Text: We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6.19)
On the night of 13 February 1945, the city of Dresden was destroyed by British bombers in one of the most devastating air raids of the second world war. Two days later, the weakened walls of the burned out Frauenkirche finally gave way and the proud dome of the great cathedral collapsed into a mound of rubble. Immediately after the war a plan for the church’s reconstruction was mooted, but for political and economic reasons, the Communist authorities set their face against any rebuilding. They preferred to retain the heap of ruins as a memorial to the many thousands of innocent people who had died, and as a warning so the brass plaque declared against ‘barbaric imperialism’. They wanted the ruins to keep alive the divisions and bitterness of war. As an atheistic regime they did not know that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could never quench it. But they were to discover that they could not altogether suppress the light of hope which the people of Dresden cherished in their hearts, the hope that one day their stunningly beautiful cathedral would rise again. In 1982 the young people began to light candles on the ruins, and in 1990, within months of German reunification, Ludwig Guettler, a Dresden musician, launched the initiative which led at last, with extensive international support including in this country the Dresden Trust, to the rededication of the restored cathedral on 30 October 2005.
As with the people of Dresden, so too with the people to whom Isaiah’s prophecy was first addressed, the light of hope could not be altogether extinguished, even if their circumstances might have appeared to some as hopeless as the mound of ruins which for so long dominated the heart of Dresden. After some fifty years in exile, permission had been given by Cyrus the Great for the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple, but the number of returning refugees was small, and although the temple itself was rebuilt within about 20 years, life remained very hard. After all the longing and anticipation, there was not much to celebrate: re-occupation was contested, the walls of the city remained a ruin, and the land itself was poor. Yet the prophet who wrote these chapters of Isaiah was still constrained to proclaim his vision of a prosperous, even opulent city, its gates open 24 hours a day, its streets and houses shimmering with gold and silver, resplendent with copper and stone where normally wood and iron would be good enough. And his vision of peace and prosperity is ours too, since the new Jerusalem which St John the Divine describes in the closing chapters of the book of Revelation draws its inspiration in no small part from this very chapter a vision not so much of a place as of the final destiny of God’s people, a state of bliss suffused with the light of the glory of God’s presence.
For me and probably for many of you it takes more than mere prose, it takes the magic of poetry and music, to give expression to the wonder of that vision. ‘Sing’ is a word that occurs more frequently in the later chapters of Isaiah than in any other prophetic book, as the prophet seeks to communicate to his hearers his own unshakeable hope in God’s faithfulness to his promises (Herbert, pages 8-9). In our own time the praise of God in words and music remains important as a means of expressing and rekindling our own sense of awe and wonder. The rededication of the Frauenkirche was not complete until the great dome which had crashed to the ground after the bombing in February 1945 was filled once more with the music of hope and resurrection. Of course a German choir could have done it, but in great generosity of spirit, the Bach Choir was invited to give two performances of Handel’s Messiah, in English, as part of the programme of events to celebrate the reconstruction. It was deeply moving to sense how eager the mainly German audience was to accept the music we made and to offer it with us to God as an act of reconciliation and thanksgiving. Old enmities were laid to rest. Old enemies had joined their hands, and now their voices, to carry away the heap of ruins which for so many years had been a public memorial of war and hatred and division, and to recreate in its place a cathedral of such newly minted Baroque splendour as would scarcely be out of place in the new Jerusalem. At the end of the performance, the emotional intensity of the applause, which was not really for the performers, but for what God had done, was so insistent that we had to encore the Hallelujah chorus before they would let us go. Those of us who were privileged to take part could say, like Peter and James and John on the mount of transfiguration; Lord, it is good for us to be here.
Of course, we cannot live perpetually at that level of exaltation, but when we come down from the mountain, having sensed if only for a few moments the majesty and dominion, but also the mercy and the healing love of the God whom we adore, we can take with us, as our text puts it, that hope as an anchor for our lives, and our hope rests on an even surer foundation than the hope which sustained the Jews in exile and on their return to a devastated and impoverished land.
