Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews Part 5

The last chapter of the Epistle has a character quite of its own. Unlike many of those often arbitrary divisions of the New Testament books which we know as chapters, it is a naturally separate section. The long and sustained arguments are over. The Writer's thoughts, gravitating to a close, and occupied naturally as they do so with the personal conditions of his Hebrew brethren, attach themselves now to one now to another side of their duties, their difficulties, their more particular and detailed needs, practical and spiritual. As he touches upon these, sentence by sentence, we often see at a glance the probable occasion of the words, but often again we are left in the dark about it. Who shall say precisely why he insists (ver. 2) upon the exercise of hospitality? or who were "the prisoners" (ver. 3) whom he bids them remember? Who shall tell what in this particular community was the occasion for a solemn emphasis (ver. 4) upon the holiness of marriage, or why again, just for them, it was well to speak in warning (ver. 5) about the love of money and the temptation to discontent? Nor can we be certain who were those departed "leaders," "guides," of ver. 7, whose "faith" the disciples were to "imitate," whose blessed "exit from their walk of life" they were to "contemplate."

All we can say of these opening topics of the chapter is that, whatever the occasions were, the words occasioned are for us inestimably precious. Dear to the heart of the believing Church for ages have been these precepts to love the brethren ([Greek: philadelphia]), to love the stranger ([Greek: philoxenia]), to remember Abraham at Mamre and Gideon at Ophrah with their angel-guests, and to see a possible angel-visitor in every needing stranger at the door. The call (ver. 2) to remember the captive, and the sufferer of every sort, comes with solemn power from this paragraph, as it presses home the law of sympathetic fellowship, and in one pa.s.sing phrase ("_as being in the body_") reminds us that, for the Christian, all sufferings, all burthens of pain and care, cease for ever when once he is "out of the body." Sacred is the witness borne here to the pure dignity of wedlock (ver. 4): "Be[S] marriage honourable in all things, and the bed unspotted; for fornicators and adulterers"--not only adulterers, but those also who sin that other sin which the world so easily and so blindly condones--"G.o.d will judge." And when the Christian is warned (ver. 5) against the greed of gain, the quoted words of the Old Testament make, by the use they are put to, a possession for ever valuable to the believing reader of the Scriptures.

For not only are they in themselves wonderful in their emphasis: "I will never give thee up; I will never, never desert thee." They are inestimable as an example of the sort of use which this New Testament prophet could make of the spiritual riches of the Old Testament. For here he sees a Divine watchword for the new life, not only in the glorious outburst of faith (ver. 6) in Psalm cxviii., the _Hallel_ of the Pa.s.sover. In the words spoken to Joshua, and to all appearance spoken _to him personally and alone_ (ver. 5: see Josh. i. 5), we are led equally to see a message from the heart of G.o.d straight to every Christian soul. Seldom, if ever, are we more powerfully and tenderly encouraged than we are here to use with confidence that old-fashioned and now often disparaged sort of Bible study, the collection of eternal and universal principles of spiritual life out of an "isolated text."

[S] The sentence demands an understood _imperative_ verb, without which the "_for_" which (in the true reading) introduces the second clause is out of place.

Then comes the pa.s.sage where the departed "guides" are commemorated.

Whoever they were, were they a Stephen and a James, or saints utterly unknown to us, that pa.s.sage is precious in its principles, true for all time, of remembrance and appeal. It consecrates the fidelity of the Christian memory. It a.s.sures us that to cherish the names, the words, the conduct, the holy lives, the blessed deaths, of our teachers of days long done is no mere indulgence of unfruitful sentiment. It is natural to the Gospel, which, just because it is the message of an unspeakably happy future, also sanctifies the past which is the living antecedent to it. Just because we look with the love of hope towards "our gathering together unto Him," we are to turn with the love of memory towards all the gifts of G.o.d given to us through the holy ones with whom we look to be "gathered together." "The exit of their walk of life" (ver. 7) is to be our study, our meditation. We are to "look it up and down" ([Greek: anatheorountes]) as we would some great monument of victory, and from that contemplation we are to go back into life, to "imitate their faith," to do just what they did, treating (xi. 1) the unseen as visible, the hoped-for as present and within our embrace. Thank G.o.d for this authorization and hallowing of our recollections. Precious indeed is its a.s.surance that the sweetness of them (for all its ineffable element of sadness, as eyes and ears are hungry for the faces and the voices gone, for the look and tone of the preacher, the teacher, through whom we first knew the Lord, or knew Him better) is no half-forbidden luxury of the soul but a means of victorious grace.

