Holy Thursday — Hebrews 2:10-15, 11:23-28
The first theologian of the church, Origen of Alexandria, preached a series of sermons on the Book of Joshua not long before he finally succumbed in 253 AD to the lingering injuries torture had inflicted upon him. In the year 250 Rome had blamed an outbreak of plague on Christians for their refusal to worship the Emperor Decius as divine. Thus Decius issued a decree for Christians to be persecuted. The governor of Caesarea gave specific orders neither to spare Origen nor to kill him but to torture him until he renounced his faith in Christ.
In a dungeon, Origen wore an iron collar, his body stretched “four spaces” on a rack for two years. They broke his body but not his faith. Origen refused to renounce Christ Jesus. After Emperor Decius died in battle in 251, Origen won his freedom, leaving his prison cell and returning to his pulpit. No stranger to the violence of the world, in Homily 15 on the Book of Joshua, Origen addresses the difficult verses in chapter eleven where the LORD apparently not only condones but commands the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites:
“And the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid of them, for tomorrow at this time I will give over all of the Canaanites to be slain… So Joshua and all his warriors came suddenly against them…And the Lord gave the Canaanites into the hand of Israel, who struck them and chased them as far as Great Sidon…And Joshua struck them until he left none remaining. And Joshua did to them just as the Lord said to him: he hamstrung their horses and burned their chariots with fire.”
Forthwith in the sermon Origen rules out the possibility that the events so narrated literally happened in history. God did not, in fact, give the Canaanites over to genocide. Quite obviously, Origen preaches, the Book of Joshua must describe spiritual warfare not physical warfare; otherwise, it would not be the Word of God for the LORD is the Father of Jesus who declares, “My peace I give to you; my peace I leave to you.”
God is not like Decius!
The LORD is not a Man of War!
If the ancient church fathers teach us to look not at the letter but the spirit of a troubling scripture like Joshua 11, then how do we regard a passage like the one Jesus commemorates on the night he was handed over to a different Roman governor? “For the LORD will pass through to strike the Egyptians,” Moses prophesies, “and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and will not allow death to enter your houses to strike you.” The Book of Exodus reports on the tenth and final plague a few verses later, “At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock.”
On the night his friends betray him, Jesus sits down in obedience to this scripture. Having aspersed the blood of the lamb on the doorframe of the Upper Room, Jesus takes bread and wine and he does not say— as the script demands— “This is the body and blood of the passover.”
He says, “This is my body. This is my blood.”
Does the Son mean to suggest that his blood protects us from his Father?
And if so, how is God meaningfully different from Pontius Pilate?
Traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul, the Epistle to the Hebrews presents Moses as the chief prototype by which we may understand the salvific work played by Jesus on behalf of his brothers and sisters. Surprisingly perhaps, Paul does not highlight Moses as the giver of the law or as the deliverer of captive Israel. The Letter to the Hebrews does not point to Moses as the keeper of the LORD’s name or as the one whose face was transfigured by God’s glory. Instead Paul lifts up Moses for his seemingly mundane performance: he sprinkled the lintel and doorposts of the Israelites’ homes with blood. And his faithful performance of this instruction anticipates what the LORD does for us through the death of Jesus Christ. That is, the Epistle to the Hebrews deduces aspects of Christ’s death upon the cross on the basis of what Moses does with the LORD’s instructions regarding lamb and loaf and cup. Rather than Moses being a Christ-figure, Hebrews sees Jesus as a Moses figure. Like Moses, the sprinkling of Christ’s blood protects us in order to liberate us.
Protect us from what?
Or whom?
Notice.
When Paul praises Moses as a prototype of Christ’s work upon the cross, the apostle simultaneously advances an interpretation beyond the letter of the Book of Exodus. “By faith Moses kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood,” Hebrews proclaims, “so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them.” The Destroyer— it’s an imperfective participle, meaning, “The one who destroys.” That is, destruction is what he does continually; it and nothing other is his very identity.
Who?
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men opens with theologizing by Sheriff Tom Bell, a character portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in the Coen Brothers’s film of the novel, “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.” No Country for Old Men reads like a chase story but it’s really an eschatological allegory; that is, it’s about a creation that has been turned upside down, where truth is lost and life is worthless and a Power that is not God is afoot. Reading the horrific stories in the newspaper and seeing the senseless violence on his police beat, Sheriff Bell— the old man of the story’s title— no longer recognizes the country in which he was raised.
The fact frightens him.
