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Brothers and sisters:
Every high priest is taken from among men
and made their representative before God,
to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.
Jesus, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, is our great high priest. He was taken from among men insofar as he shared our human nature, and was made our representative before God. Paul would express a similar truth when he said that Jesus was the one mediator between God and man (see First Timothy 2:5). As high priest, Jesus himself offered the one sacrifice that was truly capable of taking away sin, his own body and blood. Previous sacrifices, in their regular recurrence, pointed toward the ongoing need for this true sacrifice, but could not themselves address the need, as the author of Hebrews goes on to explain in subsequent chapters (see Hebrews 10:3-4).
He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring,
for he himself is beset by weakness
Jesus is a priest who is sympathetic with our sinfulness and weakness, though he himself never sinned (see Hebrews 4:15). Though he did not sin, he was similarly tested. He did know what it is like to have the overwhelming weight of temptation crushing down upon him, as he experienced in the Garden of Gethsemane. This allowed him to have a compassion for us rooted in this shared experience of our human weakness. But because he himself never succumbed he was free in a way that no other priest was free to help those of us who did. He stood in solid ground and could therefore rescue those of us who were drowning.
No one takes this honor upon himself
but only when called by God,
just as Aaron was.
Jesus came not to do his own will but the will of him by whom he was sent (see John 6:38). He was called to the role of high priest by the Father when accepted his Father's plan to be born into our world as both priest and sacrifice for sin (see John 3:16). As the Father's true Son Jesus was uniquely situated to be able to reunite sinful humans with the utterly holy and transcendent God. It was not one more feeble and tainted attempt to reach out to God only by man alone and unaided. Rather, in Jesus, God himself reached out from within humanity back to union with God. And the Father did not hesitate to reach out to embrace his only begotten Son, including our humanity that Jesus had joined to himself.
In the days when he was in the Flesh,
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to the one who was able to save him from death,
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
As our high priest Jesus offered, not some animal flesh or blood, but his own obedience, to the point of giving his own life for our sakes. By doing so he reshaped and refashioned our warped and twisted humanity back to what it was meant to be. He made it once again capable of life giving love, enabling it to share by that love in the life of God himself.
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
Eternal salvation was made possible by Jesus, our great high priest. He offered himself as a perfect offering to the Father, and together with that offering, all those who would allow themselves to be united to him. This offering now stands forever, purifying our own meager offerings, making us more and more able to join our own offerings to his, our own obedience to his perfect obedience. The true Son of God lived a life of perfect fidelity to the Father and by his priesthood he enables us to share in that life as sons and daughters who are obedient and even holy. Let us enter into that reality by offering ourselves to Jesus so that he can offer both himself and us, transformed, to the Father.
Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?
As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast.
Jesus is the bridegroom because in his incarnation he reunites heaven and earth, the human and the divine. We, his Church, are the bride, destined for the greatest wedding feast imaginable. It is such a completely new reality that our old paradigms are insufficient to contain it. We need new wineskins for this new wine. We can't simply use it as a patch on our old lives. But we ought not underestimate the potential of this promise. It represents joy and the Holy Spirit. Let us learn to trust the bridegroom as he perfects us and leads us to the fullness of the feast.
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