But now comes in a pa.s.sage of the chapter which more obviously tells its own story of occasion and aim. The Writer recurs to the supreme theme of the Epistle, the ant.i.thesis between the Lord Jesus, with His finished work and absolute permanence, and the transitory antecedents of the older dispensation. Once more the Hebrews are to remember His eternity, His eternal personal ident.i.ty, unbeginning and without end (ver. 8); He is "the same, yesterday, and to-day, and unto the ages." Before all types and preparations, before law, and ritual, and prophecy, He is.

When, having done their long work, they cease, He still is. Over the glory of His being and character pa.s.ses no "shadow of turning." Never to the endless ages shall He need to be other than He is, or to be succeeded by a greater. "JESUS, MESSIAH"; He is Alpha; He is also Omega. The whole alphabet of revelation between the first letter and the last does but spell out the golden legend of His unalterable glory.

In contrast to Him, thus unchangeably Himself, place the "teachings variegated and alien" (ver. 9) which would draw you from beside Him ([Greek: parapheresthe]) back to an outworn ceremonial distorted from its true purpose. "Looking unto Jesus," stay still and be at rest in Him. The ritual law of "food" ([Greek: bromata]) had its perfectly befitting place in the age of elementary preparation. But to make it now a rival to the message of that "grace" which means a life lived by faith in the Son of G.o.d, is to defraud "the heart" of that which alone can "establish" it in peace, holiness, and hope. To walk in Him is to go from strength to strength. To "walk in them" ([Greek: hoi peripatountes]) is to miss the very "benefit" you seek. It is to move away from the light, backward, into spiritual death.

Here follows in close sequence a pa.s.sage of pregnant significance. It begins with ver. 10, and the connexion is not finally broken till ver.

16. The Writer, prompted perhaps by the allusion to a ceremonial law of "meats," turns abruptly to the still existing ritual of the Law, familiar to his Hebrew readers as to himself. From it he leads their thoughts once more to the profound import and ultimate efficacy of the supreme atoning Sacrifice, in all its shame and all its glory, and to the call which that great fact conveys to the believer to break for ever, at whatever cost, from the old order, _considered as a rival to the Cross_. Such is the true bearing of this often debated pa.s.sage, if I am not greatly mistaken. The "altar" which "we have" (ver. 10) is not, if I read the argumentative context rightly, either the atoning Cross, at least as to any direct reference of the word, or the Table of the Christian Eucharist. As to this latter conjecture indeed the reference is totally unsupported by any really primeval parallel.[T] And _in this Epistle_ it is scarcely conceivable that, if that were the meaning, if we were to be abruptly informed here that we Christians have in the Holy Table a sacrificial altar, no allusion, however slight, should intimate that the Christian minister is not a "leader" only but a sacrificing priest. The whole Epistle may be said to circle round the great topic of Priesthood. From various points of view, and with purposes as practical as possible in regard of faith, hope, and life, that topic has been handled. But is it too much to say that, for the Writer, the one Christian priesthood which is a.n.a.logous to the Levitical priesthood, as a sacrificial and mediatorial function on behalf of the Church, is the High Priesthood of the Son of G.o.d? The Christian Ministry indeed hardly, if at all, comes into view throughout the argument. We find it at length in this chapter, the chapter which tells the readers that they "have an altar." Twice over the pastors of the Church are mentioned here (verses 7, 17); but how? As "leaders," "guides," [Greek: hegoumenoi]: as those who "speak the word of G.o.d," as those whose vigilance over the souls of the flock claims a loving and grateful loyalty. That is to say, the Christian Ministry is above all things a pastorate. To a sacerdotal aspect of its special functions no reference appears. And that is noteworthy just because of the profound sacerdotalism of the whole context of the Epistle.

[T] Lightfoot (on Ign. _ad Eph. v., et alibi_) has clearly shewn that Ignatius' use of [Greek: thysiasterion] is altogether mystical. He means not the Holy Table but (among other references) the Church of Christ as the sphere or place of spiritual sacrifice.

On a careful review of the words before us (verses 10-16), we are justified in the conclusion that the reference is, not to a Christian inst.i.tution at all but precisely to the Hebrew ritual, in which Writer and readers still had part as members of _the nation_. The thing in view is an altar whose law was such that the sacerdotal "ministers ([Greek: hoi latreuontes]) of the Tabernacle" might not use its sacrifices for food. But why? Not of course because they were not Christians, but because the sacrifices in question presented there were to be wholly "burned," "burned without the camp." The entire thought moves within the limits of the typical ceremonial. It deals with the holocaust which even the sacrificer might handle only to commit it to the fire; the victim whose destiny was to be--not eaten by the priestly family but carried outside the camp as wholly devoted for the people's sins.

