NOTES for Heb 1:1-12

With these words the apostle affirms the unity of the whole divine revelation handed down to us in Sacred Scripture - the unity of the Old and New Testaments. One and the same God spoke to people through the ancient prophets of the Old Testament and through Jesus Christ; one and the same Word was first given for hearing and then came in the flesh. One and the same Son takes part in the creation of the universe "before all ages," is incarnate through the Virgin Mary for our redemption and union with God "under Pontius Pilate," and brings about the final Transfiguration of the world for the life "of the age to come." This awareness of the divine presence in all human history, and therefore in the life of every person, is an integral component of Christian faith. And it is also important that this presence is not silent, not indifferent. God speaks, which means He reveals His love and His will to people, and therefore our attempts at communion with Him, our prayers, are never barren, even when it appears to us that we do not hear Him. His Word comes to us through Sacred Scripture, through the prayerful and sacramental experience of the Church, through the "inexpressible groanings" of the Holy Spirit in our hearts; it comes and bears fruit: our growth in love for Him and for one another.

Each person, believer or not, in difficult moments of life asks for the direct intervention of God in what happen with Him, with the close or with the world. Each person has his vision how to change quickly and effectively the course of the events. We wait for these same convenient and active actions from God, exclaiming: "why will He not punish? Why will He not condemn? Why will He not destroy? Why will He not strike, will not begin war, will not wipe off the face of the earth? Why will He not react?"

We ascribe to God these parameters of effectiveness, which are standards for our own selves, no matter, we believe or not. We are not ready to acknowledge just a simple fact: God is not like us; His thoughts are not our thoughts. Today, such as two thousand years ago, people wait for His intervention in their life, but receive a strange and paradoxical answer: God is born in the world powerless child. He is not armed, he cannot either speak, or walk, He limits His freedom and His omnipotence in such measure, in which we would have wanted to develop our possibilities to influence and to change everything on our own initiative. He accomplishes what nobody expects from Him and, most likely wants especially: He confides Himself completely to man. And each of us, decides for himself, how he will act with the Baby.

Each person, believer or not, in difficult moments of life asks for the direct intervention of God in what happen with Him, with the close or with the world. Each person has his vision how to change quickly and effectively the course of the events. We wait for these same convenient and active actions from God, exclaiming: "why will He not punish? Why will He not condemn? Why will He not destroy? Why will He not strike, will not begin war, will not wipe off the face of the earth? Why will He not react?"

We ascribe to God these parameters of effectiveness, which are standards for our own selves, no matter, we believe or not. We are not ready to acknowledge just a simple fact: God is not like us; His thoughts are not our thoughts. Today, such as two thousand years ago, people wait for His intervention in their life, but receive a strange and paradoxical answer: God is born in the world powerless child. He is not armed, he cannot either speak, or walk, He limits His freedom and His omnipotence in such measure, in which we would have wanted to develop our possibilities to influence and to change everything on our own initiative. He accomplishes what nobody expects from Him and, most likely wants especially: He confides Himself completely to man. And each of us, decides for himself, how he will act with the Baby.

The Letter to the Hebrews says much about the Messiah being higher than the angels. At first glance this is entirely obvious, and it looks strange that someone had to be convinced of what should already have been clear to them. But the matter, as can be seen, was not so simple.

The Letter to the Hebrews, according to the generally accepted opinion among biblical scholars, was written not by Paul himself but by one of his disciples, written after the apostle's martyrdom and after A.D. 70, and therefore after the catastrophe that completely changed the course of Jewish, and partly world, history. The revolt of A.D. 70 was not simply a war against Rome; it was a messianic war, conducted under religious slogans and perceived by its participants as sacred. It was one of the last surges of that militant messianism whose bearers in the Gospel era were the Zealots, the very ones who organized the revolt of A.D. 70.

The last messianic war of antiquity was the Bar Kokhba revolt, but when the letter was being written almost half a century still remained before it. In the 70s of the first century the militancy of the messianists had somewhat faded, which is no surprise: the defeat of the revolt and the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple down to their foundations proved a terrible blow, from which it was by no means simple to recover. It is no surprise that in those times mystical messianism came to replace political messianism.

If to political messianists the Messiah appeared as a powerful earthly king whom God Himself supports, strengthening his kingdom and helping him win victory over all enemies, then to mystical messianists the Messiah really appeared as someone like an angel, a being not of this world in the full sense of the word. Many of them evidently considered the Messiah not a Man, but some kind of superhuman spirit who had never been human and was not supposed to be human.

