Christmas Yesterday, Today, and Forever
One of the most iconic quotes in popular Christmas culture comes from Charlie Brown in the cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas — you’ve probably seen before — Charlie Brown is disappointed and humiliated for picking a bad tree; and Linus walks up to him as everyone else is leaving; and Charlie Brown, speaking to Linus, starts to vent his frustration. He’s upset; he’s grumbling; and then he kinda shouts: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?!”
And Linus, who had been holding his blanket and sucking his thumb, says, “Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.”
And then Linus walks to the center of the stage, drops the lights, and he recites Luke Chapter 2, verses 8–14. Then he walks back over to Charlie Brown and says simply, iconically: “That’s what Christmas is all about.” End scene.
Now that’s iconic because Linus is right. That is what Christmas is all about, and in particular it is verse 11 of Luke Chapter 2: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” And perhaps if we could ask Linus to explain what about that is Christmas all about, he would say it’s the Incarnation. It’s the fact that Jesus Christ is God become man. Jesus, who is God, has come here to be with us; to save us; by becoming like us; to live, die, and reign for us.
That is what the Incarnation is all about. That is what Christmas is all about. And the whole thing is a miracle! The true meaning of Christmas is not a fact that we master, but it’s one that masters us. We’re not called to comprehend it all; we’re called to acknowledge it, and to declare it, which we’ve done already this morning in the Call to Worship when we said: “The word became flesh; He has made his dwelling among us.”
That is what Christmas is all about going back to the very first Christmas in 4 BC. “Christ has come, Christ will come again” — but what about Christ now? … like in this moment … What is Jesus doing right now?
That’s what we’re gonna look at today in Hebrews Chapter 4, and there are three points I want us to think about, but I’m gonna wait to tell you each point as we get into them. We’re gonna stack them like this: one / then two / then three. (And I’m hoping I can show you how they all fit together.)
Let’s pray and we’ll get started:
Father in heaven, hallowed be your name! Your kingdom come, your will be done, here on earth just as it is in heaven, which means that in this moment, Father, we are asking that you speak to us. Show us the glory of Jesus, we pray in his name, amen.
So we know that Jesus has come, and that he will come again. And so we’re trying to answer the question: What Jesus is doing now?
#1. Jesus is our ascended high priest.
And there’s some explaining to do here, so look at Hebrews 4, verse 14. I want us to see how the ascended part and the high priest part go together. That’s verse 14. Verse 14 starts:
Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens …
Jesus is our “great high priest” — we see that right away. But in more detail we see he’s our great high priest “who has passed through the heavens” — and that is a reference to his Ascension, which is a vital part of Jesus’s redemptive work.
Most of the time when we talk about the work of Jesus we refer to his “death and resurrection.” That’s a short explanation, or a metonym of the gospel event, and that’s a good way to talk. The apostle Paul talks this way in 1 Corinthians 15 — he says Jesus died for us and was buried, and then he was raised on the third day. That’s good news!
And also another way we could say it, if we wanted to expand it a little more, is that we could refer to the redemptive work of Jesus as his “life, death, resurrection, and ascension.”
By adding the word “life” in front of “death” it points to his substitutionary death — it’s that Jesus lived the life we could not live and he paid the debt that we incurred by our failure. We need Jesus’s life and death! And his resurrection and ascension.
And by adding the word “ascension” behind “resurrection” it expands the meaning of the resurrection to not just be that Jesus is alive, but it’s that he’s also active. Jesus is alive and doing something, currently, based upon what he accomplished in the gospel.
Ascension Theology in Hebrews
And the Book of Hebrews is all about this. You could say that Hebrews is basically an exposition of Ascension theology. That’s how the letter begins, Chapter 1, verse 3:
[Jesus] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high …
The Book of Hebrews starts here, with a reference to the Ascension. That’s what Jesus is doing now.
He’s been raised from dead and ascended — “passing through the heavens” — to be seated on this throne in the heavenly temple. That’s what came after the Resurrection, and is happening now.
Last week we looked at the meaning of Jesus’s kingship, that Jesus holds the office of King, but see there’s more! Because Jesus is not just a King, he’s a King-Priest.
