Welcome to Lection and Liturgy

Welcome to Lection and Liturgy. I have backed up to this site a series of posts making a guide to the whole of the Christian Bible, aimed particularly at those who read it in public. My name's Doug Chaplin, I work as a priest and trainer in the Church of England. Everything here is written in a purely personal capacity. I hope the posts here will help people read Scripture in ways which help their listeners understand what is being read. You can read more about this site in this introductory post, and you can follow it in "book order" using this Reading Guide Index. So here it is: the Bible in 90 posts.

Visions, vindication and victory: the strange world of the Apocalypse

The Revelation to John, also known as the Apocalypse, contains seven letters, which make up the second and third chapters. However, it is not itself a letter, but the only New Testament book which as a whole is in the literary genre of apocalyptic. This is a type of literary description of visions that claim to unveil the meaning of history for those in the know.¹ They often contain the metaphor of a journey through heavenly or spiritual realms with a guide. The vision at the heart of the Apocalypse is that the soft power of the Lamb’s self-sacrifice will be triumphant over the hard power of the mighty Roman empire. While readings from this book are used on a number of feast days,¹ Revelation also provides the second reading for the Sundays of Easter in Year C. Its celebration of Christ’s triumph draws out a key aspect of the Easter gospel.

Readers are somewhat prone to introducing readings from this book wrongly. It is the Book of Revelation in the singular, not Revelations in the plural. The book itself claims to be the record of a single revelation, handed from God to Jesus and from Jesus via an angel to his servant John. There is only one secret to be unveiled: the triumph of God over evil through the cross of Christ.

Unfortunately, the obscurity and ambiguity of much of the language has made this a happy hunting ground for poets and revolutionaries, for heretics and lunatics alike. The most troubling ambiguity concerns its use of violence. Should we see the way in which the book portrays the “lion of the tribe of Judah” (Rev 5:5) as “a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered” (Rev 5:6) as its core, subverting the idea that victory is gained by violence? Or should we be stirred by such visions as that of the Word of God, clothed in a robe dipped in blood, riding on a white horse (Rev 19: 11-13): “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty (Rev 19:15).” Christians have taken the book in both ways, and it has stirred both non-violent and violent resistance movements.

The four horsemen, by Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps in recognition of its character as a disturbing book, one that nearly didn’t make it into the Bible, as well as one subject to multiple, and sometimes very strange interpretations, the lectionary takes only a select few readings from it.³ These tend to be the more straightforward passages, such as the opening ascription of praise to God, and pictures of worship in the heavenly throne room.⁴ Other readings come from the majestic closing chapters of the book, and the visions of a new heaven and a new earth, and the final triumph of God.⁵

There is only one reading from the stranger sections of Revelation used in both lectionaries, for the 15 August, in the Roman calendar the Assumption of Mary, and in the Anglican one a generic feast day of the Blessed Virgin.⁶ That passage is the sign of a woman in heaven, about to give birth to a child who will rule the nations.⁷ It is not surprising that traditional interpretation has applied that to Mary. But as in John’s gospel, there is probably more than one meaning. The evangelist never names Mary, but in her appearances at the beginning (John 2:1-11) at Cana, and the end (John 19:26-27) at the cross, she is simply described as Jesus’ mother.

It seems as if the lack of her name in the gospel is because John the evangelist also wants to use her as a symbol for Israel’s faithful remnant, from whom the Messiah came, who first trusted him, and who together with his new community of disciples, make up the church, the people of God. I suggest that something of the same symbolism is going on here in Revelation: the woman robed with the sun is both Mary, the mother of Jesus, but also the representative of the faithful remnant of Israel, on whose side (as in the book of Daniel) the archangel Michael fights the dragon.

That is, of course, why so many people either struggle with or thrill to the strange visions of the Apocalypse. So much of it is ambiguous, playing with multiple meanings. It wants to encourage the church with thoughts of the empire’s ultimate defeat, while encoding that message in sufficiently strange symbols that the Romans will fail to understand how subversive it is.

As readers today I suggest we should take our guide both from the caution with which the church accepted the book as scripture, and the carefully limited use the lectionary makes of it. There will always be those who will be misled into becoming anoraks obsessed with timetabling the end of the world (and inevitably getting it wrong). The Revelation to St John is simply too easy to misinterpret, and the core of our faith is expressed with much greater clarity in other scriptures, to which we should give the larger part of our attention.

