Christchurch Parish News, November 2014
A reflection on Hebrews 12:18-24
We often talk of the Christian faith as being a journey. But what do we do on that journey when we start to feel weary or begin to lose heart? What happens when our knees start to ache and our hands droop by our sides with discouragement?
The letter to the Hebrews is addressed to people experiencing exactly such emotions of despondency and despair. It was written about 40 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection but before the ransacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD. Its original readership would have been a group of Jewish Christians, who were most likely living in a large city, perhaps even Rome. As a letter it is full of encouragement but also many warnings. It encourages by reminding its readers of all that Jesus has done, with an especial focus on his atoning death on the cross. But it also warns its readers against turning away from Jesus now that he has ascended to the righthand of God.
It is not, however, a book of the Bible that I suspect many of us would automatically turn to when in need of encouragement. Most of us would be more likely to turn to one of the gospel accounts, or one of Paul’s letters, perhaps, like his letter to the Christians in Philippi. Why is that? Well, I’ve already hinted at what might be the answer. I would suggest that the main reason is that the letter was written with a 1st century Jewish Christian readership in mind and that this, to state the obvious, is not our context today. For example, the passage that is appointed to be read as the New Testament reading at the Dedication Sunday Eucharist, Hebrews 12:18-24, is taken from the highpoint of the letter where the writer draws all the rhetorical threads together, using lots of resonant symbol and imagery, to drive home his one key theological point.
In the passage in question, he contrasts two mountains: Mt Sinai and Mt Zion. As you’ll recall, the former is the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments amidst much drama with the Israelites looking up to the mountain and seeing it engulfed in blazing fire, darkness and tempest. Unsurprisingly, this mountain was approached with great trepidation, and everyone was fearful of even touching it, for here the God of Israel was present in all God’s awesomeness, and to be in the presence of God was understood as a fearsome thing: ‘so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear’”. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews reminds his readers of this and paints a terrifying picture.
Then in verse 22, it all changes. Mt Zion, by contrast, is presented as a scene of joyful partying. The angels are rocking out! (OK, it says ‘festal gathering’ but you get the idea.) Mt Zion stands at the heart of Jerusalem, and the writer steps from there to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God, where in addition to the innumerable angels, there is the church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and the spirits of all the righteous made perfect. Why does the writer of the letter contrast these two mountains? The reason why is that he is encouraging his readers by saying that it is this mountain, Mt Zion, that you are approaching (and bear in mind that the Greek word that’s used for ‘approach’ here has the specific nuance of approaching spiritually) and not Mt Sinai. Mt Zion is a place of joy and hope, not one of fear and terror.
As they are both places which depict the presence of God, what is the difference between the two? The answer is simple. At the heart of the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God, rather than the temple, which is what a first century Jew would be expecting to find as the fulfilment and foretaste of heaven on earth, instead stands Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. Put simply, Jesus is the game-changer. It is Jesus who shifts the paradigm, who makes all the difference between these two symbolic mountains, who has sanctified the letter’s readers by his blood, thereby enabling them to approach the throne of the living God not in a spirit of fear but of joy. This is your true context, the writer is telling his readers. This is the journey that you are actually on. And it is a journey where you approach God in a way which has only been made possible by Jesus’ life, his death and his resurrection. So don’t you forget it!
All of which, we would want to give our hearty assent to, I’m sure, or at least feel that we should want to give our hearty assent to. So returning to my earlier question, why is the letter to the Hebrews not such a popular book of the Bible for many of us these days? I think there are several reasons, but one of them is that as I’ve indicated our context is so very different. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews is concerned that his readers will lose sight of the definitive role played by Jesus and return to understanding and approaching God as they did before, a return to the old paradigm, to a way shaped by their tradition, which would have had three key elements, Exodus, the giving of the Law at Mt Sinai and the Exile in Babylon. Whilst a minority of Jews had come to understand Jesus to be the fulfilment of God’s purposes and Israel’s vocation, and thereby had had their understanding of the God of Israel turned upside down in so many ways, and hence became what we now retrospectively refer to as Jewish Christians, nonetheless the majority of the Jews at the time did not see or understand Jesus in this way; they did not believe Jesus to be the Messiah. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews is deeply concerned that his readers, tired on their pilgrimage of faith, are going to return to their former understanding and approach to God. Another way of putting it would be to say that there are two “God stories” on offer, with two different understandings of how and on what basis we might approach God: one where Jesus is pivotal to the story and the other where he doesn’t even make an appearance. So the two questions facing the original Jewish Christian readers were: which story has shaped your understanding of God; and are you still living by that story or are you drifting away from it and returning to the story you used to live by?
