Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12 Commentary

Until relatively recently I’d never preached a series of sermons on the book of Hebrews.  That’s partly because I’ve struggled to relate it to life in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Hebrews has always seemed to me to be so impractical and theological.  So I’ve shied away from much of its talk about things like sacrifices, ceremonies and rules.

The change in our culture has heightened the challenge of systematically preaching on Hebrews.  When I was ordained, there was still a kind of cultural residue of Christian awareness, if not outright faith.  Many of the people we knew were at least somewhat familiar with Jesus.

Now, however, virtually all of us live in very multi-religious settings.  Many people to whom we proclaim Hebrews 1 and 2 live and work alongside people who couldn’t tell them much about Jesus.  It sometimes seems that the only time Jesus’ name gets even mentioned outside the Church is by Christian radicals or in profanity.

Yet it isn’t just culture that has changed.  Most people recognize the Church has changed as well.  It isn’t just that we’re more contemporary, multi-cultural or liberal.  It’s also that our awareness of basic Christian doctrine has apparently shrunk.  We’ve largely lost track of Jesus as anything more than a nice guy who helps us when we’re in trouble.  That makes some of Hebrews’ foundational terms and illustrations highly mysterious to our contemporaries.

So perhaps it’s time to take a careful look at Jesus again.  Maybe this is a good time to let the book of Hebrews remind us not just about what he came to do, but also about just who he is.  As those who proclaim the Lectionary Epistle do that over the next few weeks, we might invite our hearers to think of Jesus as a kind of lopsided smile.

Not just for our reactions to the joy, peace and sense of purpose Jesus brings into our lives.  But also because, as Tom Long, to whom I owe many ideas for this Commentary, points out, while the Son of God initially lived in the heavenly realm’s glorious splendor, he gave all of that up to become like us in every way.  Once he’d completed his earthly work, however, Jesus returned to heaven’s glory.  It’s what Long calls the “parabola of salvation,” but what I call “the Jesus slightly lopsided smile.”

Hebrews 1 and 2 begin by reminding readers that the Son of God, the second person of Trinity, is what 1:3 calls “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.”  Then, however, Hebrews notes that the Son’s trajectory sweeps downward from the heavenly realm into painful human experience.  Jesus was made, insists chapter 2:9, “a little lower than the angels.”  Then, however, Hebrews’ Son’s arc climbs upward again.  “After he had provided purification for sins,” says chapter 1:3, “he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.”

There you have what I call the Son of God “slightly lopsided smile.”  He eternally existed in the glory of the heavenly realm.  However, for our sakes the Son of God gave that all up.  Yet once he completed that task, God’s Son returned to the glory of the heavenly realm.

Yet why did the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, Jesus Christ even give up all of that glory and splendor in the first place?  Hebrews 1:1’s Preacher begins to answer that by noting, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways.”

God, after all, loves to speak.  Yet God doesn’t just drone on in the same way at us.  God speaks to God’s people in different ways.  Those ways include, says the Preacher, speaking through the “prophets.”  God historically spoke in ways we could understand through people like Moses, Rahab, Deborah, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos.

But God’s beloved children didn’t listen.  And even when we did listen, we quickly forgot what God said to us.  Or simply disobeyed what God said.  In fact, we chose to listen to the evil one and his allies.  So while God has always talked a lot, God’s people stopped listening to God in any meaningful way.

That seems to have been an issue for the Preacher’s first Hebrew audience.  He, after all, reminds them to “pay more careful attention … to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away” (2:1).  The Preacher conveys the sense that his first readers, like all of God’s people, basically tuned out what they heard from God.  God’s children naturally show we’re not listening to what we’re hearing by acting as though we don’t hear it.

You might even argue that’s the root of so much of what’s wrong in our culture.  Our leaders are rude, greedy or both because we aren’t listening to God.  We neglect or abuse God’s good creation because we aren’t listening to God.  We harangue, hate and harm those we think of as our enemies because we aren’t listening to God.

So did God simply stop talking or just scream at us even louder?  No, God instead, in one sense, started speaking baby talk.  “In these last days,” the Preacher says in 1:2, God “has spoken to us by his Son.”  God bends over what a colleague calls “this violent playpen we call home” to speak to us again.  This time, however, God doesn’t just talk baby talk to us.  God also comes and at least initially talks to us as a baby.

Soren Kierkegaard told a parable about a king who loved one of his beautiful servants.  While he wanted to tell her about his love, he wished to do so in a way that would let her freely love him.  So the king traded in his royal robes for peasants’ clothing and moved into a village near his servant.  There the king courted her so that they gradually got to know each other.

Eventually the servant girl fell in love with this man she assumed was a peasant just like her.  At that point her king had to tell her just who he was.  But because she knew him so well, she could hear him speaking about his love for her in ways that she could understand.

Why did the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, Jesus Christ give up heaven’s glory to move into a “village” near us?  Because he wanted us to hear God speaking in ways that we would not only understand, but also gladly live by.

So those who want to hear what God’s saying look at Jesus.  God’s people watch him care for little children, scold religious leaders and eat with sinners.  Those who want their children and grandchildren, as well as nieces and nephews to hear God speaking help them hear Jesus talking about God’s kingdom, love, service and even praying for our enemies.

Of course, we live in a noisy culture in which much talk clamors for our attention.  What’s more, many of us also love to talk.  So to hear God talking, God’s adopted sons and daughters may have to at least temporarily ignore those other noises.  To pay more careful attention to what we’ve heard, God’s beloved sons and daughters may also need to just be quiet for a little while.

After all, once upon a time, God spoke to us through prophets. God gave God’s Spirit to help God’s people understand and live by what those prophets said.  Now, however, God has also spoken and still speaks to us by God’s Son.  However, God also gives us the Holy Spirit to help us not only pay attention to what we’ve heard, but also live by what that Son says.

That’s one reason why the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is such an important part of the rhythm of godly living.  The Holy Spirit, after all, uses it to, in a sense, speak to us about God’s hatred of evil as well as the depth of God’s love for us.  The Spirit also uses Communion’s bread, wine and juice’s means of grace to equip us to pay attention to God talking to us because God loves us so much.

Illustration Idea

 In his fascinating book, The Man Which Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Oliver Sacks tells the story of Jimmie who remains forever stuck in 1945. Jimmie is a very nice, pleasant person with whom you can have a nice conversation. But if you leave the room after even a two-hour conversation and then return a bit later, he’ll greet you as if for the first time.

This vacuum leaves Jimmie with minimal joy because it locks him in what a colleague calls “an ever-changing but finally meaningless, present moment.”  With nothing old to ever look back on and nothing new ever to look forward to, joy is largely impossible.

But there is one time when Jimmie shows something like joy, one moment when the vacant look on his face is replaced with something that looks completeness and calmness. That’s when he takes communion in chapel.

When Sacks mourned that Jimmie’s disease had stolen his soul, the nuns who care for him told him to come back for communion.  When the author returned, he saw Jimmie fully participate in the service, recite the familiar lines, say the prayers, and then go forward to receive the wafer. As he did, Jimmie’s face was a picture of calm and even joy.

God was at work in Jimmie in ways that made him what my colleague Scott Hoezee calls “a living, breathing, walking, talking display window of a very surprising grace.”  Sacks knew there was no good neurological explanation for this.  “But perhaps,” says Hoezee in a reflection on Jimmie’s remarkable story, “Grace has its own reason.”