Notes

1. There is discussion of this also in the post on the main Old Testament example, Daniel.

2. For example, All Saints’ Day, Michaelmas, Christ the King (Year B) and others.

3. There are a few more in the Revised Common Lectionary than there are in the Roman Catholic one.

4. Respectively Rev 1:4-8 for Easter 2 (and Christ the King), Rev 5:11-14 for Easter 3, and Rev 7:9-17 (or 7:9,14-17) for Easter 4

5. Respectively Rev 21:1-6 for Easter 5 (and All Saints’), slightly varying selections in the different lectionaries from Rev 21 and 22 for Easter 6 (either 21:10, 22 – 22:5 or 21:10-14,22-23) and Rev 22:12-14,16-17,20 for Easter 7.

6. Anglican diversity is such that some will pass the day over in silence, and others will mark it, like their Roman friends, with full panoply, as the Assumption.

7. The Roman reading is 11:19,12:1-6,10, the Anglican one the slightly longer 11:19–12.6,10.

The material reality of love: the letters of John

Although there are three letters which bear John’s name, the second and third are very short, and perhaps show something of how the teaching of the longer letter is put into action in some specific relationships. Only the first letter is used in the lectionary. This letter in particular shares some significant thinking and vocabulary with the Fourth Gospel. Whether this means they come from the same person or simply the same theological circles is impossible to say. None of them give their author a name. Tradition has associated them with John the Apostle, but there is no way of knowing exactly what relationship, if any, he had with the circles from which these writings came.

Detail from a portrait of John the Apostle by Alonso Cano. John is sometimes portrayed blessing a poisoned chalice. For more on this story, see the page for this picture at the Louvre.

Apart from the festivals of John the Apostle and All Saints’ Day, readings from 1 John provide the second reading in the Sundays of Easter during Year B. The letter is particularly suited to these Sundays because of its emphasis on the word of life, and that “we know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another (1 Jn 3:14)”. It is this combination of the gift of eternal life, and the insistence that life is to be lived in love, which make the letter prime Easter reading.

John, as we may call him for the sake of tradition and convenience, seems to live in a context where views of Jesus are contested. In contrast to those views he makes a number of claims about Jesus, not least that his death atones for the sins of the whole world (1 Jn 2:2). Jesus is to be identified with the Messiah (1 Jn 2:22), and lived a real human life. There is a considerable emphasis on Jesus having been real flesh and blood. John presumably knows of people claiming to be Christian who he thinks deny this.

The gift of the Spirit, then, is not detached from the physical gift of Jesus, and the quickest way to discern which spirit is God’s Spirit, is to see that those claiming inspiration from God confess that Jesus is the Messiah (1 Jn 4:2-3). The quality that marks the life of the church gathered round Jesus is meant to be love, and love is defined for us by God’s gift of Jesus, in the light of which we learn what it means to love selflessly (1 Jn 4:10-12). But just as it matters that Jesus has come in the flesh, so it matters that we show our love in action. “Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 Jn 4:20)

On the periphery of the Bible: 2 Peter and Jude

Some books of the Bible are effectively marginalised. In today’s church, Second Peter and Jude are among those which are pushed out to the edge of the canon. Modern scholars’ doubts that 2 Peter was written by Peter are paralleled by the early church’s reluctance to accept the book as one for public reading. Jude was rather more popular in the earliest centuries. When it comes to our lectionaries, there are only two readings from Second Peter, and none from Jude. One comes in Advent,¹ and the other is one of those provided for the Feast of the Transfiguration.²

Today’s scholarship is overwhelmingly convinced that 2 Peter is not from Peter’s hand, but written to perpetuate the author’s view of Peter’s teaching. It seems something almost written in the genre of a testament or farewell speech (see 2 Pet 1:14-15). Quite oddly, 2 Peter’s second chapter plagiarises the letter of Jude, which is a good reason for treating them together. Jude’s letter, like Peter’s second chapter, is rooted in traditions of Jewish interpretation and apocalyptic literature. Both are full of urgent and dire moral warning.

A detail from an illustration by Gustav Doré of John Milton’s Paradise Lost,
one of the most famous versions of the story of an angelic fall found in 2 Peter.