It is this crucial role played by story that I want to concentrate on for a moment. Our context, as I have pointed out, is not the same in that the choice of stories on offer in our culture is different. Unless you are convert to Christianity from Judaism, the story that shaped your worldview prior to your becoming a Christian will not be one self-consciously rooted in the Old Testament. So what would it be? What are the stories that used to shape your worldview prior to your choosing to start coming to church, or coming back to church? Some of us will have been brought up as Christians, yes. Many of us, on the other hand, won’t have been brought up in an overtly religious context at all. Either way, I suspect that for most of us, the stories that we’re more likely to drift back to are the secular narratives which shape the worldview of many but not all in our culture today. Not that they are the old stories which were dominant in the 20th century. Communism, for example, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, no longer holds the sway it once did; neither increasingly does capitalism for many in our own time offer a coherent narrative by which to live our lives. But nonetheless I think there is still a broader, rather fuzzy narrative that shapes the worldview of many of us. It may be it at different stages of our lives, It may be in different areas of our lives right now. It’s one that is more or less in functional terms materialist in its outlook (and by functional, I mean how it determines the concrete decisions we actually make day to day – i.e., how we spend our money – rather than what we might say we would do, if asked in the abstract). When it comes down to it, it’s more or less a story that tells us that this world is all that there is, that “when you’re dead, that’s it – you’re a long time dead!”; that this life is all that there is, that nothing happens after we die, and if by chance something does turn out to happen after we die, well, why worry about that now. The more pressing challenge we face is to live our lives today in a way that offers us and our loved ones maximum pleasure, enjoyment and happiness; albeit ideally in a way that causes minimum inconvenience to our fellow human beings (remember the Golden Rule!). It’s what one might call hedonistic utilitarianism.
But whatever the exact narrative of the story that one would be tempted to drift away to or return to from one’s past, the key, decisive question that is posed in the letter to the Hebrews remains the same. You might not be tempted to return to a Jewish understanding of God which isn’t shaped by the story of Jesus and his teachings, his life, his death, his resurrection and his ascension. But whatever the story is that you’re minded to return to when finding the Christian journey to be tough going, the question is this: what role in that story does Jesus play? Does he become no longer God but instead simply a notable moral example? For example, you might find Jesus’ teachings inspiring but no longer find it possible to speak meaningfully of his being God. You might find his response to state coercion to be an inspiring witness to the power of non-violent protest. You may find his call for forgiveness life-affirming and empowering. But the idea that somehow his death on the cross was instrumental in securing for us an utterly changed relationship with God is just, well, going a step too far. It’s fairy-tale stuff, isn’t it? No one seriously believes this kind of thing, do they? And so on. So to make the journey more bearable, to render it less embarrassing amongst our peers, or simply to avoid the demands it makes on how we are to live, we quietly usher Jesus off to the side of the road, leaving him looking out of the bay window of a semi-detached in a quiet 1930s cul-de-sac as we drive away; remembering perhaps to invite him once in a while to join us for the odd day out. Almost just for nostalgia’s sake, really. At Christmas time, for example…
To all these understandings of Jesus, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is having none of it. Instead, the argument of Hebrews is unwavering: Jesus and his death are decisive for our relationship with God. They change absolutely everything forever and for all time. No ifs, no buts.
So when we find the going tough and we’re tempted to turn away from an understanding of Jesus which affords him the utterly, non-negotiable central role in our spiritual journey, the writer of Hebrews looks us steadily in the eye and dares us to blink. And if reading such a passage of Scripture only makes us more keenly aware of the importance of understanding the Old Testament, so that we become ever more deeply shaped by the broader story that the Bible tells, one that would have been familiar and yet all-new in the light of Jesus to the first century Jewish Christians, then all the better. It may not be the story that we would naturally gravitate to if it weren’t for Jesus. But it is a collection of writings that if we want to understand Jesus and know him better and follow him more faithfully, we certainly need to read, understand and pray our way through more and more. The letter to the Hebrews draws our attention to this Jewish context for many of the early Christians, yes, but above all it draws our attention to the all-defining, all-changing reality of Jesus Christ himself, “to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.”