Canter Bridge

The writer of the New Testament ‘letter’—it is hardly just that—to the Hebrews does what attentive readers of sacred literature instinctively do: he fills in the blanks.

The enigmatic figure of Melchizedek deserves a Guinness Book of World Records category all his own. One would have to define it as ‘most suggestive figure about whom the least is said’. This odd king-priest meets the patriarch Abraham on his way back from a spasm of righteous warfare and receives a tithe of the man’s spoils. Then he’s gone from the record, as quickly and with as little comment as he entered it.

The consequence is that the tradition records widespread speculation regarding his whereabouts, his significance, and what other stunts he might have pulled that landed on the biblical cutting-room floor. Hebrews is one voice in that tradition, a contemplation of Jesus’ priestly role in the light of Melchizedek’s superbly mysterious precedent.

And then this same writer, surely one of the New Testament’s least bashful authors, takes on the significance of Jesus’ evident suffering. Did he, as we must, learn from his pains?

Yes, we are told, he did:

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

Just as the ink bill for subsequent writers who felt compelled to fill out the picture on Melchizedek must be an extraordinarily large one, so writers have worked late into the night to explain how the New Testament’s perfect messiah should have to learn obedience through his sufferings.

This morning offers no novel thoughts, no untying of Gordian knots in the face of this enduring interpretive crux. One merely notes with gut-level satisfaction—no, let us call it joy—the profound commitment of this Jesus truly to represent his people before heaven’s awesome demands.

The more one allows himself to sink down into the literary reservoir of redemption’s record, the more the sheer integrity of it all becomes self-evident. There are not cardboard cut-outs in redemption’s truest tale, no short-cuts, no second-rate stand-ins, no bumber-sticker simplicity, no stultifying brevity.

There is, instead, Melchizedek, a mysterious priest-king, in whom the juxtaposition of deep significance and few words makes him an eternal research project worthy of its costs. There is Jesus, the very impress of the Creator, without sin, who weeps and begs with tears and groans authentically like ours. He, like us, is changed by the unknowable agony of it. He learns. We, like him, rise from our drenched bed of trauma, yet we—unlike him—follow our Jesus-Priest with those words and acts of worship that surge from empty souls when they realize that Melchizedek—our King of Righteousness—has come.