¹⁵ For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.

As the musical tension builds, and the climax arrives with its release and exaltation in the chorus, so the writer with a flair of crescendo marches toward the exaltation of Christ. Yes, He is better than the angels, better than Moses, and better than the Law. And now, He is depicted as better than the Levitical priesthood.

Under the Mosaic Law, which governed all of Israel’s affairs nationally and individually, the priesthood was created to provide a stop gap remedy for the problem uncovered by that very Law. You see, the Law was given to show God’s people that He is holy and they are not. That presents a problem for relating to the One who created us. But the Law also provided the priesthood, so that people had something to do about their unholiness. That solution was to make amends with God through a system of sacrifices. That was, as mentioned earlier, a temporary rather than a permanent solution. If it were permanent, then the Day of Atonement would only have needed to be observed once! But that was not the case.

Christ is considered by the writer to be a high priest, but different than and superior to the Levitical high priests. Unlike them, Christ can actually sympathize with us mere humans who fall short of the Law’s righteous, holy standards. We have a propensity toward, a weakness for coming up short. The subtle inference speaks of the human high priests’ detached arrogance and the people’s tendency to enshrine religious advancement through legalistic systems. Those human priests, contrary to appearance were, in fact, human, and humility should normally lead to self-awareness of one’s own failures. But sympathy finds little room in the practice of human priests. Not so with Christ.

With Christ, God divinely acknowledges the reality and seriousness of temptation as part of the human experience. In fact, as part of His human “learning obedience” (Heb 5:8) in becoming human, Jesus felt temptation to the max. He was “tempted in all things as we are …” So, His superiority is this: while the Levitical priests were sinful, but could not (or would not) sympathize with an unholy people needing to find a solution to their problem of sin, Christ, who was not sinful, entered fully into and embraced the human experience of temptations, precisely so that He could sympathize with us in our weakness. He joins us in our struggle against temptations.