Sermon Ideas For Hebrews 9:24-28 Part 3

Redemption is a process of suffering and purification. Flannery O'Connor, in all her short stories, puts to the reader the question, "So you think you have been redeemed?" In stories like The Displaced Person, O'Connor puts characters in comic and often grotesque situations, and she shocks them into examining their lives. O'Connor's question forces both her characters and her readers to look at their lives and to see where and why they take for granted their relationships with God and to question those areas of their lives in which they feel righteous and perfect. As Christians, we are called to this kind of examination. We are also called to suffer. As Dorothee Soelle so rightly reminds us in her work Suffering, full participation in human life means suffering as we face loss and change. We, however, are not to suffer needlessly and without understanding. Christ is the symbol of our understanding and our justification. He is the one who intercedes for us with God and who becomes the presence by whom we understand our own suffering and measure our own holiness.

Milton, in his epic poem, Paradise Lost, shows us the existence of Christ from the beginning of creation. Even as the angels, led by Satan, rebel against God, Milton has Christ sitting at His Father's side. God, talking about the rebellion in heaven, calls for one who will establish order once again. Though the rest of the poem might lead one to argue that Christ is predestined to take that role, God allows Christ to choose freely this task. Having made his choice, Christ both restores the relationship between God and man and stands in God's presence for man. After the Fall, in the last books of the epic, the archangel Michael reveals both cosmic history and personal history to Adam, and what had seemed an irreparable loss to Adam becomes a source of joy as he discovers the intercessory power of Jesus Christ. He realized that his Fall makes sense within the larger narrative of human history and that he, like Christ, must choose to be part of the order of God. That choice is a symbol of both human responsibility and human freedom.

Freedom, however, is fraught with struggle. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek¹, Annie Dillard gives us an image of human life as being forever sacrificed, bound with what she sees as unbreakable cords to what she calls "the world's rock altar." Dillard sees human beings trapped by consciousness in a world full of violence and death. She fears that the human being will never be purified. The violence of existence, for Dillard, is relieved by occasional and fleeting glimpses of the holy that loose the cords and let us walk away. Hebrews 9:24, however, reminds us that there is one, foreshadowed by God's freeing of Isaac from Abraham's altar and his substitute of the lamb, to loose the bindings that bind us to the altar--one who will stand for us. The Book of Job expands this theme. Job, wanting to enter into the court of the Lord and to plead for justice, calls for such a one as he suffers on his dung heap. Gustavo Gutierrez in Job:God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, reminds us that Job calls for an arbiter, a witness, and a defender or liberator to be present for him. Gutierrez calls these the three roles, functions, and faces of God. Both Dillard and Job suffer with similar questions: how can one who appears to be righteous be caused to suffer? How can we escape suffering?

As human beings in community, we are called often to face suffering in order to change social conditions. Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King and Ghandi, in their theories of non-violent resistance, remind us that, as Aeschylus said in the Oresteia, we must suffer into truth and in order to establish the kingdom of God on earth. For Ghandi and King, the human being practicing non-violent resistance must stand, courageously and purely, in the face of violence and accept suffering in order to reveal to the violent actor the flaw in his soul. The violent actor, faced with the acceptance of suffering, must ask himself O'Connor's question: "Have I truly been redeemed?" and confront his sense of his own rightness. Suffering becomes a mode of instruction and, prefaced by a purification of the self, an act of piety. Bonhoeffer called Christ the "man for others." Like Christ, we are called to stand for and to suffer for others.

Literature abounds with instances of those who suffer for the sake of others' happiness. In Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, Sydney Carton, who has led a dissolute life, sacrifices himself to the senseless violence of the French Revolution so that Lucie Manette and her family may have a free and happy life. Similarly, in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath², which both a story of the dustbowl and an examination of the book of Job, Tom Joad stands against the violence of those who would deny the "Oakies" their humanity and is forced to leave his family. A Tale of Two Cities ends with the theme of resurrection and gives us Carton saying that "It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." This reminds us of the suffering we are called to as members of Christ's community and the promise that Christ makes that our suffering will have meaning. Tom Joad's final words to his mother in The Grapes of Wrath are that he will be present to his family: "..I'll be all aroun' in the dark. I'll be ever'where--wherever you look...I'll be there." Tom reminds us, as does God's final speech to Job, that Christ's presence is with us always even as we wait eagerly (Heb 9:28) for Him.

George Herbert in his "Love" poems puts to us the question that we shall examine throughout these lessons. He asks throughout his poems, grouped in The Temple, how he, a mere human being, can come face to face with God and whether he is worthy to stand in the presence of God. His answer, in "Love" III which we shall discuss in a future lesson, will remind us that "Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hands...but into heaven" (Heb 9:23).

Carolyn Jones Baton Rouge, LA

1. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 242. 2. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 537.