Hebrews

Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching

Thomas G. Long

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781611649215
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Hebrews is a sermon from the early Christian church that addresses a real, urgent, and still relevant pastoral problem: a struggling congregation that may not keep the faith. Thomas Long shows how Hebrews exhorts the church to face its challenges and hold true, even into the twenty-first century.

Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

Jesus, the Last Word,
and the First

HEBREWS 1:1–4

The book of Hebrews begins not just with a thought, but with a sound, the sound of a preacher’s voice. When the first phrase of Hebrews is read aloud in the original Greek, we can hear with the ear what could easily be missed with the eye alone: the richness of its tones and the rise and fall of its melody. The rhythms and resonances of the words leap off the page. From the very opening sentence, then, the reader of Hebrews is aware that, though what follows is filled with profound theological concepts and symbols, this is not a lecture or an essay or a philosophical treatise; this has the unmistakable sound of a sermon.

It is almost as if the Preacher who composed Hebrews spreads out sermon notes on a pulpit somewhere, looks out at the congregation, pauses a moment in dramatic suspense, and then begins with words as graceful and rhythmical as the beat of a human heart: “Polymeros kai polytropos palai . . .” (“In many fragments and in many fashions in former times . . .,” 1:1). Like the initial line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Fourscore and seven years ago . . .,” these opening words of Hebrews display the cadence, the alliteration, and the keen awareness of the musical flow of beautifully spoken language that signal a carefully and poetically crafted oral event, a style that is sustained throughout the book. In black and white on the printed page, Hebrews appears to be a bit like an epistle, or even a theological monograph, but, when it sounds in the ear, we know immediately that we are not in the library reading an essay but in the pew listening to a sermon.

The eloquence of Hebrews is so striking that, over the years, many have conjectured it must have been written by Apollos, a well-known early Christian preacher, described in Acts as “an eloquent man” who “spoke with burning passion” (Acts 18:24–25). No one today knows, of course, who wrote Hebrews (see Introduction), but one can certainly see why Apollos’s name would appear high on the list of possibilities. Whoever wrote Hebrews was indeed “eloquent” and “burning with passion.”

Even if we cannot solve the mystery of who wrote Hebrews, we do wonder about this author’s purpose in producing such an odd hybrid: a written document crafted to sound like a sermon. Hebrews possesses an especially strong oral, sermonic quality because it was designed actually to be read aloud as a part of congregational worship, and the writer, an insightful and gifted preacher, did what effective preachers customarily do: employed language in ways that would have aural impact when spoken aloud to a group gathered for worship. In other words, there is a possibility that Hebrews is a sermon manuscript that a preacher in one location wrote for another preacher to preach in some other place. But even if this is not the case, even if Hebrews is not written literally to be read in a service of worship in the sanctuary, it is written for an act of worship in the imagination. No matter where or when Hebrews is read, even when it is read silently and alone, it transports us into the sanctuary, to the place of praise and to the occasion of the sermon. Its metered measures evoke the ethos of worship and the familiar tempo of proclamation, and this is theologically significant in at least three ways:

1. The Evocative Text. Like every effective sermon, even those that make hard and demanding challenges, Hebrews is crafted to be savored and enjoyed, not simply devoured and endured. There is evocative pleasure in reading and hearing this well-spoken text. From the outset, the readers (and hearers) recognize the rhythms of a fine sermon and set their expectations accordingly. “Faith comes,” writes Paul, “from what is heard” (Rom. 10:17), and the writer of Hebrews would emphatically agree (see 2:1, 3).

In the gloomiest days of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke this strangely lovely and memorable phrase: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” These were not simply historic words about courage, they were words that generated courage. Hearing them did not merely convey information about being confident in the face of fear; hearing them evoked that very confidence, created a world where that boldness could be possible. In curious way, then, Roosevelt’s phrase can be called “pleasurable,” since it transports the hearer from a constricted and frightening world to a place of promise and hope. Just so, the “hair-raising eloquence” of Hebrews, its surprising and breathtaking rhetorical hills and valleys, the shapely and pleasurable contours of its speech, are no mere ornaments; they create a landscape on which the gospel can be seen in the vividness of its many colors, seen against the gray backdrop of all lesser alternatives, and, having been seen, can become a joyful, confident, and life-giving event of faith for the readers.

