Written on Our Hearts

Hebrews 10:16-25

March 29, 2013 (Good Friday) • Portage First UMC

Sometimes it’s hard to see the cross. In the Holy Land today, there are actually two sites claiming to be the location of Calvary. One has the weight of tradition behind it, and the claim that three crosses were found on the site. Today, that site is inside the Old City and is covered by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, an enormous church built on the foundations of a much older church originally commissioned by Emperor Constantine in the 300’s. It’s gaudy, busy, and crowded, but if you follow the way of the cross, the Via Dolorosa, you first go up a narrow flight of stairs to the supposed top of the Mount Calvary. It’s enclosed now, but you can stand in a long line and reach under the altar to touch the rock itself if you want. And while there’s an altar cross there, it’s really hard to get close to, or even to see very well. And, due to all the decorations, it’s hard to imagine what it must have looked like in the early first century.

The other location is called the Garden Tomb, and it was uncovered and purchased by British archaeologists in the late 1800’s. An empty tomb was discovered that seems to meet the criteria of the Gospel accounts, and not far from the tomb is a hill that, when viewed from the right angle, looks like a skull. Both words the Gospel use for the place, Golgotha and Calvary, mean “skull.” Today, this Skull Hill overlooks a bus station, but the garden itself has been maintained by British groundskeepers, and for many people, the Garden Tomb feels more authentic mainly because it’s not been built over. It feels more natural. But you still can’t see the cross. There’s only a skull-shaped hillside, a winepress, a cistern and an empty tomb (cf. Walker, The Weekend That Changed the World).

We’re used to being able to see the cross. Several years ago, while on a mission work trip, I visited the church of a very famous preacher. If I said his name, you’d recognize him, but I was bothered by the worship space. It looked like a convention center. No cross anywhere. And I was told that, because this preacher was regularly on television, they didn’t want to put up a cross because it might offend someone. Really? Well, I guess that is Biblical. Paul calls the cross a “stumbling block” (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:23). But most of our churches have crosses. In fact, back when I taught confirmation classes, one of the activities I would have them do is go into the sanctuary and count the crosses. They would get most of them, but inevitably they’d miss the crosses on the hymnals. We’re used to being surrounded by the cross, but isn’t it a strange symbol for our faith? No other faith has a tool of torture for its main symbol. We think very little of wearing a cross on a chain around our neck, and yet Nicky Gumbel, in one of the Alpha videos, says that doing that in the first century would have been like wearing an electric chair around your neck today. Originally, the cross was not a symbol in the Christian church; it was forbidden by early church leaders to be pictured in religious art. The cross was not common in such art until the fourth century, when everyone who had ever seen a live crucifixion had died. The cross wasn’t a nice, clean symbol. The cross was an instrument of torture and death. Today is only called “Good” Friday because of what that cross means. We know that if there is no meaning in Jesus’ death on the cross, then this is the very worst Friday of all.

The writer to the Hebrews is struggling with what, exactly, the cross of Jesus means. How did this symbol of torture become a representation of hope and salvation? It has everything to do, he declares, with the reason Jesus went to the cross. He’s spent several chapters reflecting on the old sacrificial system, the offering of animals and grains in order to attain forgiveness. It wasn’t that God needed their animals or their grain. It’s because the people’s sin needed to be dealt with, and it needed to be taken seriously. The people needed to know that sin costs something. When we break our relationship with God, something has to happen to make things right again. Giving what we have, especially the best of what we have, is the way God helped the people learn that there were more important things than what we own. We had to be willing to give our best, to put God first. But, Hebrews says, those sacrifices had to be annual events because “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (10:3-4). They weren’t willing sacrifices. And that’s why Jesus came. He lived, he taught, he showed us the way to live. And then he willingly gave up his life. He took on our sin. He who knew no sin took on our sin in order to make things right for us (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:21). The Son of God gave his life for you and for me. As the modern hymn says it, “On that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied” (Getty & Townend, “In Christ Alone”).

And he did everything necessary. We know that from the way Hebrews describes it. “When this priest [Jesus] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God” (10:12). Jesus sat down. Now, we may not think that’s all that significant. I mean, we sit a lot in our culture. Many of us, when we work, we sit. We sit at our desks. We sit in meetings. We sit as we answer the telephone. So what’s the big deal about sitting down? Hebrews is describing the work Jesus did, and in that day, you didn’t sit while you were working. You stood. The high priest stood as he went about his tasks. A common laborer stood as he did his work. You only sat down when you were finished (Wright, Hebrews for Everyone, pg. 110). By using that image, Hebrews is telling us Jesus did everything that needed to be done. His work is complete. His cry from the cross, that “it is finished,” wasn’t just a declaration of his death. It meant he had done everything necessary to give us hope and salvation and life. His work is done. And that means there’s nothing else you or I can do to earn salvation. There is no amount of good works, or kind words or anything you can do to be “good enough” to earn his salvation, to get enough “points” to get into heaven. Jesus has already done everything needed; we don’t have to add anything to it. We only have to accept his gift, his work on our behalf and let him write salvation on our hearts. The writer to the Hebrews recalls Jeremiah when he makes the promise that God’s covenant, God’s law will be written in our hearts and our minds (10:16).

