In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ! [Glory to him forever!]

This morning we heard these words from the gospel of Matthew, where the Lord Jesus Christ takes his disciples aside, and he reminds them yet again that he is going to be crucified, and at the end of the reading today he says, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” And that is where our journey is taking us, to not only contemplate this offering of the Lord Jesus Christ, of his life for the life of the world, but in a very real way to enter into it.

And before we sort of unpack the epistle reading this morning, I want to remind all of us that as we approach, beginning on Lazarus Saturday, which is this coming Saturday, this is the holiest week of the year. This is the most important week of the year. And to simply show up on Pascha without going up to Jerusalem as the Lord said—he said, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem”; we ourselves will be going up to Jerusalem—it is imperative that we walk with our Lord on this journey, beginning on Lazarus Saturday, coming to the Liturgy, hearing the gospel reading, hearing how the Lord raised Lazarus from the dead; Palm Sunday, hearing how our Lord came into Jerusalem with cries of “Hosannah in the highest!”; walking through Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—all of those days are important, and if you can’t come to all of those days, at least, at the very least, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. That is the minimum. But to come just on Sunday and all of a sudden the Lord is risen—it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t show that we are committed to our Lord Jesus Christ and walking with him. So I beg of you, please set aside the time to come to the services.

So in this letter to the Hebrews—we have been hearing all of these readings from Hebrews during the Great Lenten period, and it can be a little bit… seem maybe distant from us, because we may not be familiar with the Old Testament enough to understand what the writer to the Hebrews is saying, and I wanted to take today’s ready—it’s very, very short—and I just wanted to make a few points that are very, very crucial for us to understand. In order to understand today’s reading, we need to go back a little bit and really hear what the writer is saying, and essentially the point is this: In the whole letter to the Hebrews, the writer is basically saying: Look, Jesus Christ is more important than all of the history that has come before us. He’s more important than angels, he’s more important than Moses, he’s more important than Abraham, he’s more important than Melchizedek—all of these people he is comparing Jesus to. Basically, he’s saying that Jesus is the culmination of all of these people. He’s the fulfillment of all of these things that are happening in the New Testament.

And then at the end of chapter eight—today we’re in chapter nine, but at the end of chapter eight, after he quotes from the Prophet Jeremiah, he says: “In that he says ‘a new covenant,’ ” in other words, Jesus has given us a new covenant—what’s a covenant? It’s an agreement. Sometimes you hear the word “New Testament.” It’s the new agreement, the new will, like a will is an agreement; it’s an agreement if something happens after a person dies. When a person dies, you’re going to get these things, or this is going to happen. That’s what a will is for, a testament. They say, “the last will and testament.” It’s an agreement. He says, “Now that he has said ‘a new covenant,’ he has made the first obsolete.” That is, the old covenant of the old law, the old agreement with the Israel, the old Israel, is obsolete.

And he says, “Now he has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete is growing old and is ready to vanish away.” And then, in chapter nine, he explains all of the things in the old covenant of how the Jews worshiped, and it’s important to understand that. To summarize, he basically says there was originally a tent, a tabernacle he calls it. As the people of God went through the desert for 40 years looking for the promised land, God was with them; God was present with them. And his presence was indicated by the tabernacle, by this portable tent that just went with them everywhere that they went, and God’s presence filled the holy of holies. And there would be a pillar of fire by night, there would be a cloud by day, and it would lead them to the promised land.

What the writer is saying is that all of that has passed away. All of that worship, all of that ritual, all of those sacrifices—very bloody sacrifices—if you wanted to be forgiven, you came to the temple and you offered whatever it was—a lamb, a ram, a bird—and it would be slaughtered, it would be cut in half, and the Lord’s presence would go between those two halves as a forgiveness for your sins, because you were offering that to the Lord. Everything was blessed with blood in the temple. Did you know that? Everything.

And actually, it’s fascinating, because you know how our Lord had blood and water come forth? You know why? Because in the Old Testament, when they blessed something with blood, it was mixed with water, for practical reasons, too, because it was thick and coagulating, so they had to mix it with [water], and they would sprinkle everything on the altar. If you wanted to bless something—you want to bless the candlesticks—you sprinkle it with blood. You want to bless the vestments, believe it or not you sprinkle it with blood. If you want to bless all of the implements of the altar, you sprinkle them with blood. Do you see the typology? They didn’t understand why; all they knew is the life is in the blood. That’s what God said, and we know that to be a fact. If you don’t have blood in you or you bleed out, you die. So life is in the blood.