There are, in both of these, but more obviously in Jude’s version, ideas which show something of the mingling of various popular traditions with biblical stories. In 2 Peter 2:4, sinful angels³ are cast into Tartarus,⁴ normally the name of the deepest part of the Greek underworld where the Olympic gods imprisoned the Titans. This is the small acorn of text concerning fallen angels from which a huge mediaeval oak tree grew. Jude has a slightly different reference, but draws in stories from other Jewish legends (especially verses 9 and 14) to embellish the biblical accounts he refers to. Like a number of Jewish texts which “rewrite” the Bible, Jude does not distinguish between scripture and late expansion. It was for reasons like this that some early protestants had problems with these texts: another reason they have stayed peripheral.

One other key reason people reject the idea this was written even close to Peter’s lifetime is the reference to Paul’s letters (2 Pet 3:13–16). Some at least appear to exist already as a collection, which are treated primarily as inherited texts without any reference to a living Paul who is still teaching. They seem also (verse 16) to be referred to as “scriptures” – it is a moot point whether the word simply means “writings” or whether it has the sense of “sacred writings”.

The reading for the Transfiguration, Peter’s “eyewitness” account of it, seems to be one of those sorts of details put in to establish the identity of the author as Peter, quite unlike the understated claims of the first letter. The other reading, used in Advent, is the famous description explaining the delay between Christ’s resurrection and his coming in glory: “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day (2 Pet 3:8).”

Notes

1. Advent 2, Year B – 2 Peter 3:8-15a (or 8-14 in the Lectionary for Mass)

2. The same reading is also used when the Revised Common Lectionary uses the theme of the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent, Year A.

3. Probably this refers to the same “sons of God” from the mysterious beginning of the flood story that I noted in yesterday’s post on the First Letter of Peter.

4. Tartarus is used on a couple of occasions in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. In Proverbs 30:16, both Hades and Tartarus are used for poetic variation. In Job, it also appears to be for poetic reasons.

The first papal encyclical? 1 Peter

My title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Historically, Rome seems not to have had a single monarchical bishop until well into the second century. Nonetheless, there is a sense that, in looking back to Peter as the first pope, church tradition reflects his calling to be first among the apostles, the rather wobbly rock on which Jesus chooses to start building his church, as well as his clear association with Rome, from where this letter appears to be written. More accurately, calling it an encyclical picks up the way in which it is written to a circle of churches rather than a single congregation.

Peter’s first letter is read mainly on the Sundays of Easter during year A. This reflects the way in which it begins with a celebration of the resurrection which remains the frame for the rest of the letter. There are a number of overlaps with some of the letters of Paul, in language and theology. First Peter also shares an expectation with the later Pauline letters that women and slaves should seek to commend their faith by accepting the cultural restrictions their status imposes on them.

The need to urge this household respectability seems to suggest both that the early church was developing a widespread acceptance of accommodation towards basic household norms, and that there were enough Christians who flouted those norms in the name of their new faith for leaders to perceive it as a problem. Normally, repeated condemnation of particular behaviour is evidence that people are behaving in a way the writer or preacher disapproves of.

A considerable number of scholars don’t think the letter was written by Peter, partly because it’s so close to Paul in places, partly because of the guidance to households, partly because it’s addressed to churches in Asia Minor, and partly because it’s written in good Greek.¹ None of this substantially affects the meaning of the letter when you are reading it to others. Throughout this series, and generally, questions of authorship are less important to me than questions of meaning, but I tend to continue to think of Peter as the author.

I think proposed divisions between Peter and Paul are overdone: Paul has his own reasons for stressing his calling to Gentiles as unique (Gal 2:9). It’s not obvious that James and Peter shared his interpretation of their conversation. It’s quite possible that the Silvanus who helps Peter write this letter (1 Pet 5:12) is the same person as the Silvanus who helps Paul write the letters to the Thessalonians. (1 Thess 1:1, 2 Thess 1:1) When we see glimpses of Peter, whether in Acts at Cornelius’ house (Acts 10), or in Antioch eating with Gentiles (Gal 2:12) we see him apparently at ease with Greek speakers.²

The other feature (a contrast as we shall see with 2 Peter) is the very understated way the letter treats its author. Would any later writer, seeking to teach under Peter’s authority, not want to claim a higher status for him? But the letter comes simply from “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:1)” and he describes himself simply as “a fellow-elder and a witness to Christ’s sufferings (1 Pet 5:1 REB)”.