Such an image was hardly any closer to the image of the real, Gospel Messiah than the image of a powerful earthly king that ruled in the minds of messianists of the Gospel era. Therefore the author of the letter insists that the Messiah is not some mysterious mighty angel, but a completely real Man, in His humanity not fundamentally different from any of us. But the fullness of God that this Man bears in Himself places Him above the angels: no angel was given such fullness.

For a correct understanding of the meaning of the Epistle to the Hebrews, it is important to remember by whom and when it was written. According to the view commonly accepted today among biblical scholars, the author of the epistle was not Paul himself, but one of his disciples, and it was written after the apostle's martyrdom. He was apparently executed in the second half of the 60s. Most likely, the Epistle to the Hebrews came into being after A.D. 70, which became a turning point in Jewish history, and in many ways in world history as well. In that very year, after the anti-Roman uprising raised by the Zealots, Judea was crushed, and Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed to the ground in the literal sense of the word.

In scale this catastrophe was comparable to the catastrophe of 587 B.C., when the city and the Temple were destroyed by the Babylonian army and the period of the seventy-year Babylonian captivity began for the Jewish people. Such events inevitably produce a crisis: social and political, as well as religious. And the crisis experienced in the 70s by the Jewish people and the Synagogue could not help affecting the Church, which at that time was still predominantly Judeo-Christian both in composition and, more importantly, in worldview: Judeo-Christian views and traditions shaped the mentality of both the earliest Christian Church and, in part, the early Christian Church.

Meanwhile, one of the signs of the religious crisis was mystical messianism, which was rapidly replacing political messianism both in circles around the synagogue and in circles around the church. Later this messianism gave rise to numerous gnostic schools and movements. And if political messianism saw the Messiah as an ordinary man, an earthly ruler acting according to God's will, mystical messianism was more ready to see in him some superhuman being, more like an angel than a man. But the author of the epistle, whose name is unknown to us, never tires of reminding his readers that the Messiah is greater than any angel (vv. 1-4), that the way into the Kingdom was not opened to humanity by angels at all (vv. 5-12), and that angels are merely created spirits performing strictly service functions for God (vv. 13-14). He reminds his readers that the meaning of Christianity is not mysticism, but entering the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world and becoming rooted in it, finding there what no mysticism and no angels can give a human being.

In today’s reading, the apostle Paul gives examples of Old Testament faith and offers a very interesting interpretation of Abraham’s conduct. Perhaps it seems perfectly obvious to us, raised in a Christian culture, that if we believe in God, we also believe in the resurrection of the dead. Yet even in Paul’s time this was by no means obvious. It was still less obvious in Abraham’s time. Strictly speaking, Abraham had no particular grounds for believing in the resurrection. For a person of that time and culture, immortality was attained precisely through one’s children; Abraham could not imagine any other continuation of life. But Paul says that Abraham trusted God, who had promised that Isaac would be the father of a great nation, so completely that he did not doubt for a second that the promise would be fulfilled even if Isaac were offered as a sacrifice. How could this be? Does it really matter how? Abraham does not think about how it will happen; he simply accepts as a fact that God’s words cannot contradict one another—which means that somehow they will be reconciled... And this trust is credited as righteousness.

"And: In the beginning, Lord, You laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands; they will perish, but You remain; and they will all grow old like a garment, and like a cloak You will roll them up..."

In today's text the apostle refers to the text of the prophet Isaiah: "Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath; for the heavens will vanish like smoke, and the earth will grow old" (Isa 51:6). But this is, of course, far from the only place in the book of the prophet Isaiah where the end of days is mentioned. It is part of every prophetic ministry to remind people about the end of the days of "earth and heaven," about the end of the existence of the physical universe. "And all the host of heaven will decay; the heavens will be rolled up like a scroll; and all their host will fall, as a leaf falls from the vine, and as a withered leaf from the fig tree" (Isa 34:4).

Sergei Averintsev wrote this: "The last light brightens the firmament, / White walls like peaceful death, / all times curl up like a scroll, / minutes linger and the cup is full." Peaceful death is something very important for us today, because pictures of the end can frighten us and therefore inevitably cast us into depression. And Averintsev's words are not some late interpretation whose comfort we may distrust because it is too modern, too young, and untested by time. No: the prophet himself says immediately after this, "say to those who are fearful of heart: do not fear; behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God; He will come and save you" (Isa 35:4). We need only enter God's peace, now, while still on earth, and then say with the apostle in joy: "You are the same, and Your years will not end."

Our own fate after death is not what matters to us; we love the Lord so much that we dissolve our selfhood in Him. The main thing is that "You are the same, and Your years will not end"; the main thing is that You, beloved God, will not die the death of decay. And in You are all who have entered Your peace, and all whom we love so much.