The Cast of the Christmas Story: People’s Chief Priest & Teachers of the Law

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Mark Holland:

The Cast of the Christmas Story Series is sponsored by World Concern and the Global Gift Guide. Find out more at Globalgiftguide.org

Speaker 1:

The Cast of the Christmas Story.

Mark Holland:

And we continue in The Cast of the Christmas Story interviewing different pastors, their thoughts on different people that we read about in the Bible, and the beginnings of Jesus’ life. And today to help us with the High Priest, that part of the cast, we have Pastor Tim White of Washington Cathedral in Redmond. Hi Pastor Tim.

Tim White:

Hi Mark. How are you?

Mark Holland:

Really good. Good To see you again. Haven’t seen you in a while and you came in and you were kind of infirmed a little bit. What’s been going on with you? You said you had some terrible health concerns.

Tim White:

Yeah, I’ve had some health challenges in the last part of my ministry. I’ve been here 40 years now in this city, and I had a massive pulmonary embolism when I was flying back from Kenya.

Mark Holland:

Oh.

Tim White:

It was like twenty-hour flight or something and it was really God’s providence too. I could see him even working in all this, because I went right to the hospital to call on a lady and her husband had been a physician in the community for a long time and she was getting ready to pass away and she was diagnosed with a massive pulmonary embolism.

Mark Holland:

Oh boy.

Tim White:

And I was feeling terrible. I thought it was just jet lag, but they went through all the symptoms and I qualified for every symptom.

Mark Holland:

Oh boy.

Tim White:

So, I always thought with all the time I spent in the hospitals that some time if something happened to me, there’s a good chance I’d be at the hospital and I was.

Mark Holland:

Oh.

Tim White:

So that helped to save my life and they put me right in the hospital.

Mark Holland:

And you said you almost passed away from this.

Tim White:

Yeah.

Mark Holland:

Pretty close.

Tim White:

Yeah. I could well have. It was a massive pulmonary embolism so.

Mark Holland:

But you’re actually in the hospital when it was diagnosed, not knowing…

Tim White:

Yeah. I was…

Mark Holland:

… That that was a problem?

Tim White:

… In the hospital visiting someone with a massive pulmonary embolism.

Mark Holland:

Oh wow. Looks… Amazing how that works.

Tim White:

So, God was so good and he took care of me and had wonderful care in Evergreen Hospital there. And then following that, I had a number of infections with the MRSA, the flesh eating bacteria.

Mark Holland:

Oh boy. And this was during COVID too?

Tim White:

Yeah, it was quite a while. I’ve had eight that… And seven surgeries in one leg and two in the other leg.

Mark Holland:

Oh boy.

Tim White:

So it was quite a challenge, but God was so good during all of it. I ran into Christian nurses there at Evergreen who would pray for me, Christian doctor who prayed with my wife and I, because it’s very tear filled, emotion filled time. But God was just good. He just took care of us the whole time.,

Mark Holland:

God bless you. Long time at Washington Cathedral. I think the last time I was there was for a wedding back in the mid nineties. So I know you have a beautiful facility there. Beautiful church in Redmond and 40 years of serving the community continuing to serve. Now you’re going to be stepping down from full-time service here in the spring, I guess.

Tim White:

Yes, in March, pastor Mark Nisimbi is going to become the lead pastor and I’ll serve with him for a year and a half after that, just helping out as an associate before I officially retire.

Mark Holland:

Okay. And we’ve had Pastor Mark on with our Easter series, I believe. Yes, yes. Well, we’re into the Christmas season and hearing about different characters in the Christmas story. And you got assigned someone just called the High Priest and there’s not much known about this person, but you’re going to be able to pull out some ideas here about the High Priest. We don’t even know what his name was.

Tim White:

Yeah, we don’t because we only have two sources as far as a lot of the names in the Christmas story. One is Josephus and the other one is the New Testament. So we know some high Priest Caiaphas that came along later in-

Mark Holland:

The end of Jesus’ life.

Tim White:

At the end of Jesus’ life, he led the trial of Jesus. We know about his father-in-law, Annas. That was a high Priest earlier we know of – he mentions one high Priest who was only there for one year, a political appointment.

