My flesh and blood

You on earth both priest and victim

In the eucharistic feast. William Chatterton Dix

 

Read Hebrews 2:9—18

When I dress Jesus as the high priest in the high priest’s regalia (as I imagine it) I can distance Jesus from me. Or when I think of him as Son of God, or as God the Son, I may do that again, distance him. (I’m speaking of the working of my own mind here.) Then I will hail him as Lord, lofty and remote, perhaps. I hope he even then will still help me. But Jesus dressed himself in my flesh and blood. He, I have to believe, subjected himself to my temptations. The attitudes that worked their way to the surface and issued in what I did today: I have to believe that he dressed himself in them. What I would conceal from him, that he has made his own. It has come to light in him. It became his suffering. He took it to its conclusion. He took it into his death. I achieve nothing that counts spiritually by hiding any of this day from him.

 

Lord Jesus, you are my great high priest. You are Son of God. You are God the Son. And you are clothed in my flesh and blood. You are familiar with my day, this day, and the ways I responded to what came to me. You know my reactions. My behaviour patterns. Not from the outside looking in: you clothed yourself in all my frustrating, dopey — did I almost say ‘unforgivable,’ or should I say ‘subhuman?’ — thought and action. You are the one who humbled yourself and became obedient unto death.[1] Now I am humbled. As you yielded to death, so I yield to you, for death to what needs to die, and for the renewal of my life.

[1] Philippians 2:8