Hebrews 1:3 already implies that. To be seated at the right hand of God is throne language. That’s King language. But he took his seat on the throne after “making purification for sins”, which is priest language. See. Jesus is a King-Priest, in the order of Melchizedek (which Hebrews talks about in Chapter 5) — and really this whole book is about Jesus’s kingly-priesthood.
That is the office Jesus holds because of his Ascension. That’s how his Ascension and priesthood go together. After his resurrection, Jesus ascended to be the King over all and Priest of his people, and it’s the priest part that is of special focus in Hebrews 4, verses 14–16. So now let’s look closer at the priest part.
Jesus, Our Priest
Verses 14–16 are part of a larger argument, so let me try to catch you up to speed on what’s going on. (One of these days we’re going preach through the entire Book of Hebrews, and I hope you’ll be here for that, but for now, just back up to Chapter 2 real quickly.)
In Chapter 2, verse 17, the writer of Hebrews has been talking about the saving work of Jesus. Jesus came here to destroy the devil and to rescue us, verse 17:
Therefore [— in order to rescue us —] he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
That’s the first explicit mention of Jesus as our high priest, and then right after this in Chapter 3, verse 1 the writer of Hebrews exhorts us to “consider Jesus.” Which means to study him. Pay close attention to him. And the way the writer leads us to do this is by explaining more of Jesus’s priesthood, which he does for the rest of the book.
And to be honest, this stuff is wonderfully deep. The uniqueness of Jesus is shining brightly — and again, one day, we’re gonna study this together — but for now, suffice it to say that the writer of Hebrews helps us understand the priestly work of Jesus in the category of Old Testament priests.
Here’s a summary — hang with me here, okay! — in summary, we see that the atonement of Jesus was not just the moment of his sacrifice when he died, but it’s when he, as our high priest, presented his sacrifice to God. That is what priests do. That’s how the atonement is complete.
Jesus our high priest, made sacrifice for us by the sacrifice of himself, and his ascension is his entrance into the heavenly Holy of holies where he has presented his sacrifice and where he now lives before God bearing our names. Jesus is our ascended high priest who forever lives as the constant memorial before God of our atonement. Jesus is, currently, in this exact moment, the ever-present proof that we are loved by God, and that by his blood we are forgiven and cleansed and welcomed into fellowship with God now and forever.
This is deep, but we sing this! We do! One of our favorite hymns:
Before the throne of God above
I have a strong and perfect plea
A great High Priest, whose name is Love
Who ever lives and pleads for me
My name is graven on His hands
My name is written on His heart
I know that while in heaven He stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart
Jesus is our ascended high priest! Right now. That’s what Jesus is doing right now. But also, secondly, here:
#2. Jesus is the ascended man.
When it comes to the priesthood of Jesus, notice what the writer of Hebrews emphasizes in Chapter 4, verse 15:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
The writer says the same thing in Chapter 2, verse 14. He says that because we are people of flesh and blood, Jesus himself “likewise partook of the same things.” In Chapter 2, verse 17 he says that Jesus had to be made like his brothers in every respect. Because Jesus has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
Central to the priesthood of Jesus is the humanity of Jesus. It’s his incarnation. It’s the true meaning of Christmas. It’s the fact that Jesus took on human flesh — our flesh and blood … and skin and hair and eyes and teeth. Jesus, the Son of God, is our high priest because he became human like us.
The Bodily Ascension
And it is so important that this sinks in for us, like we talked about a few weeks ago. Jesus would have been like anyone of us in this room. He was a real person — he is a real person.
Because after Jesus died and was buried, three days later he was raised — and we know that he was raised in a body. The Gospels make this super clear; Paul makes this clear (see 1 Corinthians 15:6). People saw Jesus after his resurrection. He ate breakfast with his disciples. Thomas put his hand on the scars in Jesus’s side.
Jesus was raised from the dead with a new, resurrected body, and Jesus in that body ascended to the heavenly dimension.
And I say “dimension” to dispel the wrong idea that heaven means just way up in the sky. A lot of times we can think that way about heaven.
Heaven (the place where God is) we can think, is high up above the clouds where things are just floating around. But that’s not right.
The Bible does talk about the sky as the heavenS — “the heavens declare the glory of God” — but heaveN as in the place where God dwells is better understood as the heavenly realm. It’s a different dimension than the one we live in here, and it’s one that we can’t visualize with our natural abilities. It’s not empirically available to us.