One other topic that often comes up in discussion of the author and date of the letter is that of suffering and persecution, which seems to be mentioned a number of times. The recipients have to “suffer various trials” (1 Pet 1:6); people “malign [them] as evildoers” (1 Pet 2:12); they may have to “suffer for doing what is right” (1 Pet 3:14, 17); they should take the example of Christ who “suffered in the flesh” (1 Pet 4:1); they are experiencing a “fiery ordeal” (1 Pet 4:12), and they need to remember that their “brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering (1 Pet 5:9).

Detail of the Martydom of Peter, traditionally crucified upside down. Painting by Michelangelo,
in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace, from the mid-16th century.

It is clear this letter is written to encourage Christians who are finding life hard; it is less clear why they are finding it hard. There is a very common picture of the early church which sees it constantly under imperial persecution. However, most persecution was local, casual and sporadic; it was not systematic, and may have been as much about the settling of feuds, community disputes and economic conflicts as about the content of the faith. The first really systematic persecutions come in the mid third century.

When we read of persecution in this letter, therefore, we should probably think more in terms of the kind of violent disputes portrayed in Acts than anything officially organised by Roman authorities. Equally, if the location Peter writes from, Babylon (1 Pet 5:13), is, as most people think, a codeword for Rome, then we have already seen Paul trying to calm tensions between Jew and Gentile in that city in the previous decade. Peter may well also be picking up on some growing prejudice against Christians that made it so easy for Nero to blame them for the great fire some suspect he started. We might then choose to read this letter as very nearly Peter’s last communication, if as tradition says, he perished in the reprisals which followed that fire.

There is one difficult passage which crops up once in the Lectionary for Mass and twice in the Revised Common Lectionary.³ The problem verses are 1 Pet 3:18-22, and particularly the earlier verses in that reading. There’s a long tradition of relating both the idea of “preaching to the spirits in prison” (1 Pet 3:19) with the Christian story of the harrowing of hell, the rescue from the underworld of all the people of God who had died before Christ, from Adam and Eve onwards. That is probably not Peter’s meaning in this context.⁴

It seems more likely, given the very specific reference to the days of Noah, that Peter is drawing on a Jewish tradition also found in the (non-biblical) book of Enoch. This offers an interpretation of the introduction to the flood story:

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose.
(Gen 6:1-2)

A Jewish tradition, which Peter apparently knows, explains these “sons of God” as angels, who in a version of the Prometheus myth, impart knowledge, but also lead humanity into such a state of corruption that God chooses to send the great flood. The fallen angels are then imprisoned by God until the day of judgement, and the earth is cleansed in the waters of the flood.

The Christians to whom Peter writes are those who have passed safely through the cleansing waters like those of the flood in their baptism. The imprisoned spirits are those fallen angels who now have their final sentence – Christ’s triumphant victory over evil – pronounced. Peter does not say what that judgement was. It may be their annihilation, but perhaps it is that, rather than leading humanity astray, they now have to submit to the divine human, Jesus Christ, along with all “angels, authorities and powers (1 Pet 3:22)”.

Whatever else it includes, the proclamation of the gospel in the New Testament, is always about the victory of God over sin, evil and death, revealed by the resurrection of Jesus.

Notes

1. See the comments I made in a previous post on the quality of Greek in the letter of James.

2. The argument about the household organisation is the most complicated one. It crops up in the discussion of whether Colossians and Ephesians are by Paul or not, never mind the Pastoral letters. I have only mentioned it briefly there and here. There is a great deal of chicken and egg about it. If people think these letters are later than Paul’s lifetime, then they will date this type of organisation, as the church settles down in Roman culture, towards the end of the first or even beginning of the second century. If they date this type of organisation to the end of the first, or start of the second century, they will naturally think that letters which reflect it are late. It is all about competing reconstructions of a whole picture of the early church, in which scholars move backwards and forwards from the details to the bigger picture, trying to work out where each particular tree fits into the forest. Sometimes a fresh understanding of an individual tree will significantly change the overall picture of the wood.

3. Lent 1, Year B is the same in both lectionaries – 1 Pet 3:18-22, and in RCL Easter 6, Year A is a longer reading than the Roman Lectionary also including the same verses: 1 Pet 3:13-22.

