another passed over ditty

Hebrews 7
Melchizedek is a fascinating, mysterious figure, a priest, who fits somewhere outside of expectation and protocol. We know very little details about his life, but the author of Hebrews uses him as an archetype for Christ’s role as high priest. Either author’s contemporaries were more familiar with Melchizedek than modern Bible readers, and a reference to him functioned as a reference to Abraham Lincoln in our culture, or, the author is using the mystery enshrouding Melchizedek as a symbol of how little we know about Jesus. Probably, the author is employing both to derive the dialectic necessary to talk about Jesus, the Son of God and the Son of Man, and his role as mediator between God and humanity.
Melchizedek and Jesus represent a refreshing, key point in theology: God is God. God did set up protocol for humans, but God, himself, is not bound to it. (Likewise, it’s humorous that we refer to the miracles of Jesus—they aren’t miracles if he is God.) God reveals a lot about himself in the Scriptures; story after story we learn that God is good, powerful and personal, that he loves justice, mercy and obedience, and abhors injustice and idolatry. He reveals Jesus to be his son and the one who rescues us from ourselves and sin. In the story of Melchizedek, there is protocol for priests to be in Aaron’s line, but there is room for an outlier; God uses an oath in lieu of the covenant. But even the outliers function as revelation of who God is. God is holy and other.
The early church referred to thinking about all that we don’t know about God as negative theology (what God has revealed about himself is positive theology). Gregory of Nyssa preached, “And yet, as the great John says: ‘No one has seen God at any time.’ And the sublime mind of Paul confirms this opinion when he says that ‘no one has seen or can see God’. God is the slippery steep crag which yields no footholds for our imagination. Moses too, in his teaching, declares that God is so inaccessible that our mind cannot approach him.”
Jesus is far more than any analogy we can draw. Priestly talk is a reminder of the absolute holiness of God… and our sin. We aren’t worthy of approaching God, but Jesus came in order to advocate for us.