In the Letter to the Hebrews Paul touches on a theme important for all of us. He exposes the boundary between following some rite or other and living faith, the doing of the Father's will.

One can object to this understanding of the matter by saying that behind a rite there almost always stands the faith of previous generations, the Church, and therefore the Lord Himself. In many cases this is so, though not always. But the point is that a rite can screen God from us. As a result, sadly, one can stop perceiving Him as a Person and see only a set of prescriptions, restrictions, and actions required of oneself.

But Paul, quoting Christ's words, emphasizes the doing of the heavenly Father's will, and for this living communion with Him Himself is necessary, in prayer and in reading His Word. And already through this the Lord, by the Holy Spirit, gives us the right perception and the fullness of participation in the rite of the Church.

Continuing the discussion of the Torah and of sanctification through traditional Yahwist sacrifices, the author of the epistle, like his teacher Paul, speaks of the insufficiency both of the Torah itself, which had not opened into the fullness of the living Torah, and of the sanctification connected with it. Indeed, for Paul, even before his encounter with Christ on the Damascus road, the fullness of life in God was bound precisely to the living Torah; he considered every other way of following the Torah insufficient.

After that encounter, he understood that the person of Christ is the only example in the world of the living Torah actually fulfilled. He also understood that even the inner Torah, by itself, is not yet the fullness of life with God: the inner Torah only points out the way, but it does not guarantee that the person following it will be able to walk that way.

In the fullness of the living Torah revealed to the world by Christ, not only the Torah as a legal or moral code disappeared, but also the inner Torah as that spiritual compass which pointed the way to the goal: now the goal itself stood before one's eyes. The author of the epistle extends this view of the Torah to sacrifices and to sanctification. Earlier, by being sanctified, a person as it were marked the direction of movement, pointed the way to the goal, and set out toward a place he could not reach, just as a sinful person could not become the living Torah no matter how hard he tried to follow the inner Torah.

Now, with the coming of Christ, the possibility finally appeared of reaching the goal, of being sanctified in all the fullness possible for a human being, and of sharing no longer in the Presence that was found at every earthly altar, but in the Presence that abides at the throne of glory. And in the rays of that throne, the way to which the Savior opens as High Priest of the Kingdom, all earthly altars and all sacred rites disappear. The sacred rites of Christians are not a replacement for the former Yahwist rites within continuing earthly history, but the suprahistorical fullness of sanctification opened to the world through the presence of the Kingdom within it.

But all this is actual only for those for whom the Kingdom is the reality of their own life. For everyone else, in essence, nothing changes. They continue to live in the old spiritual rhythm of periodic cleansing and sanctification, repeated again and again because outside the Kingdom a person is doomed to tread in place, even if he is formally a member of the Church. Then, for such a person, his church life is essentially no different from the life characteristic of believing Yahwists of the pre-Christian era, even if outwardly it is completely Christian.

Continuing the discussion of sacrifices, the author of the letter returns again to a theme Paul addressed more than once: the insufficiency of the Torah for the complete transformation of the human person. As a disciple and follower of the apostle, he illustrates this through the priestly Torah, which prescribed regular sacrifices, including sacrifices of purification. He draws attention to what his teacher had often said: following the Torah makes it possible to resist sin, but it does not make it possible to be rid of sin once and for all. Applied to the priestly Torah, this means a bad infinity of sacrifices with no end in sight, because after each purification, which is inevitably relative, and each sanctification, which is inevitably incomplete, the person who has been purified and sanctified sins again and loses that sanctification (vv. 1-2). Sacrificial blood can cleanse a person from the consequences of a specific sin, but it cannot free a person from what the New Testament books call original sin. Thus sacrifices of purification paradoxically become for a person a reminder of the sinfulness from which they were supposed to deliver him (vv. 3-4). True, complete purification is accomplished once, just as complete sanctification can only be a one-time reality: complete purification frees a person from his sinfulness once and for all, and complete sanctification, even when it unfolds over time, still does not imply the possibility of losing sanctification and returning to the former state, after which everything would have to begin again.

That is why the author of the letter speaks of the final sanctification of the faithful "through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (v. 10). Such final sanctification opens the road to the Kingdom for those who seek it, completely changing the former pattern of purification sacrifices and all other sacrifices. It is in this sense that the author of the letter speaks of the uselessness of the former sacrifices: they are relevant only to the former, pre-Christian order of things (vv. 5-9). In the Kingdom, the priestly Torah ceases to be relevant in the same sense that the Torah in general ceases to be relevant there: after the transformation of the world and of human nature, it is no longer needed as a means of fighting sin, which has been defeated once and for all. And the priestly Torah ceases to be relevant in the Kingdom as a means of the incomplete purification and relative sanctification that it used to provide, when the world still lay in evil (v. 9).