But we do know the position. It started with Aaron whenever on the Mount Sinai, Moses was getting the 10 Commandments. And he came back and the people of Israel had made a calf golden calf to worship. And they were having this horrible party, I guess you’d call it.

Mark Holland:

Right.

Tim White:

And so the repentance came by appointing Aaron as the high Priest who would go in the tabernacle, would go beyond into the, in a place where only one person could go to represent everyone else. Of course they tied a rope around him in case he died a heart attack.

Mark Holland:

Right.

Tim White:

Not an inspirational way to lead a worship service.

Mark Holland:

Right.

Tim White:

But…

Mark Holland:

Serious business back then.

Tim White:

Yeah, but atonement was serious and it just means that sin pays a price. And the people of Israel didn’t feel like they could go to God. And what a revolution for the high Priest to be there whenever Jesus comes to establish that relationship with God. Not just the religion, but the relationship with God.

Mark Holland:

So this was a long line up of people who fulfilled that role. So this high Priest was someone that Mary and Joseph were dealing with then? Or I can’t remember the context in which he is mentioned.

Tim White:

Yeah, we don’t know if they were dealing with him. We know they went to the temple after Christmas sometime to present Jesus, and what a blessed moment that was when Simeon was there.

Mark Holland:

Do we know about Simeon?

Tim White:

He’d been waiting his whole life to see Jesus. And so they were at the temple. We just don’t know the details of their relationship. But he was a very important person. It’d be like the Governor or the Pope or something like that because he was the head, the official head of the Jewish religion there, of the combined Sadducees of Pharisees that were in the-

Mark Holland:

But there’s nothing about this particular high Priest that made him a scoundrel or anything. He seemed to be a kind of neutral figure, just a figure of religious structure.

Tim White:

We could, scholars project about that because it was a very political time. And a lot of people don’t realize how close this was to the big revolution that took place between Brutus and Augustus or Octavius and Mark Antony and the war that took place

Mark Holland:

Right. That was all going on at the same time.

Tim White:

Yeah no, a lot of it was in this region. And so it was very a political difficult appointment to be. Then have inherited, be a non jew [inaudible 00:06:24] that’s ruling. It was just very, you had to have your blood run hot or whatever to be able to handle all the intrigue that was going on. Well,

Mark Holland:

You said too that this high priest probably was brought in as a consultant to Herod about these Magi who came through.

Tim White:

He could have yeah.

Mark Holland:

Who were coming into, although it doesn’t say that in the Bible,

Tim White:

Yeah.

Mark Holland:

But it’s very possible that he was confirming that what they were saying about Jesus and their following, his star,

Tim White:

And the prophecy yeah. so he could well have been aware of all the prophecy being fulfilled at that time, maybe felt a little out of place because he didn’t know what was going on.

Mark Holland:

Nobody told him.

Tim White:

Yeah, and his basic job was to go into the holy of Holies. And now Jesus was going to become the high priest. And so anybody-

Mark Holland:

Anybody who was in the know, knew who Jesus was. When you start talking about Messiah that this is a pretty important thing.

Tim White:

They knew he was coming. They knew the Messiah was coming. But yeah, the fact that Jesus was going to take his place, this little baby, and you wonder about the jealousy must’ve felt because of the political ambition he had there. Or was he someone that was just sincere and very, very confused? Caiaphas can be argued that way because he tore his clothes off practically whenever Jesus said that he was the Messiah.

Mark Holland:

Yeah, Yeah. He wanted the purity of the faith and he thought Jesus was a blasphemer.

Tim White:

Yeah. And so this high priest might’ve been going through that. But the intriguing thing to me is that, about this whole series is about everyone knows where they were at Christmas. They’re in cotton airport at the home or grandpa and grandma’s or someplace. And here we have all these people that were in different locations at Christmas, and he was probably at the temple, which is only eight miles from Bethlehem, and Bethlehem is very close to the herodium that Herod could have been up there and hearing the baby cry or something. I sat in that very spot and watched the shepherds or their shepherds right up in those fields. It was so intriguing because they don’t drive the sheep, they lead the sheep. There was a little boy just leading this big herd and they just follow him everywhere he went. And in this blissful setting of the hills right there close to Bethlehem and nothing like the Palestinian city today, that’s so controversial and there’s so much violence but overcrowded at the time. And there he was from the temple and his replacement was born.