Towards the end of the novel, Sheriff Bell once again turns to theologizing:
“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. Maybe he did. I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin and they asked me if I believed in Satan. I said Well that aint the point. And they said I know but do you? I had to think about that. I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief I reckon had waned somewhat. Now I’m startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation. Or not to me they dont.”
“The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are,” the LORD says to Moses, “And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.” In spite of the apparent letter of the text, ancient Jewish interpreters insist the one who executes the tenth and final plague is not God. According to the testimony of the Old Testament no less than the New, demonic forces are at work in the world, ravaging the world, and attacking especially God’s people.
The LORD who heard his people’s cries in Egypt is not a Pharaoh! The one who struck down all of Egypt’s firstborn children is not the Father of Jesus Christ but the malevolent Angel of Death. Scripture refers to this particular malevolent figure, the Angel of Death, as the Satan or the Accuser, and even attributes proper names to him such as Belial and Mastemah. The latter name is a variation on the root from which Satan derives and means “Hostility.”
The Book of Jubilees is a Jewish apocalyptic text written some time after God’s people returned from exile in Babylon. Jubilees is included in the canonical scriptures of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The apostle Paul references Jubilees in his Epistle to the Galatians. And the church fathers, including Origen, often referenced it. In several places, the Book of Jubilees links the slaughter of Egypt’s firstborn children not to Israel’s God but to his enemy named Mastemah. In fact, throughout Jubilees, Mastemah, the leader of all the destroying spirits, functions as the chief spiritual opponent not only of God but also his people. It is Mastemah and his demonic horde, says Jubilees, that lure people to fashion idols and commit other heinous sins. Like Gríma Wormtongue in Tolkien's Two Towers, in Jubilees 48 it is Mastemah who beguiles Pharaoh first to oppose Moses and the Israelites and later to pursue them in order to re-enslave them. In other words, the Israelites’ captor is himself captive.
Satan hardens Pharaoh’s heart not the Father of the Son.
As Jubilees 49.2 recalls Exodus 12.23:
“For on this night— the beginning of the festival and the beginning of the joy— you were eating the passover in Egypt, when all the powers of Mastemah had been let loose to slay all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh to the first-born of the captive maid-servant in the mill, and to the cattle.”
God is not like Decius!
The sign of the blood of the Passover lamb on the lintel and the doorposts of Jewish homes prevented the servants of Mastemah from entering and destroying the their firstborn.
Likewise, the blood of Jesus does not protect us from his Father.
“Come, desire of nations, come. Fix in us, thy humble home. Rise, the woman's conquering seed. Bruise in us the serpent's head.”
That’s verse four of the Christmas carol, “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”
Baudelaire supposedly said that the “greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” Perhaps he was correct; after all, what else can account for the fact the United Methodist hymnal does not trust you with the fourth verse of Charles Wesley’s carol.
“He explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation. Or not to me they dont.”
I was preaching one Sunday morning at Trenton State Penitentiary. The scripture assigned to me that day was from the Gospel of Mark. A crowd has surrounded Jesus.
Out of this crowd, a worried father shouts, “Jesus, I brought you my son. He's possessed by a spirit that makes him unable to speak.”
“Bring him to me,” Jesus says.
And they bring the boy to Jesus.
And when the Spirit sees Jesus, Mark says, it threw the boy into convulsions.
“If you're able to do anything, have pity on us and help us,” the boy's father pleads.
“All things can be done for the one who believes,” Jesus observes.
Mark says “immediately” the father of the child cried out, “I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.”
And then Jesus rebuked the demon saying, “You, spirit, that keep this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.”
Being seminary educated and a faithful listener of NPR, I took that wild, demon-busting story that day in the prison and I preached a placid, G-rated sermon about faith as a gift.
“Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”
I finished the sermon and was about to prepare the table for the Eucharist when one of the inmates, Malcolm, raised his hand and said, “Preacher, what was that? We deserve better!”
“I'm not sure what you mean," I said, “And I'm a Methodist. We're not used to this being a dialogue, so maybe we should just move on to communion.”
“You didn't say nothing about the devil that possessed that boy,” he said, “You didn't preach a single word about the power of Jesus to protect him from that evil spirit.”
I stammered.
"If you had the benefit of a seminary education, I said, you too would understand how stories like that, the devil and his legion, they're metaphors.”
“Metafours?” Malcolm shot back.
“Metaphors,” I nodded my head and repeated.
“Metafours?! Man, I don't know what a metafour is, but I do know you skipped right over one of the few things that gives hope to guys like us.”