It is possible, within the lines of the Levitical ritual, to interpret in more ways than one the "altar" in question. It may be the great altar, regarded in its special use on the Atonement Day (Lev. xvi); not another structure than that used for other sacrifices, but that same altar regarded, for the moment, as if separated and alone, because of the awful speciality of the stern while merciful ritual of that great day. Or again, as it has been argued with learning and force[U], the reference may be to the altar of incense, the golden altar of the Holiest, on which the blood not only of the atonement victims but of all sin-offerings was sprinkled; and every sacrifice so treated was regarded as a holocaust; no part of it was reserved for food. But in either case the altar in question is not of the Church but of the Tabernacle. The "we" of ver. 10 is the community in its Hebrew rather than in its Christian character.

[U] By the Rev. James Burkitt, in _The Golden Altar: an Exposition of Hebrews xiii. 10, 11_.

So the whole thought centres itself in the supreme Sacrifice, as Ant.i.type answering to type. Jesus is our holocaust, wholly sacrificed for our sins. His sacrifice involved in its awful ritual the shame and agony of rejection by His own, excommunication from "the camp" of the chosen. Then let the Hebrew believer, "receiving that inestimable benefit," be ready also to follow his Redeemer's steps in rejection and in shame. Let him also be prepared for casting out by priest and scribe.

Let his yearning heart, with whatever anguish, inure itself to the thought that the beloved "city of his solemnities" is not the final and enduring Jerusalem. Let his "thoughts to heaven the steadier rise," as he looks, like Abraham before him, to "G.o.d's great town in the unknown land," where sits on high the Mediator of the New Covenant, the "Priest upon His throne."

CHAPTER XIII

LAST WORDS

HEB. xiii. 15-25

The connexion of ver. 15 with the antecedent context is suggestive. We have been led to a contemplation of the Lord Jesus in His character as Ant.i.type and Fulfilment of the holocaust of the Levitical atonement.

Even as the chief animal victim of the old covenant, the symbolical bearer of the sins of Israel, was carried "outside the camp" to be consumed, so our Victim was led "outside the gate" of the city to His death, that there, by His blood-shedding, by His absolute and perfect self-immolation in our stead, He might "hallow His people," bringing them forgiven and welcomed back to G.o.d. The point of the dread ritual of Calvary here specially emphasized is just this, that He "suffered outside the gate." The old Israel, guiltily unknowing, fulfilled the type in the Ant.i.type by refusing Him place even to die within the sacred city. He, in His love for the new Israel, that He might in every particular be and do what was foreshadowed for Him, refused not to submit to that supreme rejection.

From this the apostolic Writer draws two messages for his readers. First (ver. 13) they are to follow the Lord outside, willing to be rejected like Him and because of Him. They are to be patient, for His sake, when they are "put out of the synagogues" and reproached as traitors to Moses. They are by faith to conquer the cry of their human hearts as they crave perpetuity for the beloved past; they are to remember (ver.

14), as they issue from the old covenant's gate into what seems the wild, that "Jerusalem that now is" was built for time only, and that they belong to the city of eternity, where their High Priest sits on His throne to bless them now and welcome them hereafter. Then, secondly and therefore (ver. 15), they are to use Him now and for ever as their one sacerdotal Mediator. By Him, not by the Aaronic ministry, they are to bring their sacrifices to G.o.d. They are to accept exclusion and to turn it into inclusion, into a shutting-up of all their hopes and all their worship into their glorious Christ. And what now is their altar-ritual to be? It is to be twofold; the offering of praise, "the fruit of lips that confess" the glory of "His Name," and then the sacrifice of self and its possessions for others for His sake (ver. 16); "doing good, and communicating" blessings; for these are "altar-sacrifices ([Greek: thysiai]) with which G.o.d is well pleased."

Such, if we are right, is the connexion. The Lord, rejected, that He might die for us after a manner faithful to the prophetic type, is to be the Hebrew disciple's example of patience when he too is rejected. Such rejection is only to unite him the more closely to the Christ as his way to G.o.d, his Mediator for all the praise and all the unselfish service which is to fill his dedicated life.