But it’s there, and that’s where Jesus is, in the heavenly dimension, in the presence of God, in a resurrected body — the same body that was seen by over 500 people and that digested breakfast and that was touched by Thomas. That body! Jesus is in that body right now.
Which means, the incarnation of the Son of God was not just a one-time thing. It was not a historical convenience, or a temporary necessity. But the incarnation was (and is) a uniting of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ, who is fully God, fully man, forever. The incarnation is the continuing incarnation that Jesus nows lives out in the heavenly realm. Jesus is still a man.
He Is Able to Sympathize with Us
And this is where we have to stretch our imaginations a little: What are the implications of this? What does it mean that right now Jesus is still God incarnate? What does it mean that right now Jesus is still human, in a body?
Well, we could think about what it means for him to breathe. That just like we take breaths, and our lungs expand and contract, Jesus’s lungs do the same, because he also has lungs and he also takes breaths.
Or we could think about skin and bones: we could take our fingers on one hand and pinch the skin of our fingers on the other hand, and could consider that in the same way that we can do this, Jesus can do this too, because Jesus also has skin that he can pinch.
We might look at our knuckles and imagine Jesus looking at his knuckles, because he has knuckles to look at.
As we think about Jesus’s continuing incarnation we could think about all these things and more, but the writer of Hebrews takes us somewhere else. He takes to the level of consciousness, and he says that Jesus, because of his humanity, is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.
Jesus is able to sympathize with us, to have compassion on us, because he knows what it’s like to be a man — not “once upon a time” a man, but he still is a man.
He’s not tempted anymore like he was during his days on earth, but there is a continuity between the life Jesus lived on earth and the life he lives now, and that is certainly a continuity of experience. Here’s what I mean: when Jesus was raised from the dead and ascended, it did not wipe clean his memory. He didn’t just forget everything.
Again, we’re pushing our imaginations here, but what do you think was on Jesus’s mind after his resurrected body ascended into the heavenly realm?
Do you get the question? — After Jesus ascended, in his resurrected body, what do you think was on his mind?
Well, of course we can’t know that exactly what that was, but we can know what it was not.
And I’m especially interested in this because I’ve woken up before in a hospital bed and could not remember what happened to me.
Some of you know about this car wreck. 19 years ago, in December, when Melissa and I were in high school, we got into a bad car accident, and I suffered a traumatic brain injury.
And God, by his grace, worked a miracle; he healed me; he changed my life. But what’s odd about the whole thing is that the only reason I know about it is because it’s what I’ve been told by other people. I don’t remember anything about the wreck. I have this gap in my memory. There’s this missing chunk of time, and it’s weird.
But I remember getting my first new memories. I remember waking up in the hospital, and there were all these people coming in and out, and they were in my face asking me questions: Do you know what year it is? Do you know your parents’ names? Do you know how old you are?
They asked me so many questions, and the reason they asked me so many questions is because they were trying to figure out if there was any continuity here.
Is the kid in this hospital bed the same kid he was yesterday?
Does he know who he is?
Does he remember anything about his life?
Does he know what he experienced?
And again, we don’t know exactly what was in Jesus’s mind after he ascended, but we do know that nobody was in his face asking him questions. Nobody was trying to figure out if he’s the same man. He is the same man, and he remembers everything. Everything Jesus experienced on this earth, he still knows.
The way the sunrise looks over the Sea of Galilee; the way cooked fish smell on charcoal; the noise of the crowd as they shouted for his crucifixion. He remembers it all.
The way his stomach ached with hunger that time Satan tempted him in the wilderness; the vitriol of the Pharisees when he healed a man on the Sabbath; the earnestness of Peter’s voice when he swore allegiance to Jesus at all costs, and then also there was the sound of the rooster’s crow. He remembers.
The desperation in Gethsemane; the injustice of his trial; the pain of nails in his hands and our sins on his back. He remembers.
The historical Jesus we read about in the Gospels is the resurrected and ascended Jesus of this exact moment, and his ability to be our priest depends upon his ability to recall what he learned about being a man on this earth, which he recalls right now as that same man, ascended.
This means, Christian, it is not trite to say that Jesus knows your need. We would be shocked if we knew what he knows. He became like you in every respect.
