October 20, 2024

“The Order of Melchizedek”

I love puzzles. I used to do jigsaw puzzles — the kind with 250 pieces in a box.  Now Dadgie and I do 3D puzzles together.  But the kind that really intrigue me are the ones that play tricks with your mind.  I’ve always been able to get absolutely lost in solving a chess problem, or a tricky hand of bridge, or a crossword, or a sudoku.  And that’s why I love things like this cryptic phrase in today’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrews.  It’s a wonderful little puzzle buried in an ancient text.  The writer refers to Jesus as “having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.”  And there’s the puzzle: what in the world is “the order of Melchizedek?”  A whole world of meaning is concealed beneath this one simple, arcane reference.

Stay with me through this next part, I know it can get a little deep – or at least roll up your pants legs.  Melchizedek is only mentioned once in Israel’s recorded history.  His name appears in Genesis (Chapter 14) as “King Melchizedek of Salem” and he is referred to as “priest of God Most High.”  In the Genesis passage, Melchizedek greets the patriarch, Abram, on his return from routing the enemy.  Melchizedek serves a priestly role, giving Abram a blessing, and receiving a tithe from him.  The reference to Melchizedek as king of Salem, which is an ancient name for the city of Jerusalem, and the historical roots of his name, Melchi-zedek (which means my king is righteous) make it most likely that he was a Canaanite king of Jerusalem before it was inhabited by the Israelites.  So Melchizedek was not legitimate, according to the ancient rule of succession of priests from the Israelite tribe of Levi.  Here’s the rub: Abram treats this Canaanite priest-king from Salem as a superior.  He is the only one in the narrative to whom Abram submits, even though Melchizedek was an outsider.  He didn’t belong.  His priesthood was an aberration.

Then, in Psalm 110, we find this reference: “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.’” The psalm appears to be praising some ancient, Judean king and acknowledging his lineage back to old king Melchizedek, and, interestingly enough, affirming his role as not only king but a priest – even though he was not a Levite – because Melchizedek was regarded as a priest.  Our author here in the Book of Hebrews is picking up on that language in the psalm, and saying that Jesus has the legitimacy of being directly sanctioned by God for all time as high priest on behalf of us all, even though he did not have the inherited authority of the Levitical priesthood.

So, we made it through the weeds.  Here’s the long and short of it: the Canaanite king, Melchizedek was exalted by the Israelites as a king and priest of their own.  The people who believed so whole-heartedly in the power of a name that they would not even pronounce the name of God essentially “adopted” this foreign ruler, with his non-Levitical name, as an embodiment of divine authority.  And that’s the “order of Melchizedek” according to which Jesus is regarded as “high priest.”  It’s the order of an adopted foreigner, an illegitimate pretender to the priesthood, to whom the greatest patriarch of the faith submits himself.

In the classic novel, Bread and Wine, by Ignazio Silone, the priest, Don Benedetto says that sometimes when the world goes crazy God must hide and appear only under strange guises and with assumed names.  Talking to his former student Pietro Spina who had returned to fascist Italy from exile disguised as a priest, Don Benedetto says that God also may appear in the midst of their troubled circumstance in disguise.  “It would not be the first time.” says Don Benedetto, “that the Lord has been forced to hide Himself and make use of an assumed name. As you know, He has never attached much importance to the names men have given Him; on the contrary, one of the first of His commandments is not to take His name in vain. And sacred history is full of examples of clandestine living. Have you ever considered the meaning of the flight into Egypt? And later, when He had grown up, did not Jesus several times have to hide himself to escape from the Pharisees?”¹

Don Benedetto then relates the story of Elijah hiding in the cave, who didn’t hear God in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but only in a “still, small voice.” He tells Pietro that you have to be on the lookout if you are going to hear God. God may only be present in the unexpected.

“I too,” Don Benedetto says, “in the depth of my affliction have asked, where then is the Lord and why has He abandoned us? The loudspeakers and the bells that announced the beginning of new butchery to the whole country were certainly not the voice of the Lord. Nor are the shelling and bombing of Abyssinian villages that are reported daily in the press. But if a poor man alone in a hostile village gets up at night and scrawls with a piece of charcoal or paints ‘Down with the war’ on the walls the Lord is undoubtedly present. How is it possible not to see that behind that unarmed man in his contempt for danger, in his love of the so-called enemy, there is a direct reflection of the divine light? Thus, if simple workers are condemned by a special tribunal for similar reasons, there’s no doubt about which side God is on.”²

So Don Benedetto reveals the solution to our cryptic puzzle: The divine power that fuels the very soul of the universe makes its appearance in the least expected ways.  Like the foreigner who serves as priest to a patriarch, Jesus came on the scene as a humble servant, washing the feet of others.  He said to his disciples, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”  The Power of Divinity shows up, as Don Benedetto suggested, in every act of mercy, of crying out against injustice, of opposing oppression and violence, and in the quietest and least noticed of acts of grace.

