest of our faith. This is the only place in the New Testament where Jesus is called an apostle. The word “apostle” simply means “sent one.” The word is used in a special way, different from disciple, or follower, when it refers to Peter or John or even Paul, because with them it refers to someone who met Jesus directly and spoke to him and was authorized by God to speak on his behalf after his ascension into heaven.

Jesus wasn’t an apostle in that sense, but he is the greatest apostle in the since that he was sent by the Father to carry out the will of the Father, to reveal the Father’s heart of love to the world by identifying with us and dying for us. And that makes him the perfect high priest, offering atonement on our behalf and serving as the bridge between us and God.

But then, after telling us to fix our eyes constantly, not sporadically, on Jesus, he brings us Moses, and that’s significant. Look at Vv. 2-5.

Now, to understand what the pastor is doing here, we have to understand Moses through first century Jewish Christian eyes. Because Moses, to them, was like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton all rolled into one … on steroids. They revered Moses even more than Abraham.

In the Old Testament book of Numbers, we find Aaron and Miriam, Moses’ older brother and sister, questioning why Moses was so special. They both figure prominently in the history of Israel too. Aaron was the first high priest, and Miriam was a prophetess. They didn’t like the woman Moses had taken as a wife, and spoke out against him among the people.

They were like, “What’s so special about Moses? Hasn’t God spoken through us too?” You can read the story in Numbers 12. I love the way this is worded. As they were complaining about Moses, it says “And the LORD heard it.” Duh duh duh. There’s an ominous tone to those words. And I love what God does when he hears them. He goes down to the entrance to the Tabernacle in a pillar of cloud and makes Aaron and Miriam come and stand before him. Like they’ve been called to the principal’s office. “Aaron and Miriam! My office. NOW!”

And this is what God says. “Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” (Num. 12:6-8). And then God storms out. That’s literally what it says. “And the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and he departed” (V. 9).

Moses saw God’s glory and spoke to God face to face, not in dreams and visions as God spoke to other prophets, including Aaron and Miriam. He wrote the first five books of the Old Testament and is the one through whom God gave his law to his people. That makes him the primary instrument of God’s revelation of himself in the Old Testament.

Moses is the one who, at the instruction of God, established the priesthood and the sacrificial system – a system that foreshadowed the work of Christ on the cross. He bore witness to Christ. He could be called THE Old Testament apostle, sent by God to deliver and establish his people as a people. And although Aaron was the high priest, Moses functioned as a priest, the intermediary between God and his people.

Now look! Look at V. 5. Moses was faithful as a servant and pointed forward to the work of Christ. The word “servant” here is a really rare word. It only appears once in the New Testament – here. It speaks not of just any old servant or slave, but of an honored servant, similar to the squire of a night. One who had a special relationship with his master, who was beloved by his master, and was trusted with special tasks by his master. It means something more like “steward” than “servant.” Still a servant, but not just any servant. Moses is the only person in the Bible to be referred to this way. Not even the great king David, a man after God’s own heart, was considered this close to God. First century Jews regarded Moses so highly, they considered him higher, and more favored by God, than the angels.

He was God’s special steward on earth. But look at V. 6. Moses was a steward. Special, but still a servant. Jesus is a son. Moses was faithful as a steward. Jesus is faithful as a son. Moses was faithful to God in leading the people out of Egypt and leaving them at the doorstep of the Promised Land. But Jesus was faithful to the Father in going to the cross, enduring the horror of separation from God on our behalf, and fully identifying with us in OUR suffering. Moses was great. Jesus is greater still.

He was faithful to God in the incarnation and the cross. In V. 2, the pastor says Jesus “was faithful to him who appointed him.” He was faithful and obedient to God in setting aside what was rightfully his as the fully divine Son, and he identified with us, became fully like us “in every respect,” and he died in our place, with our sin counted against him. And then in V. 6, he says, “but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son.”

He was faithful to the Father in going to the cross. He is faithful over God’s house, that’s us!, as the son, our high priest, our intermediary, the one who makes atonement for our sin for us.

He is no less faithful over us than he was to the Father. The cross is all the evidence that we need that no matter what we face, Jesus is right here, faithfully standing with us, holding our hand, and guiding us along the way, as we navigate this world as citizens of the Kingdom of God. We can anchor to him, regardless of what we face. So don’t quit. Don’t give up. Keep going. Jesus makes every bump, every bruise, every price we pay following Christ worth the cost. He is everything. Let’s pray.

[i] PBS, “The Great American Read: Heroes” (9-28-18)

[ii] Henry Kissinger in the New York Times Book Review, from his review of Churchill, by Norman Rose (July 16, 1995).

[iii] AOL News (9-19-09), quoting an article entitled “Adopted brothers reunited by work,” from the Bangor Daily News and The Nashua Telegraph (9-22-09)