THE HEBREW WRITER'S AIM AND SO WHAT?
I could easily see Jews [Jews who are Christians and
those that aren't reading the book of Hebrews with special interest. If
they rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah it's to be expected that
their motivation would be to critique it. If they were Jews who have
embraced Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah and Lord it would be to learn more
about Him and his purpose. Jews, I would confidently suspect, would be
especially interested in Moses, Aaron, tabernacle, priests, animal
sacrifices, curtains, genealogies, Joshua, the Old Covenant, the heroes
of Israel's history and such. How would that he difficult to understand?
What is surprising [at least] is that Gentiles would find it interesting, much less sometimes enthralling.
Here's
this book, something like 2,000 years old that from beginning to end
speaks of things that have peculiar relevance to people with a Jewish
background and we Gentiles eagerly pore over it.
Of course, it must be said, that we mostly look to the book of Hebrews for arguments to prove that we are right to view Jesus as we do. Is this not true? I think it is true.
But
when did we the Gentile rank and file ever meet a Jew and reason with
him? When did we ever reason with a devout Jew [if ever we did] in favor
of Jesus using the book of Hebrews?
I think our
abiding interest in the book of Hebrews is more than surprising—I think
it is close to astonishing, especially if we forget the writer's aim!
The Hebrew writer's aim is to keep Jewish believers on their feet!
Church
attendance was down, disappointment was everywhere, some had walked
away and no longer assembled with Jesus-believing fellow-Jews. They were
drifting back to the Judaism they knew with its sacrifices, Aaronic
priesthood and visible structures, back to what Jerusalem stood for and
the Hebrew writer wanted to stop the rot among them and enrich their
faith.
How does he go about it?
He doesn't try to prove anything—he proclaims! Well,
yes, he so structures his presentation that he's "making a case" for
staying with the Lord Jesus but his "arguments" aren't arguments,
they're claims on behalf of Jesus. And he makes these claims on Jesus'
behalf because he is already committed to Jesus on the basis of the
gospeling of eye-witnesses of the life, death, resurrection and
exaltation of the Lord Jesus. He doesn't demonstrate from Scripture that
the Jesus they had come to believe in was indeed the Messiah. He
doesn't pretend that believers carried around a card with all the
predictions about the Messiah and when they met Jesus he had all those
identity markers. No, like all the other believers, including the
apostolic group in the beginning, they read the Scriptures in light of
Jesus rather than Jesus in the light of Scriptures.
The book of Hebrews is a "sermon" addressed to people with a Jewish heritage that mattered to them.
It
appears to me if we are to use the book of Hebrews well it won't do
just to find out what all the verses meant and repeat them and their
meaning—we must do more than exegesis. To be faithful to the
Hebrew writer's purpose which is to keep believers on their feet and
enriched in the gospel of and about Jesus Christ—to keep faith with that
book we must use it in our setting and culture to do
what he did. It isn't enough to say, "Here's what each verse means and
here's how his 'argument' works for Jews."
To be faithful to that
book [and any other in the Bible] we need to pay attention to the
gospel sub-text which is everywhere underneath the verses in the text
before us. This vast and indispensable sub-text shows itself every now
and then with powerful clarity and to be faithful to the book we are to
do with it in our time and culture what the Hebrew writer did to his
time and culture.
He proclaims that Jesus is a
greater High Priest than any of Aaron's line [in part] because he's
deathless. He doesn't develop an argument about Jesus' immortality—he
preaches it [contrast it with 1 Corinthians 15:3-9].
It's right
and proper that we should examine how the Hebrew writer made his case
for loyalty to the Lord Jesus but we mustn't think that having worked
out marvelously how he made his case to these Jews that our business is
to ceaseless repeat how he did it and leave it there. "See, that's the
book of Hebrews!"
The 21st century believing Gentile might well nod in approval at our accuracy and then ask, "So what? What does a Jewish sermon have to do with us?"