March 2, 2010

Hebrews 5

What's odd to me about this chapter is that Jesus as the High Priest works much better with the High Priest tradition of non-Jewish religions that were still holding on at the time. The High Priest who died every spring (and lay with a representative of Mother Earth) and was reborn to bring life back to the world. Jesus replaced these priests for all time. You must admit it fits better. A new kind of High Priest of the Jewish faith seems exactly what His disciples at times wanted Him to be - when he had to explain that He wasn't.

Was it an attempt to claim Him for the Jewish faith? Or is that too cynical? After all, it's Paul of the Gentile Ministry we're talking about here. He argues against that kind of stuff all the time. But then, perhaps he's out of his element here. He's not the one sent to the people to whom he's writing. There are a lot of things he seems worried about clearing up though.

What we probably get from the first five chapters as a whole, then, is the idea that several years after his death, Jesus might have been being downgraded, already, to "really cool prophet people got confused and said was the Son of God." And that whole resurrection thing...really? Sounds kind of kooky.

And at the end of the chapter, Paul lays it out for them (and me, who's over here trying to make sense of it): you've forgotten the basics. You're losing track of what's true and false, right and wrong, even good and evil. "Dull in understanding." "For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the oracles of God."

Harsh. I suppose we all need a slap in the face about it now and again though. And the thing about the current theory on life, the universe and everything to do with God is that if it feels okay to you then it must be okay with God. I've said that recently myself (obviously not quite like that but "I know God's okay with this."). And, well, that's great if you have thought it out and studied the issue and prayed about it and worked through all the delicate issues and come to a soulful conclusion. If you're "mature" and your "faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil."

For the rest of us, we have plenty of guidelines. And perhaps for those who still "need milk not solid food," the basic black and white precepts make more sense. But Jesus came so that we could look beyond all of that to the person. It's a shame to get stuck there. It's better than running around as if we're mature in our faith when we're really just letting ourselves off of the hook about everything, but the point of growing up and growing in our faith and just plain growing at all is to get beyond these simpler views of right and wrong, good and evil, to see the new world Jesus Christ brought to Earth with him.

A New Order He died for, more fully than any High Priest of olde, and for people who need reminding of very basic stuff. We must never forget to do the work of transcending the black and white so that we see the truth and picture beyond it - rather than just dismissing the distinction entirely.

And I think a good way to know the difference between when we are "unskilled in the word of righteousness" and "trained by practice to distinguish good from evil" is that it gets harder to tell, from the inside, just what that is but we get it right more of the time. Then again, maybe it gets simpler but harder to act upon. Or maybe we all just need milk rather than solid food.