Mark Holland:

Yeah, that must’ve made him feel a little uncomfortable to say the least.

Tim White:

Maybe if he was fully aware.

Mark Holland:

So what are some things that we can apply to our own life today about this idea of the high priest? What do you think?

Tim White:

I think something that all of us wrestle with, I know I do as – I’m a third generation pastor. My grandfather was a Methodist pastor for fifty-five years. My dad was a community church pastor for sixty-some years, and I’m only going to serve fifty-two years or whatever. So I’m,

Mark Holland:

That’s a long time though.

Tim White:

But it was a religious thing to do. Everyone thought ever since I was a kid that I was going to be a pastor. So I was determined not to be that. And then actually when God cut a hold of me and I became a pastor, it was part of the Jesus people movement, like the Jesus revolution and what a controversy that was to move from just someone that’s so religious to being opening their arms to everyone. Now the veil is written to and hippies are going to come to church and the homeless.

Mark Holland:

You can add all of that.

Tim White:

And all that yeah. But it’s always been a challenge to me being caught in the role of a religious person. Not that there’s not good things to say about religion, but to try to keep it so I hadn’t lost my first love, which happens to so many pastors. And that’s a challenge at Christmas because for so many of us, Christmas is-

Mark Holland:

So busy.

Tim White:

So busy, but it’s so romantic when you go to the Midnight Communion or you go to the Christmas service or you read the story with your family around the tree, you’re touched by something that goes way beyond just the Christian religion. And it’s a Jewish and Christian story and it’s a humanity story. And for us to remember, and that’s the miracle that often happens, is we remember, oh yeah, this is about me and Jesus. This is about a baby that wasn’t hiding away in the holy of Holiness with a rope tied around him.

It’s about a baby that invited common people to come to him and about Jesus that the children loved and he was the friend of sinners. And it just, hopefully, and I think it just the way God designed it, at least in my life, it’s always been a breakthrough to come back to that personal relationship that we have.

And here’s the high priest, the highest formal religion person. A very powerful job, very political job.

Mark Holland:

Kind of like the Pope.

Tim White:

Yeah, kind of like the Pope. And he’s right there within earshot. Eight miles. I mean, sound travels a lot in Israel because there is so much rock there and everything, and marble and the construction, that perhaps he could even heard the baby cry.

And at the same time, Herod listening from the Herodium and the shepherds and everyone else, to me it’s just an opportunity for every one of us to rededicate our life to Jesus Christ and to feel Christmas personally, not just as many things to do and not just something that’s a religious formality that we get together with a family and we go to church. But it’s something that we personally experienced, this repentance and renewal of our first love with Jesus Christ, us being his followers, that we matter to him and have a relationship with him.

Mark Holland:

Some of the heart of Pastor Tim, white of Washington, Cathedral and Redmond. Pastor, why don’t you pray for those people listening to this, maybe pastors in particular, people who work in church, kind of getting caught up in all of the programs and things that are going on this time of year, but to get back to our first love, why don’t you pray for those people?

Tim White:

Lord Jesus, we thank you so much for Christmas and we thank you for what you do in each of our hearts. We think about the world and how much the world needs Christmas, especially this year. We think about all those that need to be drawn into a personal, encouraging, and powerful relationship with you where you’re our Lord and you’re our Savior. God, I ask that as pastors or other people that are very involved in doing good works and doing things that we could be renewed to, that our love in you would not just be the religious, but it’d be something very deeply personal as we see the baby and we remember you and all it meant for you to be born on Christmas into our hearts. And so God, I pray for anyone that would want to repent and make this a brand new moment with you as the Lord of their life. Amen.

Mark Holland:

Amen.

The cast of the Christmas story series is sponsored by World Concern. You can give a gift with a lifetime of impact. Your gift will meet the critical need of a child or family living in poverty. You can give a goat or one of forty-three other life-changing gifts today through the World Concern Global gift guide. Give life-changing gifts that work together to transform the lives of moms, dads, and children in the world’s poorest places. You can even select a meaningful gift in honor of a friend or loved one. Each gift transforms the life of someone in poverty. Go to Globalgiftguide.org again that’s Globalgiftguide.org.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for joining us for the cast of the Christmas story. A series on Purposely Equipped.

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