I wonder if anyone can tell me what is the Old Testament passage most frequently quoted in the New Testament…
You might think it’s something like Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” If you’re really into the writings of the minor prophets, you might come up with an obscure verse like Habakkuk 2:4, “The just shall live by faith.”
Depending on how you do your calculation, there are something in the range of three hundred quotations from the Old Testament that can be found in the New. But the quotation that tops them all is from Psalm 110, verses 1 and 4, which run like this:
The LORD says to my Lord:
‘Sit at my right hand,
until I make your enemies your footstool.’ …
The Lord has sworn
and will not change his mind,
‘You are a priest forever
after the order of Melchizedek.’
The first place we find these words is in each of the first three gospels. They come up in the course of one of those nitpicking encounters between Jesus and the religious authorities. We hear them, not on the lips of Jesus, but from his opponents. They use them to try to debunk what people are beginning to say about Jesus: that he is the promised Messiah. Clearly, they recognized these verses as a messianic prophecy.
The next time we come across them is when they are quoted by Peter. They are to be found in the middle of his sermon on the day of Pentecost. He was addressing the large crowd who had gathered in the street when they heard Jesus’ followers praising God in what they recognized as their own languages. And after citing these same verses, Peter proclaimed, “Let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Messiah.” (Acts 2:34-36)
This in turn brings us to the Letter to the Hebrews, which we have been following now since the beginning of the year. So I will forgive you if you don’t remember way back in chapter 1, where this text is quoted once again. There, pointing to Jesus, the author asks the question, “To which of the angels has God ever said, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’”? (Hebrews 1:13)
Finally we come to the verse immediately preceding the passage before us this morning: Hebrews 6:20. There the author writes of Jesus as “having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek”.
When I was scratching my head early last week trying to come up with a title for this sermon, I thought of calling it “Who the heck was Melchizedek?” And perhaps that’s exactly the question you’re asking yourself right now! Well, the answer comes in the three verses which make up this morning’s passage from Hebrews.
The author takes us far back into the mists of history—in fact, to chapter 14 in the book of Genesis. Now here’s the scene: The rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah had been trounced in battle by the rulers of some of the neighbouring settlements. Among those whom they took as captives was Abraham’s nephew Lot. When Abraham found out about it, he pulled together his armed men and staged an overnight raid on the two rulers and their forces. The result was that Lot was made a free man once again and Abraham forged a treaty with the ruler of Sodom. And that is where Melchizedek enters the scene.
He appears to come to Abraham out of nowhere. He is the king of Salem (later to become Jerusalem) and the scene takes place in the nearby Valley of Shaveh. Melchizedek brings with him bread and wine and pronounces a blessing on Abraham. In response, Abraham returns to him a tenth of all his possessions. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, Melchizedek disappears into the mists of time.
Now I have to say that this scene is one of a few in the Old Testament that never fail to bring shivers down my spine. It is up there with the three mysterious visitors who later came out of the blue to visit Abraham as he stood at the entry of his tent. And with the fourth man who stood amid the flames with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego inside King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. I ask myself: Could it be that what those men witnessed—and what Abraham witnessed that day in the Valley of Shaveh—was a foreshadowing of the eternal Word, Jesus, who was with God and who was God from the beginning? I’ll leave it to you to come to your own conclusion.
King of righteousness
But back to Melchizedek. Our passage this morning tells us three things about him. The first is a translation of his name. It is a combination of the two Hebrew words melek, which means “king”, and tsedeq, which means “righteousness”. Put them together and Melchizedek’s name means “king of righteousness”—and as such he points directly to Jesus.
But before we go any farther, perhaps we need to ask, what does it mean to be righteous? Many people confuse righteousness with self-righteousness. In reality the two could not be farther apart. Jesus put the lie to what masquerades as righteousness when he told the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector who went to pray in the temple. You will recall how the Pharisee strutted in and parroted, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get…” That isn’t righteousness: that is shameless, delusional pride.
Several years ago one of my brothers had new neighbours move in next door. In an effort to be friendly, he went over and invited them over for a barbecue. He was taken aback by their response: “Oh no. We couldn’t do that. Our church forbids us from sharing meals with outsiders.”