What’s hard for you? He’s been there.
What keeps you up at night? He gets it.
Make a list of the top three things you wish you could change about your life, and know that Jesus, right now, from where he is sitting to where you are sitting, he is with you in the 1-2-3 as someone who understands it, as someone who has compassion on you as a human like you so that he can be a great high priest for you.
Jesus, our ascended priest is the ascended man. And this changes everything.
That’s the third point in our stack. “One” is that Jesus is our ascended high priest; and then “two” is that Jesus is the ascended man; and now “three” is the question:
#3. How then should we live?
This is the question of application. What do we do with this fact about Jesus? What does it mean for us?
There are two things here I want to highlight, and the first is the exhortation that stands out in this passage, in verses 14 and 16. And I’m going to summarize it as simply to walk closer with Jesus.
1) Walk Closer with Jesus
Notice in verse 14 that because Jesus is our high priest, “let us hold fast our confession.” And then in verse 16 again, it’s the same idea: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
To hold fast our confession means to embrace the gospel. The original audience of this letter was tempted to shy away from the truths of the gospel and its implications, and the writer is exhorting them not to shy away: Don’t shy away and turn back, but lean in and live out! And that means to draw near.
The idea of drawing near to God, or approaching God, is repeated at least eight times in the letter, and the first time is here in verse 16. And this means basically to live in fellowship with God — live in the fellowship with God that we have because of Jesus.
Because of Jesus — because of his past saving work through his life, death, and resurrection, and because of his continued office as our high priest — it means that God always welcomes us; we can always come to him; and that is always through Jesus. Our living in deeper fellowship with God means our walking closer with Jesus, and there is nothing I want more badly for myself and for you.
I want to be as close to Jesus this side of heaven as is humanly possible for a forgiven sinner. And I want that same thing for you. And so that’s what we’re aiming for here, God willing, over the next 30 years. Let’s walk closer with Jesus together.
Because if he’s a real person — and he is — we can know him more; we can think about him more; we can ask for his help more.
And it doesn’t involve a long, drawn out process of preliminary ritual. You don’t have to light a candle or remove your shoes or wash your hands with special water. Just talk to him. Riding down the road, talk to him. Stressful moment with the kids, talk to him. Feeling low out of nowhere, talk to him. Whatever you’ve got, wherever you’re at, bring it to Jesus.
As an old British pastor put it,
The more I know him, the more I like him; the more I know him, the more I love him; the more I know him, the more I desire him; the more I know him, the more my heart is knit unto him. His beauty is taking, his love is ravishing, his goodness is drawing, his manifestations are enticing, and his person is enamoring. His lovely looks please me, his pleasant voice delights me, his precious Spirit comforts me, his holy Word rules me; and these things make Christ to be a heaven unto me [on this earth] — (Thomas Brooks, 1654, Heaven on Earth, 184)
— while he is seated there and we are here doing whatever we do. Walk closer with Jesus.
Okay, here’s the last thing: Jesus is the ascended priest, and the ascended man, and that means, One, Walk closer with him, and Two, go tell it on the mountain.
2) Go tell us on the mountain
This is where we don’t want to just know more of Jesus for ourselves, but we want others to know more of him and to have more of him through us. And so we go tell of him. We commend him. We talk to him like’s real, and we talk of him like he’s real.
And here’s one simple way to do that this season: say “Merry Christmas” to as many people as you can! We’ve got 12 days! This is just Day 2. So all throughout Christmastide, from yesterday through January 5, tell as many people as you can “Merry Christmas” and when they say: Ah, bah humbug, Christmas is over! You can say: Not at all, Christmas has just begun.
Because if we know what Christmas is all about — the fact that Jesus is God become man to save us — if we know what Christmas is all about, it’s Christmas yesterday, today, and forever.
And now we come to this Table to celebrate.
The Table
But first, if you’re here this morning and you do not trust in Jesus, what are you doing? Trust him! Put your faith in Jesus and be saved!
And for those of you who do trust him, for those of you who are saved by him, this morning as we receive the bread and the cup, let us adore him and rejoice in him and give him thanks, for his life and death and resurrection and ascension — Jesus is our great High Priest who lives for us right now.
His body is the true bread.
His blood is the true drink.
Let us serve you.