There was a newspaper story some time ago about a mother and her little daughter caught beneath the rubble of a collapsed building after an earthquake in Armenia.  It was terribly cold, and they were trapped under these huge slabs of concrete for a week.  The little girl got more and more thirsty, but there was no water.  So the mother found a broken piece of glass and cut her own finger, telling the child to suck the blood from the cut.  The girl was still thirsty and begged her mother, “Please Mama, cut another finger for me.”³  Well, they did survive and were eventually rescued, but it’s hard to let go of the cry of that little girl, asking her mother to cut another finger.  After the fact, doctors opinions were divided about whether the blood from her mother’s fingers actually saved the little girl’s life, but that misses the point.  The television broadcasts are likely in a situation like this to focus on the workers who spent a week digging through the rubble to get to these two, but when all the details come out, it’s clear that the mother’s quiet compassion, steadiness, and willingness to sacrifice are the real story.  It’s easy to pay attention to the hype and miss the real, common heroes in life.  It’s easy to look at leaders and celebrities in the media and discount the simple acts of love or the quiet voice of reconciliation that are reflections of divinity itself.  It’s easy to praise those in our own circle of familiar faces and stories and pass over the gentle face of a foreigner who may, if we yielded ourselves, serve as a priest of the Most High.

Like us, the disciples got all caught up in trying to figure out who’s winning and who’s losing.  Mark says they came to Jesus and implored, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”  We love to watch the presidential debates and follow the latest polls to find out who’s on top, and vicariously, whether we’re among them.  But victory is not always what we expect it to be.  Jesus knew that.  He knew that what constitutes triumph in the eyes of the Lord is generally a far cry from what we usually pump our fists in the air over.  He said to his disciples, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”  This is entirely contrary to the values of our world – the values of our culture.  All around us we hear the echoes of a society terrified of weakness and hungry for triumph.  The media posts and newspapers celebrate prosperity, the television promotes acquisition, our conversations around the dinner table are about achievement, our debates over the back yard fence are about how we measure success, and everyone wants to win.

Can you imagine how Jesus would do in the presidential election?  We want a leader who tells us how great and powerful we are, and how prosperous our lives can be, not one who calls us to sacrifice and servanthood.  Jesus has got the wrong message for our time.  His poll numbers would fall through the basement.  There’s no way he could adhere to the focus group generated talking points.  Dadgie caught a great line from Jim Wallace in an issue of Sojourners Magazine a while back.  He pointedly noted that, “Jesus didn’t say, ‘What you have done for the middle class, you have done for me.’”⁴

So who is Jesus?  He is a priest according to the order of Melkizedek.  It is an order that every tired, over-stressed, seemingly insignificant one of us is summoned to enlist in.  It is the order of a woman who bleeds to save her daughter’s life.  It is the order of a man who scrawls a revolutionary message on a wall in the middle of the night.  It is the order of one who foregoes the shady deal, or declines the opportunity to knife his coworker in the back – who stands on principle and sacrifices an opportunity for advancement or loses his job.  It is the order of a teenager who loses favor with friends for refusing to do drugs, or join in taunting an unpopular kid, or cheat on a test.  It’s the order of a nation that puts human rights above trade imbalances and oil prices, or principles of compassion and cooperation above pure national interests.  It’s the order of every lowly one of us who finally grasps what Jesus was trying to teach and live out among us, every one who chooses the difficult road, who lives in the great and proud tradition of an ancient, Canaanite priest-king, an alien, who offered what he had, and reflected in a simple gesture Divinity itself.

¹ Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine, Signet Classics, 2005, p. 222.

² op cit. p. 223.

³ John-Thor Dahlburg, Associated Press, December 29, 1988.

⁴ Jim Wallace, How to Choose a President, Sojourners Magazine, November, 2012, p. 15.