The lesson was special for the believing Hebrew then. But it has its meaning for all time. In one way or another the true follower of the crucified and rejected Redeemer must _stand ready_ for cross and for exclusion, so far as he is called upon by his faith to break with all ultimate and absolute allegiance save to "Jesus Christ and Him crucified." He has to recollect, on one account or another, that he too belongs to the invisible order, to the "citizenship that is in heaven,"

and not to any visible polity as if it were final, as if it were his spirit's goal. But then he too is to make this detachment and separation only a fresh means to unite him to his great High Priest for a self-sacrificial life in Him. He is to be no frowning sectary, saying, "I am holier than thou." He is to be simply a Christian, to whom, whatever the world may say, or the world-element in the Church, Christ the crucified is Lord indeed.

Following these appeals, in a connexion which we can trace, the thought pa.s.ses (ver. 17) to the Christian Ministry. "Outside the gate" of the old order, the disciple finds himself at once not an isolated unit but included in _a new order_. He is one of a spiritual community, which has of course its system, for it has to cohere and to operate. It has amidst it its "leaders," its [Greek: hegoumenoi], its pastoral guides and watchmen, a recognized inst.i.tution, which always as such (though always the more as it is more true to its ideal) claims the obedience, the loyalty, the subordination, of the mult.i.tude who are not "leaders."

These "leaders" are set before us as bearing a Divine commission, for we read that they "must _give account_." So qualified, not as a.s.sertors of themselves but as servants and agents of G.o.d, they watch for souls, with a vigilance loving and tender, asking for response.

Such an ideal of the Christian Ministry is as remote as possible from that of a sacerdotal caste, or indeed of anything that has to do with a harsh and perfunctory officialism. Its position is totally different from that of an agency of mediation between man and G.o.d, between the Church and her Lord. We have one pa.s.sing note of this in the fact, present in other Epistles as in this, that the Ministry is addressed and greeted through the Church rather than the Church through the Ministry.

See below, ver. 24: "Salute your leaders." If we may put it so, the Christian clergy are so far from being the sole deliverers of the apostolic writings to the people that the people rather have to deliver such messages to the clergy.

Yet on the other hand this pa.s.sage is one of the many which set the Christian Ministry before us as a vital factor in the life of the Church, an inst.i.tution which has its life from above, not from the will of the community but from the gift of G.o.d. In their anxiety to avoid distortions and exaggerations of the ministerial idea many Christians have failed to give adequate place in thought to its essentially Divine origin and commission. A pa.s.sage like this should correct such a reaction. There is in the Church, by the will of G.o.d, a "leadership,"

recognizable, authentic, not arbitrary yet authoritative, not mediatorial yet pastoral. It is never designed indeed to come really between the believing soul and the ever-present Lord. Yet it is appointed as the norm a human agency by which He works for the soul, not only in the solemn ministration of His great ordinances of blessing but in spiritual a.s.sistance and guidance as well. It will be the pastor's folly if he so insists upon the imagery of shepherding as to forget for one moment that the "sheep" are also, and in a larger aspect, his equal brethren and sisters, "the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty." It will be his folly, and the ruin of his true authority, if he forgets in any part of his service that he is not the master but the servant of the Church. If in his "guidance" he dares to domineer, and if in his teaching he takes the tone of one who can _dictate_ any point of faith or duty, on his own authority, apart from the Word of G.o.d, he is fatally mistaking his whole function. Nevertheless he is called to be a "leader," with the responsibilities and duties of a leader. This thought is to keep him always humble, and always intently on the watch over his own life. But it is to be present also to the members of the Church, to remind them always to _tend towards_ that generous "obedience" with which Christian freedom safeguards Christian order. The Church is never to forget the responsibility of the Ministry; it is to a.s.sist the Ministry in its true discharge. For in this also "we are members one of another."

The closing sentences of the great Letter (ver. 18 and onwards) call for little detailed explanation, with one great exception. The Writer asks for intercessory prayer for himself and his colleagues, in the accent of one who knows his own unreserved desire (ver. 18) to keep his whole "life-walk honourable," [Greek: kalos anastrephesthai]. He asks specially for this help, with a view to his own speedier return to his disciples (ver. 19), an allusion which we cannot now explain for certain. At the very end (verses 22-25), with a n.o.ble modesty, in the tone of the true Christian leader, drawing, not driving, he asks for "patience" over his "appeal" ([Greek: paraklesis]), his solemn call for loyalty to the Christ of G.o.d under all the trials of the time.