2. The Communal Text. The “oral tone” of Hebrews recreates the communal, congregational event of hearing, as opposed to the individualized act of reading. A student of the spoken word, Walter Ong, observes that “the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups. When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker.” But if the speaker decides to clarify a point by asking the audience to refer to a handout, the result is that each person “enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be reestablished only when oral speech begins again” (Ong, p. 74).

The Preacher of Hebrews has produced a written sermon, but one with the marks of an oral event. As such, he does not address discrete individuals, but rather “brothers and sisters, holy partners in a heavenly calling” (3:1).

3. The Dialogical Text. Hebrews, like all good sermons, is a dialogical event in a monological format. The Preacher does not hurl information and arguments at the readers as if they were targets. Rather, Hebrews is written to create a conversation, to evoke participation, to prod the faithful memories of the readers. Beginning with the first sentence, “us” and “we” language abounds. Also, the Preacher employs rhetorical questions to awaken the voice of the listener (see 1:5 and 1:14, for example); raps on the pulpit a bit when the going gets sluggish (5:11); occasionally restates the main point to insure that even the inattentive and drowsy are on board (see 8:1); doesn’t bother to “footnote” sources the hearers already know quite well (see the familiar preacher’s phrase in 2:6: “Someone has said somewhere . . .”); and keeps making explicit verbal contact with the listeners (see 3:12 and 6:9, for example) to remind them that they are not only supposed to be listening to this sermon, they are also expected, by their active hearing, to be a part of creating it. As soon as we experience the rise and fall of the opening words of Hebrews, the readers become aware that they are not simply watching a roller coaster hurtle along the rhetorical tracks; they are in the lead car. In Hebrews, the gospel is not merely an idea submitted for intellectual consideration; it is a life-embracing demand that summons to action.

So as an evocative, communal, and dialogical text, Hebrews is not a tight argument, hard as a diamond with sharply cut facets; it is, instead, a sermonic exhortation (13:22) with an open weave, porous to the participation of the readers. It finally stands or falls not on its irreducible logic but on its capacity to be the soil in which an event of faith grows in the imaginations of those who read it. The reader does not come to the end of Hebrews exclaiming, “Q.E.D.; that proves it!” but rather, “Amen! I hear this, I see this in the eye of faith, I believe this, I will live this!” When faith sounds in the ear, then it reverberates in the heart.

God Talk (1:1)

In terms of theological content, Hebrews opens with a poetic description of divine revelation as the speech act of God (1:1). God is pictured not as a silent and distant force, impassively regulating the universe, but as a talker, as One who has been speaking, arguing, pleading, wooing, commanding, telling stories, conversing, and generally spinning words across the lines between heaven and earth since the beginning of time.

The concept of divine revelation as speech is, of course, a metaphor, but a crucial one. Primarily it implies that, just as speech is an active interruption of silence, a disturbance of the stillness caused by the force of sound waves, so revelation is an active intrusion by God into our world and not a passive process. God moves the powers; God causes the sun to rise, God shakes the foundations; God breaks the chains; God labors in the world: all of the activity of God in creation reveals the character of God and is gathered up in the concept of divine revelatory speech.

In this sense, revelation is far more than mere human discernment of the holy; it is an event, an act of God toward humanity. Revelation is being “spoken to”; it is a holy summons, a disturbance of our peace. Revelation is not initially what we do to find and to name God, but what God does towards us to seek and to save and to restore all creation. Revelation is not human beings bringing ourselves to the place where we can see God hidden in every flower, star, and cloud, but God bringing us to the awareness that the heavens are preaching a word we could not know on our own and that flowers, stars, clouds—indeed the whole universe, as well as the entire fabric of human history—are telling a story of God’s glory beyond our imagining. Revelation is not primarily the discovery of some grand design stealthily concealed in the complex patterns of nature, awaiting a science sophisticated enough to map it, but a shout in the street crying news we could not have anticipated, news that God is at work in creation, providing and saving, reconciling and judging, nurturing and healing. God speaks.

