Psalm 26 | Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Jeremy Richards
The bulk of Jesus’ ministry took place in the region of Lower Galilee, in the northern part of Israel with the town of Capernaum serving as a kind of home base. But over time, especially after being rejected in his home town of Nazareth, he began to push the boundaries of his ministry out further and further. On one occasion, he travelled with his disciples to the city of Caesarea Philippi, at the northernmost point of Israel.
On their way there, he asked them an important question, maybe the most important question. I imagine these 12 young men walking together in an untidy line, bunched up in groups of 2, 3, or 4, laughing and maybe even rough housing. I imagine Jesus ahead of them, on his own, deep in thought – wanting to ask this question, but afraid to, the way it’s always hard to bring up a serious topic to someone who is completely oblivious to what you’re going to say. Finally, he thinks of an easier question to ask, one that will get their attention and open the door to the question he really wants to ask them.
“Who do people say that I am?” he asks rather suddenly. They all quiet down and hurry to catch up to their teacher, their rabbi, as they’ve learned to do. They’ve been with him a while now and they’ve learned that
They think about his question. “John the Baptist,” Andrew says. “Elijah,” James, the son of Zebedee says. “Or Jeremiah,” James’ little brother John chimes in. “Or maybe one of the other prophets,” Thaddeus says.
They probably could’ve come up with some other answers, but Jesus doesn’t really care who other people say he is, at least not right now. He wants to know what they think of him, these young fisherman, zealots, and tax collectors who have become all at once his disciples, his friends, and his family. So he cuts them short while they’re still thinking. His question leaps out abruptly, jolting them out of their thought, “But who do you say that I am?” he asks. And there’s, maybe, a hint of desperation in his voice. Because we all want to be known.
Now there is a new silence that settles over the group, alone on this road between Bethsaida and Caesarea Philippi. The disciples are now confronted with the question they’ve been turning over in their own minds for months and months. It’s the question that has kept them up at night, the question they’ve whispered amongst themselves when Jesus calmed the storm or fed 5,000 people or cast a legion of demons out of a foreign man: “Who is this?” they ask one another. The question is always in the back of their minds, always defying an easy explanation. They have given up everything to follow this man – left behind families and homes and jobs – and yet they haven’t been able to answer the question.
But now they have no choice, because their rabbi has asked them point blank, and he’s looking at them with anticipation and maybe a bit of anxiety. He’s opened himself to them, made himself vulnerable. There are few questions more risky than, “What do you think of me, really?” He knows who he is, but do they know who he is? What will they say? The silence hangs for what feels like an eternity, but then Peter speaks, his voice only a whisper, but it rips through the hush, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”
The same question Jesus asked his disciples confronts all of us as we read our way through the Gospels. One minute we are sitting in our favorite chair with a warm cup of coffee or tea on the table beside us and our Bible in our lap, or we’re sitting in “our spot” at church on a Sunday morning, and then in an instant we find ourselves on an old dusty road in the Middle East, surrounded by a motley crew of brown-skinned young Jewish men, with unkempt hair and holes in their clothes. We stand with them in the silence, and we turn the question over in our heads alongside them.
It's the Christian conviction that this is the most important question we will ever be asked. Our whole lives turn on the question, “Who is Jesus Christ?” It’s the doorway between life as we know it and the new life of God has made available to us through Christ, the life we were always meant to inherit.
In the opening of the book of Hebrews, the author attempts to flesh out Peter’s answer. She too, no doubt, confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. But what does that mean? Such an answer is a beginning, not an ending. It’s the entrance into new life, eternal life. Eternal life isn’t about living forever, it’s a quality of life – the divine life – the life of God bursting into creation through the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s the red pill that takes us out of the Matrix, and sets us on a whole new journey.
(As an aside, you may have noticed that I referred to the author of Hebrews as “she.” The author of Hebrews is unknown, but it’s been argued that it may have been Priscilla, the wife of Aquila. Priscilla was a prominent woman leader in the early church and a friend of Paul and Timothy’s. Of course we can’t know if Priscilla was the author or not. We have no idea who wrote it. But since we don’t know, I’m going to attribute it to Priscilla, at least for this sermon.)
At the beginning of Hebrews, Priscilla doesn’t waste time on niceties. Matching the abruptness of Jesus’ question – “But who do you say that I am?” – she offers no greeting, no introduction. Without warning we are launched into a theological treatise on the identity of Christ that is equal parts beautiful and complex. The theologian D. Stephen Long says, “If Hebrews were a symphony it would begin with the crescendo. Before we have time to prepare ourselves to listen well, Hebrews sounds forth it’s central themes.”[i] The first 4 verses are so dense that Long spends 25 pages of his relatively short commentary trying to unpack them. In contrast, he spends only 5 pages on the other 7 verses we heard read this morning.
Like the Gospel of John and the first chapter of Colossians, Priscilla begins with Christ’s cosmic identity. God has appointed him the heir of all thing, through him God created the worlds. He now sits “at the right hand of the Majesty on high,” and has been given a superior, more excellent name, which, though not given in the text, is thought to be the very name of God, which Jews did not speak: Yahweh. He is both “a reflection of God’s glory” and also an “exact imprint of God’s very being.” He is, in the words of the Gospel of John, the Logos that both “was with God and is God.” He is both an exact imprint and a reflection of God the Parent.
These opening 4 verses are a wonderful example of what is called a “high Christology,” an understanding of Jesus’ identity that focuses on his divinity. Christ isn’t just a good human, not just a moral example to be followed. He is much, much more than that. He is the heir of all things and it is only through him that God the Parent created all that is. Not only is it through him that all that is exists, but he alone sustains it. He is the life force for all existence.
