The Family of All Farmers
The Reformation and our relationship to God
For the law appoints as high priests humans, who are subject to weakness, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever.
Hebrews 7:28
Christ Our Mediator
Today is Reformation Sunday in Protestant land, and our readings have brought us to a concept important to many of the Reformers: Christ as our sole Mediator.
The Book of Hebrews is a great and unique text. While it’s housed in the canon with the epistles, we now know it was probably originally a sermon by an anonymous preacher in the first decades of the church. It’s brilliant. For many, it’s also a bit impenetrable. I want to try and make it more relatable.
An idea that comes up throughout Hebrews is talking about Jesus’ role as our great “high priest”:
We have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God…Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness.
Hebrews 4:14, 16
Jesus as Great High Priest is nested within Christ as our Mediator (he’s also the head of the church, prophet, king, and more). This was a plank of why most Protestant denominations reconceived Church leadership and the Catholic priesthood.12 We all know this part of the Reformation history: you had all these corrupt priests doing bad things and therefore abusing the role of mediator, or our go-between us and God. And so Protestants realized there was something not right about this. It wasn’t just the corruption, but how the corruption pointed to a bigger problem of how we’re relating to God in the Church: we are using other sinners as mediators, and this gives them way too much power. And when they reread Scripture with a Reformer’s eye, they took an examination at readings like the Book of Hebrews and started thinking that things had gone terribly wrong. And so this is also why we Protestants don’t have saints to intercess for us, because Christ is our one Mediator (1 Tim 2:5). He’s the only priest we need.3
But if we want to dig into this, it does get a bit confusing with other Protestant ideas important to us, like “the priesthood of all believers.” So wait, we’re all priests…but we actually have one high priest…but (in most Protestant denominations) we don’t actually have anyone called priest? Yeah, it’s confusing! And it also might seem like a really distant, technical, historical thing.
So, I want to try to make the idea of Christ as Our Mediator something we can feel more in our hearts. First, I want to talk more about mediators in general, then why we need a mediator with God, then why Jesus, and how this all transforms our relationship with God.
Priests and Other Varieties of Mediators
Let’s start with a way too basic refresher on the role of the high priest in Judaism in Jesus’ time.4 Like all priests, the high priest had to be a descendant of Aaron, a Levite, part of a special bloodline. This role comes about because as Israel develops, they begin to understand the gap between them as sinners and the Almighty God to be so great that they couldn’t just approach God willy-nilly, especially since they kept sinning. So to atone for Israel’s sins, the high priest would regularly offer blood sacrifices to restore and renew their relationship with God. Thus, they helped mediate the relationship with God for the rest of the people.
That’s just one type of holy mediator. The prophets of Israel would also help renew their relationship with God, but instead of atoning for our sins, they would directly interface with God to receive new revelations on behalf of God for the rest of the people. We saw with Mt. Sinai and Moses that trying to relate directly to God was straight up hazardous. Then in turn, in receiving the Law, the Law becomes another kind of non-personal mediator, something that modulates and forms our relationship with God.
But what is that word, “mediator,” at its core?
In his podcast, Tim Mackie helps explain how actually, we have mediators all over the place, using the example of a mechanic.5 You drive a car, and it has an engine inside which is totally unexplainable, just way too complex for the average person to grasp. But you try to drive it, and you know it’s broken. So you take it to the temple for cars we call a “garage,” and the mechanic makes it whole, almost like a “car priest.” And so the mechanic is a helpful mediator between us and the car.
In other words, a mediator is someone qualified to help us relate to some really complex thing we can’t possibly understand. In this lens, there are kinds of different mediators in our world, and all kinds of priests: a coach or a doctor is like a priest between you and your body; a political analyst might help you relate to what is a crazy unexplainable election cycle; a lawyer is someone between you and this big, unexplainable, scary system we call “the law” that we should approach by ourselves with fear and trembling.
So we see how mediators are really useful. We could see how it’d be bad to not have one in the spiritual realm. Have you considered God’s servant Job? There’s no mediator in that story, at least not on his side; he doesn’t have Jesus as his advocate, just Satan’s debut as a prosecutorial adversary. Job tries to talk to God directly, and while God has mercy on him in the end, God also says man, you just really can’t understand me.
But maybe this all still feels too technical or distant. I think there’s something more near and dear to us here.
How do we relate?
Maybe we can start to see why we might need some kind of mediator between us and God. We do want to have a relationship with God, but there are so many ways to mess it up. Not many people do blood sacrifices anymore, but there are lots of other ways we try to earn our reconciliation and salvation and wholeness with God. And we can’t.
Part of this is because of the nature of sin. Sin creates this rip, this gap, this space between us and God. It’s not just a “God-shaped hole” for people who don’t believe; all Christians have a sin-shaped hole between us and God. And in fact, it is because of our sin that we often want to close the gap of sin through more sin: we feel the gap between God’s power and ours, so we seek more power, or God’s abundance and our limitations, so we engage in greed, and so on. Ultimately, none of these work to actually repair the gap created by sin, because the gap is utterly cosmic in nature. While we can improve on many of our human problems, this one is beyond us.
