High priest discussion hasn’t stopped. The reminder here is that it is God who has chosen for the intercession that a high priest makes, first by man and sacrifice and then by Jesus and sacrifice. The human high priest sympathizes with the sin of those around him because he himself is guilty as well, he shares in their weakness. Jesus, although similarly appointed by the Father for the work of the sacrifice, was never guilty. His sympathy extends from having resisted temptation instead of having succumbed to it.
The marked drama of Jesus’ humility abounds here. At least the human high priest was a poor sap without a high horse who sympathized with us because he was one of us. Jesus voluntary becomes one of us and resists the temptations we so often fail at and yet looks at us with the same kind, forgiving eyes as the man who has been there and failed. He wasn’t in there sacrificing anyway because of his failures, he does it exclusively for ours. The only benefit to him is the expression of love for his people. Further, he is the sacrifice! He took every element of reconciliation between God and man and put it upon himself.
On Melchizedek, the reference is from Psalm 110 and what’s interesting here is that the vibe of that Psalm is quite a bit different than the humble, sympathetic high priest we’ve been hearing about. In fact, it’s starts with “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” There is a starkness between the justice of God and the mercy that he extends to his people. The positioning of this text in Hebrews is a little tricky because the author is trying to praise Jesus as the example of what the perfect high priest would do as a man. We read his Son of God identity into it and it gets confusing because we think, “of course he is reverent” and “was he not obedient before?”. But that isn’t the point. The writer is purposefully drawing comparisons between the office of high priest up to this point and how Jesus functions in that role in his human form and how that can be powerful enough to be a permanent means of reconciliation because he was more than man.
The writer anticipates this conversation might be difficult to follow but attributes it to the shallowness of the Hebrews understanding. Basically, they never moved beyond very basic understanding of what God was up to, even as He has revealed more to them. This is very much a potential issue for us. We struggle with parts like this in Hebrews because we have often taken in the Bible with a very limited context, subject to our own perspectives only, and without a sense of the bigger picture. If we do that, we miss out on part of God’s cool story and our part in it. We play a role in what God is up to, the establishing and growth of His Kingdom, and a right understanding of that bigger picture puts our work within that picture into a motivating perspective.