Throughout time, God has spoken to humanity through many different people and traditions, Priscilla says, but God has spoken definitively in Jesus. Jesus is the fullness of the revelation of God. She says that God spoke through others in the past, but I would say the same is true in the present and the future. God continues to speak to people throughout the world through many different faiths and traditions, but the biblical claim, and the claim of Christians of all different stripes throughout the centuries, is that God has spoken most definitively, most fully in the person of Jesus Christ. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant or close-minded. I believe God does speak through many other religions and faiths. But there is a reason we are here today, and that reason is the person of Jesus Christ.
It's our belief that it is through Christ that God reconciled Godself to the world. It’s through Christ that we receive that eternal quality of life I spoke of a minute ago. It’s through Christ that we can know God and become God’s children. And wherever God meets others – in all kinds of faiths and traditions throughout time and space – it is, in fact, Christ who mediates, though he may go by other names in those traditions.
If the first four verses offer us a high Christology, the next five balance it out with a low Christology, which focuses on his humanity. The author interprets Psalm 8 creatively, taking the psalm to refer not to humanity in general, but to Christ, who is also called the Son of Man (or the “Human One”). A prominent thought in the New Testament is that Christ becomes a stand in for all of humanity, so that what he accomplishes all of humanity accomplishes through him. Through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Christ initiates a new path for all of humanity – through death and into God’s glory (which is, again, another way to speak of God’s eternal life).
In our reading today, Priscilla calls him the archegon, which is translated as “pioneer” in our Bibles, when v. 10 says, “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.” Archegon means both the founder and the leader. So Jesus both initiates, creates, “founds” salvation, and also leads us to salvation. Kind of like how the founder of an organization often stays on after founding the organization to lead it.
The second half of our reading claims that the very same Christ that the first four verses spoke of in such cosmic language – who existed since before time, who is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, who sustains all things, and who has been given that most excellent name – was made, in the words of the psalmist, “for a little while lower than the angels” when he became human and experienced human death. But because he became human, and not only became human but also suffered and died as a human – because of those things and not in spite of them, “because of the suffering and death,” Priscilla says – he has been “crowned with glory and honor.”
What comes through, then, in these theologically dense (but again, very beautiful) verses is Christ’s radical humility and radical solidarity with humanity. Christ so enters into life with us, that the “exact imprint of God’s very being” became our brother. The Word that was “with God and is God” has called us his siblings. In order to bring “many children to glory,” that is, to sweep us up into the life, the glory, of God, the cosmic Christ who is above all things became lower than the angels and took on the human condition – all of it, even death. But death was not the end for him, and because it wasn’t the end for him, it won’t be the end for us either. Through death he establishes the path to salvation, the path to God. And now he serves as our pioneer, our leader, the archegon who will also show us the way through death and into eternal life.
Jesus Christ is not simply a role model to emulate, though he is that too. He is the door, the path through which God reaches into our lives and pulls us into relationship with God. He is the means by which God makes of us a “new creation,” so much so that we are said to be in him while he is also in us.
What I’m trying to get at is that, if we will let him, Christ can and will change our lives, not through an exterior ethic, but through an interior, spiritual transformation, one that is not instantaneous but on-going throughout this life and into the next.
But to say it’s interior and spiritual is not to say that it doesn’t have outward, ethical ramifications. Philippians 2 makes a very similar claim to what we heard from Hebrews this morning. In that book, the author, Paul, makes a very similar claim: that Christ shared equality with God but didn’t consider that equality as something to be exploited or grasped, but instead humbled himself and became human and even died, and then was glorified and given the name “that is above every name” (see, very similar). But that passage from Philippians begins with this charge: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited…”.
In other words, the humility and solidarity Christ showed in his life is to be made evident in our lives as well. Just as Christ was unafraid to enter into the human condition and the risk of death, so we must not hold back from entering into the most broken, hurting, and dangerous parts of the world. Just as Christ showed solidarity with us, so we must live in solidarity with our neighbors, especially those who are the most vulnerable to poverty, violence, and discrimination.
But we can’t live that kind of life through sheer will-power and good intentions. Instead, it is Christ in us, transforming our hearts and minds, transforming our very being, making us Christ-like. Christ became what we are so that we might become what Christ is. Athanasius said in the 4th century, “The Son of God became [human] so that we might become God.”[ii]
That may sound sacrilegious, but it’s right there in our reading: “For the one who sanctifies (Christ) and those who are sanctified (humanity) all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.” Priscilla argues that there is a radical, almost blasphemous equality that exists between us and Christ, but it isn’t blasphemous because it isn’t because of what we’ve done, but because of what Christ has done. He has lowered himself that he might elevate us, and “bring many children to glory.”
But Christ will never force glory on us. As we said last week, as love, God can’t be controlling or coercive. And so he stands at the door and knocks, he asks us who we say he is. As Christians, saying yes is a two-part process. First, we say it verbally in one way or another. We say with Peter, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” Or we say we Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”
But because salvation isn’t simply about intellectual ascent to certain truths, but about a transformed way of life, and because salvation is not only spiritual but bodily, we also say yes with our bodies. Through baptism we wade out into the life of God, feel it rising from our ankles to our knees to our hips to our chests. We say yes to the call of Christ. We are plunged – all of us: mind, body, and soul – into the sea of God’s glory. Our old self sluffs off, carried away by the current, and as we are pulled from waves, we are made new.
[i] D. Stephen Long, Hebrews, 20.
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinization_(Christian)