4. To say this is not Peter’s meaning is not to say anything about that doctrine, far less to attack it. The most decisive contribution arguing for a different view was written by a Jesuit, William Dalton (Christ’s Proclamation to the Spirit’s in Prison: a Study of 1 Peter 3:18 – 4:6 Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965)
   

Keeping it in the family: James

Short selections of James are read mainly in the latter part of Year B.¹ The letter, largely full of practical moral guidance in a largely traditional Jewish mode, sometimes has echoes of Jesus’ teaching. Tradition attributes it to James, the brother of Jesus, and nearly all its content fits with the picture we gain elsewhere of James, clearly a leader in the Jerusalem church in Paul’s day. In this prominence of Jesus’ brother in the community, the early Jesus movement is showing that traditional Jewish family and community values were maintained alongside the more radical prophetic note Jesus often sounded.

The strongest arguments against James’ authorship are the high quality of the Greek the letter is written in and perhaps the apparently settled and socially unequal nature of the Christian synagogue James is challenging about their behaviour. The question of who wrote the letter does not substantially affect its meaning.²

A portrayal of the martyrdom of James in a mediaeval Orthodox illuminated manuscript,
The 1000 year old Menologion (service book) of Basil. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Paul’s writings reveal his conflict with some Jewish Christians claiming to represent James, and a more Torah-observant version of Christianity. Now James’s letter shows the other side of that conflict, and mounts a critique of what some people, at least, were representing as Paul’s teaching. Those who take faith as a mental or spiritual act of believing something to be true are not doing justice to the practice of Christlike faithfulness I have suggested Paul was talking about. James has just such believers in his sights (which he may also take to be a view held in Paul’s circles) when he bluntly says “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (Jas 2:17).

Famously, Martin Luther, pursuing his polemics against medieval understandings of the place of works, coined the phrase “by faith alone,” a phrase even more prone to misuse than Paul’s language. The phrase only appears once in the Bible, and it is James who uses it in discussing Paul’s favoured example of Abraham: “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone (Jas 2:24).” Unsurprisingly, Luther did not like the letter, refused to consider it was written by the Lord’s brother or any apostle, and relegated it to the back of his Bible.

There are those who argue for a very real and deep conflict between James and Paul. Certainly there were later versions of both Torah-observant and Law-free Christianity that looked wildly out of step with the mainstream of Christian development. But while I think Paul and James both had their partisans criticising the other’s disciples, both share a belief that God’s people are Jesus’s people, and that believing in Jesus as Messiah includes following the practical teaching of Jesus. 

James, when talking about the importance of Torah-observance says: “You do well if you really fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself (Jas 2:8)” Paul, when talking about the need to resist imposing circumcision says: “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself (Gal 5:14).” They have differing emphases, and different audiences, but on the idea that faith and obedience go together in practical ethical service, they both return to one of Jesus’s key verses of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Notes

1. Propers 17–21, 22^nd – 26^th Sundays in Ordinary Time

2. If it is directly connected with James, the brother of Jesus, it asks major questions of some widely held assumptions about the cultural and linguistic environment of the early Jesus movement.

More perfect priest, superior sacrifice: Hebrews

There’s a long tradition of grouping Hebrews with Paul’s letters. In the Latin and King James Bible tradition it has usually been titled “Paul’s letter to the Hebrews” as well. Despite that, it has still always been placed after the letters which stand under Paul’s name. Paul’s letters come in order from the longest, Romans, with sixteen chapters, to the shortest, Philemon, with only a single chapter. Even when Hebrews was referred to as Paul’s letter, then, its position in the New Testament put a question mark over the attribution. The style and content have persuaded most contemporary readers that Paul, whose name is entirely missing from the anonymous text, cannot possibly be the author.

This, the longest of the miscellaneous letters is a single continuous argument, an exposition of Old Testament texts, with a final chapter of advice and greetings tacked on. The impression is of a sermon which the preacher has decided to turn into a letter and send to (probably) the Christians he knows at Rome. That seems to be the best way to make sense of why the writer ends with greetings from “our Italian friends” (Heb 13:24 REB). The traditional title of “to the Hebrews” seems to be based on an assumption that only Jewish Christians would be interested in such a detailed argument from scripture on the superiority of Christ’s sacrifice to those of the Jewish temple.

The lectionary uses a few of the more quotable short readings, particularly on key feasts, as Hebrews exhibits a very high understanding of both Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice. There is a limited selection from its overall argument, perhaps just enough to follow the argument, towards the end of Ordinary Time in Year B,¹ with a few readings from the closing chapters in Year C.² To understand these, it may be helpful to offer an outline of the central line of thought.

