“The word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart. No creature is concealed from him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account.”
The Letter to the Hebrews was most likely written as a sermon to encourage and reawaken the faith in the Jewish Christians who were in danger of giving up on it, not because of persecution from outsiders, but because they were becoming weary of the demands of the Christian life and were growing indifferent to the faith in the face of the constant and continuing temptations to the immediacy of worldly pleasures and worldly concerns. Sound familiar? The author reminds the Jewish listeners/readers of the weariness, indifference, and eventually the infidelity that the Hebrews fell into in the desert, even shortly after their liberation from slavery in Egypt. As we travel our lifelong pilgrimage toward the kingdom of heaven, we often find ourselves enduring the trials and temptations that lead to frustration, indifference, even boredom.
The author of Hebrews was calling the Jewish Christian community (and us today) to reawaken our original joy in accepting Jesus as the promised word of God. After all, we are armed with the two-edged sword of his living Word, and because of this, we can cut through temptations to boredom, indifference, and all those things that fetter us and our world to ways of thinking and doing inspired by other ‘kingdoms.’ The early Church Father, St. John Chrysostom, wrote of this passage, “Do not then, when hearing the Word, think of it lightly. For God is ‘sharper than a sword. He judges the inner heart, for there he passes through, both punishing and searching out. All things are laid open to that eye, all things are clear and manifest; there is nothing able to escape it. All are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render account.”
The first sentence of the book The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck, MD, says simply: “Life is difficult.” We all understand this by reason of experience. The difficulties and demands of life, with the innumerable decisions and responsibilities it puts on us, can, at times, become wearisome, sometimes to the point where we feel we can’t take it any more and we want to just chuck it all and go fishing, so to speak. This can be especially true in our own times, so often driven by a kind of frenetic pursuit after fleeting passions and material things. These things, though, have no life in them. Because they have no life in them, they possess no power to offer us the lasting happiness we so deeply desire and pursue.
The author of Hebrews is reminding the Jewish Christians (and us) of their former joyful acceptance of Jesus as the One who had, from the beginning, been proclaimed and promised as the climax, the fulfillment of the Word of God to humanity; and of their faith in him as the final word of salvation, a living word that was spoken into our humanity out of God’s inexpressible love for us. The author reminds us of God’s perpetual love for us and his infinitely faithful intercession on our behalf. His central theme, then, is of the sacrifice that Jesus made on our behalf, and of the necessary courage not just to call ourselves followers of Jesus, but to live our faith in him openly, willingly and sacrificially; to resist this world’s manifold temptations to boredom, indifference, or to despair of the faith.
Lord, open our hearts and strengthen us with the two-edged sword of your Word. Enable us to discern more clearly the pull of the temptations to boredom and indifference, so that we can remain faithful to your Word, regardless of the trials or the costs. Give us the gift of faithful obedience to your Word, and the courage to accept the responsibilities that come with the freedom you have given us in faith.
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