As Jesus’ followers we need to be so careful not to radiate that false brand of righteousness, the one that gives the impression that we see ourselves as better than other people. True righteousness is what we find in the tax collector, who crouched in a shadowy corner of the temple where he was barely noticeable. And not having the boldness even to lift up his eyes and look towards heaven, he murmured, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:9-14)
The truly righteous recognize their constant need of God’s grace. They seek to live in daily dependence on him. And this is what we see in Jesus, who said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” And again, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.” (John 4:34; 6:38)
We call Jesus righteous in a unique sense, though, because he did what no other human being has ever done: he lived a life of perfect, uninterrupted communion with his Father. Jesus is the true King of Righteousness. In him we are able to see all that it means to live in a relationship with God.
King of peace
The second fact about Melchizedek that our passage this morning points us to is that he was King of Salem—and Salem in Hebrew is the same word as shalom, which means “peace”. My Bible dictionary informs me that that word shalom involves a much broader understanding than what we commonly mean by “peace”. It carries with it a notion of “completeness”, “soundness”, “well-being”, “safety”.
So it was that, on the night before they were to face what would be their greatest trial, Jesus could comfort his followers with the words, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you… Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (John 14:27)
A few days later, as they gathered in fear for their lives behind locked doors, suddenly Jesus was in their midst again with the familiar words, “Peace be with you.” (John 20:19) And today Jesus comes to us with those same words, “Peace be with you.” Peace as we face tragedy and suffering. Peace as we run into broken relationships and conflict. Peace as we seek to negotiate the storms and setbacks that are an unavoidable part of life in in a fallen world. And in all of those circumstances, Jesus is able not only to give us inner peace. He also empowers us to be makers of peace. After all, peace is one of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Yet there is more to it than that—infinitely more! The peace that Jesus gives us in the here and now is only a foreshadowing of the real and lasting peace that he will bring with him in the new creation. This is the peace that we read about in the prophets:
“No more shall there be…
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not fill out his days…
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain
or bear children for calamity,
for they shall be the offspring of the blessed of the LORD,
and their descendants with them…
The wolf and the lamb shall graze together;
the lion shall eat straw like the ox,
and dust shall be the serpent’s food.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain,” says the LORD. (Isaiah 65:20-25)
That is a picture that never ceases to amaze me! (And what a stunning contrast it is to the images that we see in the news daily right now of bombed-out buildings and desperate refugees fleeing for safety in Ukraine!)
Yes, Jesus does bring us peace as we lay our troubles before him. But the real peace he came to bring is the shalom of the new heaven and the new earth, when all creation will thrive as it hasn’t since the Garden of Eden, in the light of his unending glory. And it is the vision of that peace that calls and arouses us to be makers of peace in the here and now.
Our eternal high priest
Thirdly, Melchizedek was a high priest. Abraham recognized this when he gave him a tenth of all that he had. We don’t know what kind of sacrifices Melchizedek offered in his high priestly role. But we do know the sacrifice that Jesus offered for us in his own life’s blood poured out for us on the cross.
Words are not sufficient to describe what Jesus accomplished for you and for me on that first Good Friday. The closest I can find are from my Anglican Prayer Book when it speaks about what Jesus has done for us through his death as “a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”.
The Letter to the Hebrews will have a good deal more to teach us about Jesus’ eternal priesthood in the succeeding chapters—and I don’t want to steal from what preachers might be led to say in the Sundays that follow.
Yet allow me to say that, unlike Abraham’s response to Melchizedek, we can’t be satisfied with giving just a tenth. Jesus demands our all. As he said to his first disciples, he says to you and to me, “If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) The apostle Paul said much the same thing a generation later when he wrote to the believers in Rome: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1)
Switch now for a moment to the twentieth century, to 1937, when the Nazi party had all of Germany in its oppressive grip. A young Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat down to put together a study on the Sermon on the Mount. He could not have known that eight years later he would die as a martyr to Hitler’s brutal régime. Nor could he have known how prophetic his words would be when wrote, “The cross is laid on every Christian… When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
As we focus our thoughts this morning upon Jesus, the King of righteousness, the King of Peace and our Great High Priest, the only response that enters my mind comes to me in the words of the hymn writer Isaac Watts:
When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.