Every talker needs a partner, someone to listen and to speak in return, and God’s conversational confidants have been, in particular, “our ancestors” (1:1, Greek = “fathers”), that is, the people of Israel, the Old Testament people of God. There is a reciprocal relationship implied between the speech of God and the people of God. The recipients of the divine word are God’s people, but it is by virtue of being addressed by God, gathered up in the holy conversation, that they are made God’s people in the first place. In short, God turned toward the Hebrews and “talked them into being” the people of God, the children of the promise (see 6:13–15). The speech of God creates its own family of faithful hearers: “ancestors,” not in the biological sense, but in the acoustic sense, a genealogy of those who have been hearers of the Word and thus kinfolk in the faith. The writer of Hebrews, faithful to the narratives of the Old Testament, knows that to be the people of God is not primarily to be given secret illumination or mystical enlightenment, but rather to be drawn into a lively and life-changing conversation. This God is One who speaks eventfully, and the people of God are those who have ears to hear and who speak and act in response.

God speaks, Hebrews tells us, “in many and various ways” (1:1), which is more accurately rendered “in many fragments and in many fashions.” Though some have argued that “fragments” and “fashions” are synonymous terms and that the writer is simply being redundant for rhetorical effect, the two expressions probably point to somewhat differing aspects of the experience of God’s revelation:

1. God speaks “in many fragments,” that is, a word here and there, now and then. The speech of God is not unbroken chatter, like an all-night radio talk show, but episodes of speech punctuating seasons of silence. God spoke, for example, to Samuel in the temple, but this event of divine speech interrupted a long stretch when “the word of the Lord was rare . . .” (1 Sam. 3:1). Or again, when the Canaanite woman came to Jesus, begging for mercy for her tormented daughter, his word of grace and healing came only after a cryptic period of silence (see Matt. 15:21–28, esp. v. 23).

In W. H. Auden’s poem “Victor, a Ballad,” Victor has been betrayed by his wife, and in his distress he flees his home on a desperate journey of grief. He walks out onto High Street, past the garbage dump, and out to the town’s edge. There he stands in his sorrow, weeping.

Victor looked up at the sunset

As he stood there all alone;

Cried: “Are you in Heaven, Father?”

But the sky said “Address not known.”

(Auden, Collected Poems, p. 140)

We do not know why the revelation of God is episodic, why God speaks in fragments, why the will of God seems crystal clear in one circumstance only to be an opaque “address not known” in another. We only know that there is a mysterious rhythm to the speech and silence of God that uncoils from the wild and wise freedom of God and that it is the experience of faithful people to say, like the psalmist, “For God alone my soul waits in silence” (Ps. 62:1).

And it is also the experience of God’s people that out of the silence God does speak, and speak in timely, healing, and strengthening ways. In Bearing the Cross, David Garrow tells about such a moment in the life of Martin Luther King Jr. In the middle of the Montgomery bus boycott, King was facing a personal crisis of confidence. With negotiations with the city bogging down and resistance from the white community strengthening, King was growing not only weary but frightened as well. He had received over forty telephone calls threatening his life and the well-being of his family. Late one night, King returned home from a meeting only to receive yet another call warning him to leave town soon if he wanted to stay alive.

Unable to sleep after this disturbing threat, he sat at the kitchen table and worried. In the midst of his anxiety something told him that he could no longer call on anyone for help but God. So he prayed, confessing his weakness and his loss of courage. “At that moment,” he said later, “I could hear an inner voice saying to me ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for the truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’” It was, realized King, the voice of Jesus speaking a word of promise, a word of reassurance, a timely word of comfort and strength (Garrow, p. 58).

2. God also speaks “in many fashions.” The metaphor of divine speech encompasses, of course, the infinite ways that God’s presence, activity, and will are made known to human beings. Sometimes God speaks through visions and by stimulating flashes of insight, at other times God speaks through political movements and the shaking of the powers. Here God speaks in a dream or a waterfall, there in a prophetic oracle or a pillar of fire, or again in the still small voice, the commandments of the law, the stories of kings, the rest...