You see, their hope, or at least their prophet’s hope, rested on an obstinate inner certainty about the faithfulness of God which could look beyond the grinding poverty and bitter disappointment of present circumstances to a future in which God’s promises would have been fulfilled. Isaiah, in his songs of the suffering servant, came perhaps closer than any of the prophets to an understanding of how these promises would be fulfilled, but even he could not know. We however do know, because we can look back on the life and death of Jesus. It is in order to focus and emphasise the difference which Jesus makes to our hope that the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews directs our attention to the shadowy figure of Melchisedech.
Melchisedech makes the briefest of appearances in the book of Genesis. As a priest and king allied to Abraham, he blesses Abraham and receives from him, as an act of thanksgiving after victory in battle, a tithe of the booty (Gen 14.18-24). He enters the story and is gone again in a matter of just seven verses. But this brief walk-on part came to be regarded as hugely significant for two reasons first because Melchisedech must have been vastly important in the eyes of God if he could bless Abraham, himself the receiver of God’s promises, the man in whom all the nations of the world should be blessed: and second because his appearance and disappearance without any mention of parents or children, birth or death, was held to imply that Melchisedech was in some way immortal like God himself.
There is just one other reference to Melchisedech in the Old Testament, and that is in Psalm 110 The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit thou on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool (Psalm 110.1) a psalm of David referring to one who would be greater than David, which was interprested in Jesus’ own time as promising a future Messiah. This same psalm, set to music in Handel’s great Dixit Dominus motet, identifies this promised Messiah as: ‘a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedech (Psalm 110.4).
The point which the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is determined to ram home to his readers is that Jesus is the fulfilment of this promise. Jesus is the one greater than David who is to sit at God’s right hand, and he is not only the promised lord and king; he ushers in a new priesthood as well. The law of Moses, which interposed a dynasty of priests between God and his people, is fulfilled and superseded by the new and greater priesthood of Jesus, priest for ever after the order of Melchisedech, who by the sacrificial offering of his own life on the cross of Calvary, has removed the burden and the barrier of sin which stood between us and God.
If the theology of all this strikes you as a bit strained, building so much on so little, you are in good company. The writer of the epistle himself said that it was no baby food, but tough meat which would take some chewing and a mature digestion. His style of Biblical exegesis has its roots in the Alexandrian tradition which was popular in the Hellenistic Judaism of the first century. Two thousand years later we inhabit a rather different intellectual world, which respects the Bible as a faithful record of our ancestors understanding of God, a record which still has much to teach us to-day, but in liberal Hampstead at least, we are reluctant to hang the burden of proof on a few verses wrenched out of context, still less to accept, as he does, that Melchisedech didn’t die just because the Bible does not mention his death. Fortunately we don’t have to accept his reasoning. With or without the Melchisedech factor we believe that Jesus in his life and in his death fulfilled the promises scattered through the Old Testament, not least in the prophecies of Isaiah, of one who would restore the broken covenant relationship between God and his people.
Yet it is helpful to see Jesus as our priest. If the essential function of the Levitic priesthood was to stand before God on behalf of the people, and to stand before the people on behalf of God, then Jesus who is both utterly human and utterly divine is the perfect fulfilment of that priestly model; and much more than that, since he is himself not only our representative, our high priest, but also the one and only offering pure enough to stand in the presence of Almighty God, where there is no place for any impurity, no place for any false note, no place for any offering at all which falls short of perfection.
Because our Lord entered into our humanity, because he paid the price of our sinful humanity by giving his life for us on the cross, because he invites us to share in his risen life through the presence within us of His Holy Spirit, we are able in and through Him to do what no one but the high priest himself could do under the law of Moses and then only once a year we can ourselves draw near to God. As we do so, we are privileged to share in some measure in this life, in full measure in our life beyond the grave in that joy in the presence of God which prophet and apostle alike foresaw, that joy which poets and musicians have celebrated ever since.
So it is that we have this hope this hope in Jesus – as an anchor for our lives. Amen.
Sources: H W Montefiore, on Hebrews, in Black’s New Testament Commentaries AS Herbert, on Isaiah 40-66, in the Cambridge Bible Commentaries.