| Lectionary : Proper 27 (epistle) | | Date Created: Nov 09, 2006, 11:31 AM |
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The Gospel reading for this coming Sunday is Mark 12:38-44. And the Epistle is Hebrews 9:24-28.
The commentaries tell us that the author of Hebrews has constructed this huge analogy between Jesus who is at once both the High Priest and the sacrifice. That's good commentary-speak, but I think it's misleading. I think it's probably truer to say that the author of Hebrews is making clear the huge analogy that God has created. From our human perspective, it may look as though Christianity was trying to find ways to tie itself in with the traditional, struggling to find ways to rationalize what happened in their time with the Scriptures that they'd been handed down. One frequently reads passages in the secondary literature about the strands of thought within Judaism that were available -- almost as raw material -- for the Christians to create their theology out of.
This scholarly cause-and-effect model misses something basic about God. He's outside of time. I don't believe that the Exodus or the High Priesthood or the Isaianic prophecies were constraints upon Jesus. They are not certainties and Jesus' life and ministry dependent upon them. Chronologically, they may have been prior, but in the eternal mind of God, I believe it is Jesus' mission on Planet Earth that is fundamental. It is in Jesus that the fulness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell. Insofar as the prophets were writing about the implications of the mind of God on the realities of their day, they were writing about Jesus and what he was to accomplish. They describe him in his authentic freedom; he is not constrained by their sequentially prior ideas, rather they are constrained in what they write by the eternal truth of him.
Thus, the author of Hebrews is not cleverly bringing together two things that are dislike each other when he writes about Jesus and the Old Testament routines for relationship with God. He is not making an imaginative creative leap. He is artfully describing a true and rich connection that he has discovered. But he's discovered it because it was there all along. The God who sacrificed himself in Jesus Christ is the God who set up the Hebrew nation.
When you read Wright or Perriman or listen to Bell, you could think that God's business in Scripture was all about the Now -- using apocalyptic or cosmic language with the purpose of investing the current moment, any moment, with eternal significance: Now is important in its own right, and the language of eternity is a way of talking about the importance of now. I don't think you get there from reading Scripture. Instead, the picture seems to be that we should use the now in the service of what is eternal. Part of the reason that the now is significant is that what we do now will determine what we are in the forever. It isn't that God wants to teach us about our neighborhood and uses the language of eternity to do so. Instead, God uses the stuff of our local space-time to teach us about things outside of space-time that we wouldn't otherwise be able to grasp. |
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