So, once a year, because people would bring these sacrifices to be forgiven of their sins—you couldn’t constantly come and sacrifice, like every time we come to confession; we have a big sin and we come to confession—but you couldn’t do that every single time and come to make sacrifices. So once a year they would have the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and the high priest would go into the holy of holies where there was the ark of the covenant, there was the mercy-seat, and he would sprinkle blood on the mercy-seat once a year, and it would forgive all the sins that weren’t forgiven.

But the writer to the Hebrews says the high priest had to do that every single year. He had to do it over and over and over again for people’s sins to be forgiven, and the point he makes in the reading today is: Our High Priest, Jesus Christ, doesn’t do this over and over and over again; he does it once for all, and he offers his blood, and he doesn’t go into a copy of the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly place; he doesn’t go into a tabernacle made with hands; he doesn’t go into the Temple; he goes into the holy of holies—the real holy of holies, God’s presence—and he offers himself as a sacrifice, as what it said in the gospel reading today, a ransom for the forgiveness of our sins forever.

What’s the point? This is a very, very crucial point that I want you to understand. When we celebrate the Divine Liturgy, we do not crucify Christ over and over and over again, and sometimes our detractors tell us that. “Oh, you have the Liturgy. You crucify Christ every single time.” No, no, no. That’s not our understanding, but here is our understanding, and this is very important: You are baptized, you are chrismated, you are members of the body of Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, you’re not just remembering; you’re not just sort of going through the motions—here it is—you enter into the event that is being commemorated, because God’s perspective is not bound by time; God is an eternal now. For God, it’s always present. The past, the present, the future, it’s always—he sees it all. That’s the God that we serve.

And when we offer the Liturgy or—listen—we offer Lazarus Saturday, we offer Palm Sunday, we offer Holy Thursday, we offer Good Friday, we offer Holy Saturday in the tomb, we offer Pascha—guess what?—you are entering into that event. By the power of the Holy Spirit, you are entering into that event as if you were present there. God is bringing that to you. So when we are here and we are offering bread and wine and we say, “The Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me. Take, eat; this is my body. Drink of this, all of you. This is my blood,’ ” you are being present at that one sacrifice. It’s as if we are being transported because this event is timeless.

So, no, Christ is not being sacrificed over and over and over again, but you are experiencing it over and over and over again. This is the magnificent way that the Lord Jesus Christ allows us to experience what Christ offered on the cross as a high priest. Here’s what the reading said today:

Christ came as high priest of the good things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by hands, that is, not of this creation, but not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood he entered into the most holy place once and for all, having obtained eternal redemption.

There is not a coincidence here that there are three parts to our church just like there are three parts to the tabernacle. There’s kind of the worldly part in the back, there’s the part which is like the holy place, and then there’s the holy of holies where the offering is made. We believe not that the priest is offering it, but that Christ himself is offering it. Christ himself is present with us and is making this present for us and to us.

How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit (see? through the eternal Spirit) offered himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve?

The word here is “worship.” Worship. To worship the living God. What you’re doing is when you are present here, your conscience is being cleansed. You’re receiving that body and blood of Christ, it says, “not for judgment or condemnation, but for the remission of my sins.” Your conscience should be clear when you leave the Divine Liturgy, receiving the body and blood of Christ. These are not—and don’t let anybody fool you—these are not dead works. The dead works he’s referring to is the worship that had to happen in the Old Testament, over and over and over again. This is once for all, and you are receiving it over and over and over again. Then finally it says:

For this reason, he is the mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions of the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of eternal inheritance.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, what you are receiving in the Divine Liturgy—and this is why… I want to say this carefully, because I know we have people that watch online and so forth, and we had this time when we were not able to be together. As we move forward into Holy Week and Pascha—and I had this discussion with our Saturday group—it is imperative that we come together for this feast. We can’t have Palm Sunday part one and Palm Sunday part two; we have to come together. So it’s important that we are together to experience this. This is something that can’t be experienced virtually. You have to be here. And so now the opportunity has come. Is everything perfect? No. Do some people feel unsafe? Yes. It’s fine. But let’s come together. Let’s be resolute that God will bless our efforts and that he will make present to us the eternal sacrifice of God which cleanses us from our sins and make present to us the saving works of his passion, death, and resurrection.

To him who is our life, with the Father and the Spirit, be glory, honor, and majesty always, now and forever, and unto ages of ages. Amen. Glory to Jesus Christ!