But there is a response called for, though not in the way we usually think. You know how we are—someone gives us something, we feel this need to give back something of equal or greater value. But there is nothing we have that we can really offer Jesus. Instead, we’re called to respond this way: “Draw near to God” (10:22). Draw near to God. And to help us with that, the writer describes four ways we can do that. He says, “Draw near to God with a sincere heart.” Another way to translate that is a “true heart.” We think of the heart as being the seat of emotions, but in this image it’s the center of our being. It’s the place where life is sustained. Transformation, change, salvation begins in the heart and then is “pumped out” to the rest of our being. An “untrue” heart is someone who acts one way in church and another way when they’re around others. When we have a true heart, we become who we were meant to be, authentic in God’s sight and in everyone else’s. We all, likely, have times when our heart is less than true, and that’s why we need to invite Jesus to take up residence there. When he lives there, he’s busy cleaning it out, making our hearts more true each day, drawing us nearer to his Father.

“Draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings” (10:22). “Assurance” is a huge thing for we Methodists. Our founder, John Wesley, searched hard for that. He knew he was doing all the right things, but still he felt like he didn’t have any faith at all. And it wasn’t anything he did that finally gave him assurance. It was during a time of worship when he cracked the door of his heart open just enough for the Holy Spirit to get in. In that moment, he famously felt his heart “strangely warmed.” He spent the rest of his life preaching that you could have assurance that you believe, that you have faith. It’s not something we can really drum up on our own. It’s a gift we receive. One of Wesley’s favorite verses was this: “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Romans 8:16). We draw near to God so that we can hear the spirit whisper to us, reminding us who we are. We are children of God because of Christ’s finished work on the cross.

Because of that assurance, then, we can have “our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience” (10:22). Tom Wright says it better than I can: “Most people, most of the time, have something which hangs heavy on their hearts, something they’ve done or said which they wish they hadn’t, something which haunts them and makes them afraid of being found out. How wonderful to know that the sacrifice of Jesus, and the ‘sprinkled blood’ which results from it, has the power, as we accept it in faith and trust, to wash every stain from the conscience, so that we can come to God without any shadow falling across our relationship” (Wright 116). We can be cleansed, and we don’t have to worry about that “thing” anymore. Jesus took care of it on the cross. It no longer has to be a barrier between you and God. You can draw near to God and be cleansed from a guilty conscience.

And then, the writer says, we should have “our bodies washed with pure water” (10:22). This is a strange phrase. A lot of writers jump to the conclusion that this refers to baptism (cf. Wright 116), and it might, but it might more likely refer to all those ceremonial washings the Hebrew people did when they were preparing to come before God. The author has been talking about the way Jesus completes all the old rituals, and cleansing was a huge part of their lives up to this point. In fact, all over the Holy Land today you’ll find ruins of these ancient ritual baths, even just outside the Temple Mount, on the Southern Steps, there are several mikvah, places to ritually cleanse yourself. You had to do that before you went to worship. But in Jesus, we don’t have to go through the ritual cleansings. As we’ve just been reminded, he’s already done that for us. When we allow ourselves to be made whole by Jesus, we are then prepared to enter the presence of God. We do not need to fear. Jesus has prepared the way (cf. Guthrie, NIV Application Commentary: Hebrews, pg. 344).

Draw near to God. When we accept his work on the cross, when we allow him to live in our lives, his hope and his salvation is written on our hearts. So on this Good Friday, is the message of the cross “written on your heart”? The cross was a horrible, painful, awful death, one we wouldn’t wish on anyone, and yet out of that horror comes the most beautiful promise in all the world: we can draw near to God, we can know God. We can be forgiven. We can have his presence living in our lives each and every day. This cross, which the religious leaders meant as an ending in reality became a new beginning, a new hope, a new reality.

Frances Jane van Alstyne learned that. Very early in her life, when she was six weeks old, she contracted an illness that caused her to go blind, and despite her parents’ many attempts to help restore her sight, it was eventually concluded that her blindness was permanent. Still, that didn’t slow Frances down. She attended school at the New York Institution for the Blind, where they were required to attend morning and evening chapel services. In addition, Frances went often to the local Methodist church, and it was there, during a series of revival meetings, that she came to know the assurance of faith that only comes from embracing the cross and what Jesus did there.

Already, Frances was an accomplished poet, but as she fell more in love with Jesus, she began to write more poetry that could be sung in the churches. In fact, during her lifetime, she wrote some 8,000 hymns, many of which centered around the theme of Jesus’ work on the cross. She wrote so many hymns that publishers began to invent pen names—some 200 different names—in order to make it appear that the hymns were the work of different authors and not just one woman. But over time, she came to be well known, not by her married name, but by her maiden name: Fanny Crosby. One of Crosby’s most well-known hymns is a prayer that comes straight from Hebrews 10. She wrote it, as she did all of her hymns, in her head. She always had a hymn completely done before she had someone write it down. This song was written when a Cincinnati businessman, William Doane, gave her a melody he had written, and as she listened to it, she felt the words well up within her: “Jesus, keep me near the cross, there a precious fountain, free to all, a healing stream, flows from Calvary’s mountain. In the cross, in the cross, be my glory ever, till my raptured soul shall find rest beyond the river.” Fanny Crosby found her greatest hope in the cross. Its message was written on her heart.

So what about you? This Good Friday, will you draw near to God and find hope and healing and salvation in the shadow of that brutal and ugly cross? It’s why he came, and it’s why he still comes to each of us.