“This passage gives you hope?”
“How do you think most of us ended up inside, preacher?”
“Most of us here, we were taken captive by something long before we ended up behind bars. That Jesus Christ has the power to deliver us from that, that's one of the few things that gives people like me hope— if Jesus can do that, then he might just be able to get me out of here.”
Last month, I laid in the emergency room, afraid I was about to have a stroke. My chemotherapy had skyrocketed my blood pressure and my head rung painfully with my heartbeat. Acutely aware of my mortality, I suddenly heard (felt?) a voice in the back of my head.
“You know your faith is a fraud,” it said— he said, “You are not loved. And death is simply the end. There’s nothing more. Nothing else.”
I shuddered.
But not from the pain.
From the disquiet.
If you think that voice in the back of my head was mine or that it belonged to my subconscious, then you have not yet come to trust the scriptures as the word of the living God.
Looking back on the exodus story, Paul writes to the Corinthians, “We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer.”
Paul puts a capital D at the front of the word just as he does in the Letter to the Hebrews, “By faith Moses kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood so that the Destroyer of the firstborn might not touch them.”
God is not like Decius!
The Devil is.
Or rather, the Devil is the voice in the ear of every Pharaoh.
However you might judge the Book of Jubilees, according to the Epistle to the Hebrews, the first Passover was about Israel’s liberation from enslavement in Egypt and deliverance— if even only for a time— from the dominion of Mastemah, who was at work in and with and under Pharaoh and his minions. And by analogizing Jesus to Moses, Paul proclaims that Christ has achieved an even greater exodus. The blood of Jesus sprinkled upon the tree functions like Moses’ aspersion of blood at the first Passover.
The blood of Jesus does not protect you from his Father, whom he invites us to address as our Father.
The blood of Jesus protects you from the Devil, whom he calls the “Prince of Lies.”
And because Christ's blood protects you from the Destroyer, it moreover frees you from the Destroyer’s chief weapon, the fear of death. Jesus lives with death behind him; therefore, you can live freed from the fear of death. “Through death,” Hebrews announces, “Jesus destroyed the one who has the power of death, that is, the Devil, and rescued all those who through fear of death were subject to captivity.”
The death of Jesus does not save you from his Father.
Through his death Jesus defeats the devil named Mastemah.
Or as St. John puts it as plainly as blood on a doorframe, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” Or as but another Christmas carol sings, “Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.”
I am sure such language of the devil strikes some of you as mythological.
If so, I feel sorry for you.
I simply do not know how anyone could read newspaper headlines or television chyrons and endure if there is not an Other at work in the world who is not God from whom the LORD Jesus Christ has and is and will deliver us.
The Oscar-wining screenplay for No Country for Old Men omits a scene which closes the novel— and makes it intelligible. Sheriff Bell is at the supper table with his wife and he observes:
“She told me she’d been readin St. John. The Revelations. Any time I get to talkin about how things are she’ll find somethin in the bible so I asked her if Revelations had anything to say about the shape things was takin and she said she’d let me know.”
But before she comes back to him, Sheriff Bell reasons his way from the depraved, hopeless condition of humanity to his own biblical judgment.
He says, “I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train.”
We call it the Last Supper.
But scripture instead presents Holy Thursday and Good Friday as a new but penultimate Passover— penultimate because Sheriff Bell is right.
The Destroyer is not yet finally destroyed forever.
Pharaohs abide. Decius has many descendants who wear not togas but tailored suits. And it seems we are bereft of bold witnesses like Origen of Alexandria. God’s people cry out still from more corners than Egypt. Mastemah whispers unfaith into many an ear; he just is that voice in the back of your head. And the fear or death (or the death of meaning) binds multitudes in sin and nihilism.
Dr. King was wrong. The arc of the universe does not (naturally) bend towards justice. Sheriff Bell is right. Things are bad, and not one of us can stop this train. But fear not! His blood will protect you. You can live otherwise. And not only was his blood applied to you at your baptism, it is here on the table.
Just so:
Come to it.
Come to the table.
The true and living God is so unlike the monsters that loom near his manger or hasten his cross. He is so unlike such monsters, in fact, he makes himself as mundane as a piece of bread. The Destroyer gave Pharaoh a hard heart. God dissolves on your lips. The Destroyer sent Pharaoh to pursue his slaves. The LORD digests in your bellies. Mary’s boy makes himself an object in your hands. His blood covers the lintel of your head; so that, no matter what comes, you are free.
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