Passage: Hebrews 10:5-10

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Author: Pastor Horton

Date: December 22, 2024

Christmas Cards.  I’m willing to guess you have sent yours out by now and have had a few trickle into your mailbox at home.  Some Christmas cards still have Christian imagery and a Bible verse – although those seem to be a bit more scares this year depending on where you shop.  Some include a family picture or a photo montage made by Snapfish.  And yet others list, family member by family member the joys, blessings, and accomplishments which happened over this past year. 

This morning as we near the festival of Christmas, we get to open up a Christmas card from God within the pages of his Holy Word.  And what do we find?  Good tidings of great joy – our salvation arriving in Christ Jesus!  But a closer examination might have to ask why such a message is needed to be announced in the first place?

After all, if we are talking lists of accomplishments, the writer to the Hebrews reminds us that God’s Old Testament people and their priestly system had a very long list of accomplishments which they did.  By the time of Jesus, there were so many priests that each only served two weeks out of the year at the temple.  But centuries earlier, at the beginning, when Aaron and his two sons were Israel’s only priests, they were there at the temple making sacrifices 365 days a year, every year.  Every morning.  Every evening.  Every day!  And then don’t forget to add in Sabbath sacrifices, New Moon sacrifices, sacrifices for Israel’s religious feasts, sacrifices brought by individuals, and then there was the Passover with its thousands of lambs all sacrificed on the same afternoon.  That’s a lot of work.  That’s a long list of accomplishing what God had asked of his people.

You almost have to wonder if the priests, knife in hand and dripping red, ever thought, “Here we go again.  How many animals do we need to slaughter?” Or “Surely, all this meticulous minding of every single letter of the law must amount to something before God?  He must see our good deeds and praise us or reward us.”  To be fair, there was a thick river of blood and mountains of dead animals used for sacrifice, lining Israel’s path through history.  When is enough, enough?  Could the Old Testament people write a card to God and say “here – look at all you asked and look at all we accomplished!?”

No.  Our God understood that temptation and his Word disproves such a thinking.  Right before our reading, Hebrews chapter 10 reflected, “It (the law) will never be able to make perfect those who continually offer the same sacrifices year after year.  Instead, these sacrifices reminded them of their sins year after year.  The fact is that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins.”  Sacrificing animals was an endlessly repetitive task, and an unpleasant one at that, and at the end of it all, it didn’t actually take away any sin!  At the time of Jesus, it had been going on for 1,400 years, that’s half a million days!  Half a million!  What a long list of accomplishments!  And yet what was the point of those Old Testament sacrifices?  “In fact, the law is only a shadow of the good things to come, not the actual realization of those things.”

This is where Hebrews is so special.  The whole book wrestles with the question: How do the Old Testament and New Testament fit together?  How does the covenant made on Mt. Sinai mesh with the covenant made in Jesus’ blood on Mt. Calvary?  Hebrews spends a lot of time showing how that old way of doing things compares with the new way of doing things in Jesus Christ.  In every case, Jesus is the superior answer.  As our reading puts it: “He does away with the first in order to establish the second.”

And while the priests back then could write up a list of all the sacrifices they made each year – and turn them into God– those sacrifices were not the answer to humanity’s sin problem.  They were commanded by God.  Insufficient when it came to forgiveness, but important in their purpose.  When the many animals were slaughtered, people became aware of how serious sin is before God.  Sin doesn’t sound so serious when you just talk about it.  But when you actually go out to your flock, pick one of the best animals, and care for it as you transport it to the temple, only to have it killed and sacrificed and burnt up – one begins to understand how our sins are a stench in God’s nostrils.  It’s not just an issue of being on a “naughty” list.  Our sins offend God.  And sacrifices directed people to trust God’s mercy, not their own holiness.  It was a system that led souls to realize that they needed a substitute for their sin.  It was “a shadow of the good things to come” in Christ Jesus.

You and I need that reminder as well, don’t we?  We need the reminder that Christ alone accomplished our salvation.  We need that reminder because in each of our hands is a Christmas card to God with a list of our accomplishments – vain though they may be – making a case for why we should be on his “nice list.”  Our hearts, naturally create such a list.  It’s filled with big boasts and proud promotions about all the good we have done before God, not to his glory but to our own.  We try to excuse the deathly damage our sin creates.  We try to justify our not perfect selves rather than hear and see the perfect justification won for us on the cross of Jesus.  We cling to our list as if our eternal lives depend on it – yet those lists of our accomplishments have a way of disintegrating right before our eyes. 

It kind of like those cards one can buy off of that joker greeting website.  They sell actual Christmas cards that play music (annoying music) or have an animal barking along.  Only once the card is open, the music doesn’t shut down until the battery runs out of energy.  Think you can outsmart it by ripping the card open to destroy the battery?  The interior is filled with messy Christmas glitter.  It really takes the right kind of person to receive such a card (maybe spare grandpa and grandma that one).  In the end one is left with a card ripped to shreds, smashed battery, and a giant mess that’s hard to clean up.  That’s symbolic of our lives of sin and the best we can do before God.

But thankfully through the Word, we get to read Jesus’ Christmas card to God the Father today.  It’s how our reading began, “Therefore when he entered the world, Christ said.”  It feels like, almost as if we are hearing Jesus setting aside heaven and leaving a Christmas note for the Father before taking up residence in a womb and then be born in a stable and laid in a manger.  “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but you prepared a body for me.”  Our reading, for the sake of us time-bound people, puts the eternal God in the moment before the first Christmas.  The Son of God is about to give us the one accomplishment we need on our list: payment for sin.  Old Testament prophecies are lining up according to God’s direction as our readings today focus our eyes to humble Bethlehem and a virgin named Mary.  All is prepared for our Savior.

You can almost picture Jesus writing to the Father, “Here I am.  I have come to do your will, God.  In the scroll of the book it is written about me.”   The Word about to be made flesh.  That will be his entire life’s mission.  He would give up a list of potential worldly accomplishments.  He would give up personal freedom, subject himself to suffering, and even die his death on someone else’s terms.  Yet he looks forward to it.  He’s determined.  Everything and every scroll inspired and written in God’s Holy Word centers upon Jesus.  He would come to obey God perfectly.  He would come to live every moment for others.  He would come to win eternal life for you.

And so in these days before Christmas we eagerly wait for what all creation had been waiting for and for what God himself was planning!  Not a gift under a Christmas tree or a family gathering or small flood of Christmas cards in the mail (though those all are to be counted as blessings), but something bigger.  It is about God’s fix to what the endless repetitive sacrifice of animals could not do.  It is about God’s fix to our sin – something no amount of human bartering or human sorrow or human efforts could do.  Here comes Jesus.  He will do it all, once for all.

“By this will, we have been sanctified once and for all, through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ.”   That makes for a pretty good Christmas card message to embrace by faith.  We’re a few days away!  Here comes Jesus to be our Savior!  Amen.