Melchizedek's offering – Pfarrkirche St. Peter: Neogotischer Hochaltar (1904)
Image by Wolfgang Sauber licensed under Creative Commons, via Wikimedia.

The author has some key concerns in his argument, all designed to persuade his hearers that the new covenant in Christ is superior to the Mosaic covenant. The first plank, with which he begins, is that Christ is superior to Moses. He applies a number of psalms which early Christians, and some other Jewish groups, read as Messianic, to argue that Jesus, as God’s son, is superior to Moses as God’s servant.

He then wants to argue, in a closely related pair of ideas, that Jesus’ priesthood and sacrifice are superior to those of Aaron and his descendants. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in actual temple practice – perhaps he had never actually got to Jerusalem to see it for himself – but in the biblical texts which describe and legislate for it.

One of the problems he faces, however, is that priesthood, in Jewish understanding, is inextricably tied up with heredity, and Jesus does not come from a priestly family. He resorts to the mysterious figure of Melchizedek, who appears briefly in the book of Genesis (Gen 14:18-20) and then again in Psalm 110, one of those psalms that was interpreted messianically, even, according to the gospel tradition, in a riddle Jesus himself posed while teaching in the temple precincts (Mark 12:35-37).

In this figure he finds a priesthood which is promised by God to the Messiah, and which is superior to that of Aaron, since Melchizedek had given God’s blessing to Abraham and his descendants (who, of course, included Aaron and Levi, the key ancestors of the priestly and levitical families – Heb 7:1-10). Jesus, as a priest after the order of Melchizedek, is superior to the temple priesthood.

Secondly, the temple where Jesus offers his sacrifice is superior. The Jewish high priest only enters the holy of holies, where God allows his glory to dwell on earth. Jesus has entered heaven, where the reality the temple points to is to be found, the actual presence of God. The writer appears to have an understanding of the world where invisible reality is more real than what we can see and touch. We can at present only see a world of shadows, reflections and copies: the real spiritual world is yet to be fully experienced.³ The earthly temple is based on a pattern of a heavenly temple revealed to Moses (Heb 8:5). Jewish priests only enter the copy, Jesus has entered the original heavenly one it is based on, the one in whose worship we now participate with Jesus (Heb 12:22-24).

Finally, Jesus offers a superior sacrifice, himself, which unlike the sacrifices of the temple priesthood, does not need to be repeated, but is a single offering made at the point of Jesus’ entry into heaven’s holiest of holies (Heb 9:23-26; 10:10-13). The writer makes use of a Greek translation of Psalm 40. If you are reading the epistle on the Feast of the Annunciation (or Advent 4, Year C) you will come across a quotation from Psalm 40 you will be unable to find in your Old Testament.

The Greek version used by Hebrews says “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.” (Heb 10:5) The difference between the Greek and the Hebrew text is somewhat baffling. If you look up Psalm 40:6 in your Old Testament you will find a quite different verse: “Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear”.⁴ The Christian Church treated the Greek as an inspired translation. Jews and Christians accused each other of “altering the Bible”, and, probably as a result, Jews stopped regarding the Greek as an inspired translation. It is a reminder again that the Bible is not one single, simple, book, but a complex library.

The main line of argument leads to an unusual picture where the priest Jesus offers his dead body as a once-for-all-time sacrifice, entering into heaven at the moment of his death (Heb 9:24-26). Like John’s gospel, Hebrews seems to unite death, resurrection and ascension, and treat them as a single act of salvation.

At its heart, however, is the idea that Christ’s incarnation – assuming the same flesh and blood as his brothers and sisters (Heb 2:14) is the precondition of his death being effective. He needs to be both God’s son and a human being to make our humanity holy and fit to live in God’s eternal presence (Heb 10:10, 14). Christmas and Easter, in this letter, are held together as a single gospel.

Notes

1. 27^th – 33^rd Sundays in Ordinary Time, Proper 22 – 2 before Advent.

2. Propers 14–17, 19^th – 22^nd Sundays in Ordinary Time

3. The extent to which the writer is or is not influenced by the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato is one on which there is no real consensus, but I think it’s hard to avoid accepting some influence.

4. A literal translation might say “You dug out my ears”. Perhaps the metaphor is of digging out the wax, so that someone can hear clearly, or perhaps the Greek translator went instead to a mental picture of God making the first human out of clay, digging out the ears and shaping the body parts, and so preparing a body. One can only speculate!