And this is actually a really terrible problem. If we are sinners, and we only know imperfection, we only know brokenness, we only know finitude, how can we know God? We know our justice is partial if it exists at all, while God is justice…how can we possibly relate to perfect justice? When we try to relate by ourselves, it’s actually dangerous for us if Moses, Aaron’s sons, or a host of other fools can teach us anything about what it means to try and get too close to God. And this isn’t just an Old Testament problem, but it’s a problem today when people want to relate to the rawly spiritual through the latest guru, practice, drug, or empty promise of transcendence. Or take the garden-variety attitude that is an unfortunate logical consequence of Protestantism: “I don’t need anything between me and God, I can have direct access to him.”
So we do need a mediator. But again, the Reformation happened in part because priestly mediators are really imperfect, and sometimes deeply corrupt, like a mechanic who will rip you off because they know you have to trust them. And so while the priest system was a gift from God for a time, says the preacher of Hebrews, this was just a foreshadowing of what would be made perfect in Jesus Christ. In him, there was a new priest, a new mediator, a new relationship builder. And he’s not a messed up human, but he still knows what it’s like to be us, who still cries with us and hurts for us, but unlike us in our self-preserving instincts, gives up his life for us. And not only is he God’s son, he is an imprint of God’s character, he shows us what God is like. He shows us that God is self-giving, self-sacrificing Love, not distant, but right here. Through Jesus Christ, we see that despite the huge gap between us, God desperately wants to have a relationship with us.
So why else and how else is Jesus the perfect high priest? Scripture gives us many reasons, but the cross is the most important one. In spilling his own blood, the blood of the Lamb and the blood of God, that big, impossible-to-fix gap between us and God was filled. The distance was collapsed. In the Garden, we humans became self-conscious and separated from God, and the gulf of humanity could only be bridged by humanity, and the gap between God could only be bridged by God. So God became a human bridge himself.
As John Calvin said, “It was especially necessary [that] he who was to be our Redeemer should be truly God and man. It was his to swallow up death: who but Life could do so? It was his to conquer sin: who could do so save Righteousness itself? It was his to put to flight the powers of the air and the world: who could do so but the mighty power superior to both? But who possesses life and righteousness, and the dominion and government of heaven, but God alone? Therefore, God, in his infinite mercy, having determined to redeem us, became himself our Redeemer in the person of his only begotten Son.”6
The Family of All Farmers
What we see through Jesus is God revealing a new depth of his relationship with us. Whether it was the Law or through our sin, our default seems to be to relate to God through transactions. We want to buy a relationship. But that is not love, and that’s not the heart of God’s relationship with us.
God’s relationship with us is both above and beside, a shared Father with his Son, a Mediator who is our brother. In the eternal song of the Trinity, we have a relationship with Jesus, who points us towards a relationship with God the Father, with the Holy Spirit in turn helping us have a relationship with Jesus when we get lost. It’s a flowing relationship, a living family. As Hebrews 2:11 says, “For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason, Jesus is not ashamed to call [us] brothers and sisters.”
Before I close, I want to return to the different kinds of mediators. One kind that is both close to heart in the Bible and close to heart in Vermont is the great high priest of the earth known as the farmer. Once upon a time, nearly all humans were farmers. Today, we still have them as people who relate to creation for the rest of us who didn’t grow up on the farm and have no idea how. If my church relied on me for their crops, we’d all go hungry. But like a good mediator, farmers have the knowledge and ability to relate to something so wonderful and complex that most of us can’t. In doing so, they nourish us.
Clearly, while we have one sole Mediator, we still have a need for lots of other little mediators. And so, as Protestant Christians, when we hear that phrase “the priesthood of all believers,” we might best think of it as something like “the family of all farmers” (in fact, just one or two generations removed in my congregation, the majority of members were from families where everyone farmed).
In this family of faith, everyone is equipped to be a farmer, not to the earth as dirt and soil, but to the world as made through Jesus Christ, the Word from the beginning, the fabric of creation. It’s not just pastors who are farmers; everyone can relate to Jesus, called to help steward Jesus’ message and help the rest of the world relate to him by accepting his invitation to let him live in us.
In this family, what matters is not our bloodline or nation but simply whether we know, love, and follow Jesus or not. In this family, we don’t look out just for our family, but treat everyone like they’re family. In this family, the “priesthood of all believers” with the same great Mediator, everybody’s a priest, so nobody’s a priest, because we only have one true priest. His perfect love has bridged the gulf, collapsed the gap, and set us free.
Full warning, for the sake of time I’m glossing over complicated history with some generalizations about the Reformation in this piece.
Another full warning, I know Catholic theology is not being terribly steelmanned in this piece, I am simply offering the general Reformed view.
See note 1 re:generalizations; Anglicans are one branch of Protestantism that held onto the explicit priest role.
Okay, so we’re not just flattening Catholicism a bit, but also historical Judaism…at least this is continuing another Protestant tradition.
Thanks to Tim’s Hebrews series in “Exploring My Strange Bible” for the background for this piece.
Institutes, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.iv.xiii.html.