Reading: Hebrews 1-2, Psalm 25

A few years back I went to the theater to watch the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire. I enjoyed it. A few days later I got in a conversation with a co-worker who grew up in India. After a few minutes I got the impression we had watched different movies. Which was not the case of course. But I did not have the deep cultural background that my coworker had, so he had a much deeper sense of the story. Things that passed right by me where hilarious or tragic to him. We saw the same story, but he saw more of it.
In some ways, the epistle to the Hebrews is to the story of Jesus what my coworker was to Slumdog Millionaire. The letter takes the grand Story of the people of God in the Hebrew Scriptures and maps it right onto the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. At the same time, it is a message of encouragement, a proclamation the Jesus is Lord, and an announcement of the coming Justice of God. That it succeeds in being all these things at once makes it one of the most impressive works of literature ever written.
To whom do we owe this fantastic work? This is a touchy subject. The earliest traditions of the church are confused on this, crediting variously Paul, Barnabas, and Clement. A generation later there was a kind of consensus that it was written by Paul, but this only lasted a few years before being called into question by people like Origin and Augustine. The church made no statement on the matter until the Reformation, when Martin Luther suggested it was written by Apollos. Eager to denounce all things Luther said, the church announced it was written by Paul, though the weight of evidence is really pretty heavily against this. There have been a number of other suggestions, but none of them really have evidence behind them. So the answer is, we don’t know. And I kind of think it’s a good thing. The point of Hebrews is the completed work of Jesus, and it somehow seems correct that the clearest expression of this in the Bible comes from an unidentified source.
One other thing before getting to the opening chapters. It has been suggested that Hebrews was originally a spoken work- a sermon that later got written down. This seems pretty reasonable, since dictation was a common form of writing letters anyway, and public teaching was common in the early church. The letter draws heavily from the Psalms, particularly Psalm 110, and from the new covenant passages of Jeremiah. Almost like a modern sermon might. It also shared some unique forms and words with the final speech of Steven the Martyr in Acts 7, one of the first recorded Christian “sermons.” I tend to think this was written by whomever wrote it after speaking the material several times, perhaps realizing that what he had to say was important enough to commit to parchment and get circulated.
Okay, on the letter itself. The opening chapters are a dense Christology. Right out the gate we are told that this is a letter about Jesus, who is the completed Word from God that began with the Hebrew Scriptures. He is the radiance of the invisible God and the exact imprint of his nature. The author of Hebrews understands who and what Jesus must be to fulfill everything the Scriptures promise about him. He must be human, as we are human, and he must be God, as God is God. He opens with this to make sure we all know what we are talking about. Accepting that Jesus is the son of God is axiomatic to the argument he is going to make. This is not really an evangelistic work. It is an explanatory one. The aim of the author is not to convince people that Jesus is God, but to explain the enormity of what Jesus has accomplished, and why nothing and no one but Jesus can solve the human problem.
Be then moves on to the various brings that Jesus has been compared to. First up is angels. This era of Judaism had developed a rather complex angelology, and at times got rather obsessed with the roles and responsibilities of the various angelic beings. This was also a major theme of the early Christian heresy of gnosticism. Here we a systematic demolition of the idea that Jesus was an angel or angelic creature, using the Hebrew Scriptures as proof. That these Scriptures are authoritative is also axiomatic to the author. If you do not accept the Hebrew Scriptures, this argument won’t make any sense. Tomorrow we will move on other beings that Jesus is superior to, landing on his status as both the supreme human, and the incarnation of God. The we will start in on the heart of the Hebrew Scriptures: the Temple, the High Preist, and the Sacrifice.