He has "used brevity" ([Greek: dia bracheon]) in writing; he might have expanded the vast theme indefinitely; he has only given them its essentials. Then he makes his one personal reference, abruptly, as if speaking about well-known circ.u.mstances; Timotheus (ver. 23) has been released from prison, and is on his way to join the Writer, and the two may hope to visit the Hebrews together again. Then follows the greeting to the pastors through the Church; and then a message of love sent by "those from Italy," that is to say, as the familiar idiom suggests, brethren resident in Italy who send their greeting from it; an allusion over which endless conjectures may gather but which must always remain uncertain. The last word is the blessing of grace. "Grace"--the holy effect upon the Church, and upon the saint, of "G.o.d for us" and "G.o.d in us"--"be with you all."

We have thus followed this final pa.s.sage to its end, but making, as the reader will have seen, one great omission. The twentieth and twenty-first verses stand by themselves, with such an elevation of their own, with such a tranquil majesty of diction, with such a pregnant depth of import, that I could not but reserve my brief comment on them to the very last in these attempts to carry "Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews."

"Now the G.o.d of peace, who hath brought again from the dead the Shepherd of the sheep, that great Shepherd, with blood of covenant eternal, even our Lord Jesus--may He perfect you in all good unto the doing of His will, doing in you that which is acceptable before Him, by means of Jesus Christ; to whom be the glory to the ages of the ages. Amen."

Here is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the benedictory prayers of the Bible. At every turn it sets before us truths of the first order, woven into one wonderful texture. It presents to us our G.o.d as "the G.o.d of peace," the G.o.d who has welcomed us to reconciliation and is now and for ever reconciled; at peace with us and we with Him. It sets full in view the supreme fact upon which that certainty reposes, the Resurrection of His Christ, recorded here and only here in the long Epistle, as the act and deed by which the Father sealed before the universe His acceptance of the Son for us. It connects that Resurrection with its mighty antecedent, the atoning Death, in words pregnant with the truths characteristic of the Epistle; the Lord, the great Shepherd, was "brought again from the dead" (the phrase is reminiscent of Isa.

lxiii. 11, with its memories of Moses and the ascent of Israel from the parted waters), "in the blood" (as it were attended, authenticated, ent.i.tled, by the blood) "of covenant eternal," that supreme Compact of Divine love of which twice over (chapters viii., x.) the Epistle has spoken; under which, for the slain Mediator's sake, G.o.d both forgives iniquity and transfigures the will of the forgiven. Then the prayer follows upon these mighty premisses. The Teacher asks, with the authority of an inspired benediction, that this G.o.d of peace, of covenant, of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus, would carry out the covenant-promise in His new Israel to the full. May He "perfect" them, that is to say, equip them on every side with every requisite of grace, for the supreme purpose of their existence, the doing of His will in everything. May He so inhabit and inform them, through His Son, by His Spirit, that He shall be the will within their will, the force beneath their weakness, "working in them to will and to do for His good pleasure's sake" (Phil. ii. 13). To Him, the Father, be glory for ever.

To Him, the Son, be glory for ever. Who shall decide, and who need decide, to which Divine Person the relative p.r.o.noun [Greek: ho]

precisely attaches? The glory is to the Father in the Son, to the Son in the Father.

One closing word remains. Observe this designation just here applied to the Lord Jesus Christ; "the Shepherd, the great Shepherd, of the sheep."

It is noteworthy, because in our Epistle it stands here quite alone. We have had the Christ of G.o.d presented to us throughout under the totally different character of the High Priest, the great Self-Immolator of the Cross, now exalted in the glory of His High Priesthood to be the Giver of blessing from the Throne. To Him in that sublime aspect the thought of the Hebrew believer, so sorely tempted to look away from Him, to look backward to the old and ended order, has been steadily directed, for spiritual rest of conscience and for loyalty of will. But here, true to that _habit_ of the Bible, if the word may be used, with which it acc.u.mulates on Him the most diverse t.i.tles in the effort to set forth His fulness, the Writer exchanges all this range of thought for the one endearing designation of the SHEPHERD of the sheep. It was as such that He went down to death, giving for the flock His life. It was as such that He is "brought again," to rescue, to watch, to feed, to guide His beloved charge, "in the power of life indissoluble."

Not without purpose surely was the Lord left pictured thus in the view of His tried and tempted followers. In the region of conviction and contemplation He was to shine always before them as the High Priest upon His throne, the more than fulfilment of every type and shadow, the goal of Prophecy, "the end of the Law." But He was to be all this as being also, close beside them, their Shepherd, great and good. He was to be with them in the pasture, and in the desert, and in the valley of the shadow of death. They had followed Him indeed as their Sacrifice without the gate. But precisely there He took to Himself His resurrection-life, to be their Companion and their Watcher for evermore. The Lord was their Shepherd, and He is ours; they should not, and we shall not, want.