“For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come”
Rare are the occasions when we have a reading at Holy Communion from one of the major writings of the New Testament, The Letter to the Hebrews, but when we do they are of the greatest significance. Once in the Sundays in Lent, next Sunday, Passion Sunday, for instance, and twice during Holy Week, the epistle reading is from Hebrews. And, of course, it provides the great epistle for Christmas, too, and on a few other occasions as well, such as in the Octave of All Saints’. How splendid, then, is the course of the readings at the Offices which allow us to savour somewhat more fully the richness of this almost impossibly rich and perplexing epistle. In a way, it is one of the most theologically demanding works of the entire New Testament. And that’s saying a lot!
This year at Morning Prayer, we have had the privilege of reading from Hebrews a little more extensively as well as the great joy of reading one of the most outstanding narrative sequences in The Book of Genesis, the story of Jacob or Israel. In a way, The Letter to the Hebrews provides the most wonderful Christian commentary on the whole of the Old Testament and, indeed, particularly with reference to Genesis.
“Let brotherly love continue”, our reading from the 13th chapter begins. Indeed, “let brotherly love continue,” and should we ever be under any delusion about how hard that is, we have only to consider The Book of Genesis! In a way, it is about the antithesis of brotherly love! Cain kills Abel; that’s just for starters; Abram and Lot, who are kinsmen, get into tussles over land; and, then, there is the most extraordinary sequence of stories dealing first with Isaac, the promised son, and then Jacob and Esau, twin brothers but at odds with one another; and then, the story of Joseph and his brothers who sold him into slavery. Apart from Isaac, it might seem that it is altogether about brothers. Upon closer examination, of course, there is the curious business of Ishmael, a step-brother to Isaac by way of Sarah’s servant, Hagar. In short, it is all about brothers whose relation to one another exhibits the greatest confusion, ambiguity, tension, and animosity imaginable. You would almost think it was Hants County! Or anywhere, really!
We are no strangers to family struggles and animosities. Of all the forms of relationship, none are more fraught with tension and strife than families. It is, I think, not by accident that the first book of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, deals so much with the relations of fathers and sons, brothers and sisters and kinsfolk out of which derive the twelve tribes of Israel which, in turn, become the basis for the twelvefold Apostolic fellowship imaged as the heavenly city. The overall point is expressed by Joseph who was sold into slavery by his brothers: “and now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life … So it was not you who sent me here, but God.” An astounding statement that reveals the outstanding biblical insight into the grace and power of God, namely, the providence of God that overrules and rules in and through our unruly wills.
The Letter to the Hebrews understands this, I think. It goes on to exhort us to hospitality by way of an image; “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” It is an almost explicit reference to one of the most beautiful passages in the whole of The Book of Genesis. It relates to the wonderful story of God appearing to Abram as three men, or angels, and yet also as the Lord, under the shade of the Oaks of Mamre; it is the setting for the bestowal of the promise to Abraham of a promised son. That son will be Isaac; the son, too, about whom Abraham will be put to the test. Abraham provides hospitality for the strangers, “entertaining angels unawares,” it seems.
The ancient obligation of hospitality takes on the form of new imperative in Hebrews; the imperative of brotherly love understood as charity, the charity or love which embraces everyone as our brother and sister in the love of Christ. “Remember those in prison,” it goes on to say, “as though in prison with them.” Why? Because whatever their faults, they, too, belong to the body of our humanity and, even more, to the body of Christ as sinners in need of redemption, no more, really, than you or me. The measure cannot be just the world’s measure. For all that we understand the incarceration of many a miscreant or wrong-doer, we do ourselves and them endless harm in not acknowledging the mixture of folly and wilful destructiveness that appears so frequently in so many of our own actions. It means to acknowledge the same potential, emphasis on potential, in us all. There go I but for the grace of God!
“Let marriage be held in honour,” it goes on to say. Could there be anything more difficult and controversial than our present confusions about marriage? And yet the biblical viewpoint is firm and clear about marriage as the union of man and woman even after an entire pageant of not just serial monogamy but outright polygamy, at least for a certain part of the history of Israel. But here is the point. The more the idea of the oneness of God, namely, monotheism, is upheld and recognised, the more monogamous Israel becomes.
In the lesson from Genesis, Jacob says to his household, “put away the foreign gods that are among you.” And “Jacob hid them under the oak which was near Shechem.” How strong is the hold of false gods and idols on us all, even in the face of the God who has revealed himself as God Almighty!
And that is the undeniable reality of the world of the New Testament. It would be foolish to ignore this and even greater folly to think that we could or should re-image one of the most basic and crucial institutions of human life. It is, I fear, precisely our folly and our confusion and betrays another wonderful aspect of the biblical vision, the blessings of friendship. Let brotherly love continue is about the deeper and profounder form of love, the love that belongs to our life together in the body of Christ. It is in the face of our confusions and our brokenness that the Church must uphold certain ideals and principles, not the least of which is compassionate forgiveness which seeks our wholeness out of the brokenness of human lives. It is all part of being in the body.
“Keep your life free from money.” Ah, yes, the money angle! What does it mean to keep your life free from money? Are we to take that literally? No. It is meant in the sense of not allowing ourselves to be defined by money but to pursue the idea of the good stewardship of our resources instead, firmly keeping money as merely a means and never an end.
And on it goes. In a way, the commentary on the Old Testament vision reaches its highest form in the image of a city. “We have here no continuing city,” Hebrews says, no abiding city, no city that remains at least not in comparison to the city we seek, a city to which we can have no access except by the paradox of going “outside of the camp”, itself an image of the pilgrimage of Israel and of the Revelation of God to the sojourning people of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai, an image carried forward to the city of David, the city of Zion, the city of Jerusalem. More profoundly, it speaks to the brutal realities of Calvary, “outside a city wall,” as the old hymn puts it. Such are the brutal realities of the Crucifixion, without which we are not free, without which we are not complete.
That city becomes the image of freedom on this day which is known as Mothering Sunday because of the readings at Holy Communion. We have both the image of the city, Jerusalem, spoken of as being “the mother of us all” and which is above and which is free and we have the image of our wayfaring and our being fed in the wilderness in the story of the loaves and fishes.
The greater point of that story complements the insight of Hebrews. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost … and they filled twelve baskets.” A basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, twelve baskets for the apostolic fellowship, the Church as fed and nourished by the sacrifice of Christ, the redemptive sacrifice of love. We live from those superlative left-overs, the food of grace, the food of our wayfaring, on our way to Jerusalem, the heavenly city. Christ our brother, father, mother and son gives himself to us for our redemption. Can there be any greater joy in the midst of the barrenness of Lent than to recall the providential mercies of God towards us in Jesus Christ?
“We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus said to us on Quinquagesima Sunday, and here we grasp the radical meaning of that “going up”. “We have here no continuing city” but in the mercies of Christ’s sacrifice we participate in that heavenly city, “Jerusalem which is above is free; which is the mother of us all.” And our freedom has to do with our being the sons not of the bond-woman, Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, but of Sarah, the mother of Isaac; these stories of brothers all pointing us to the redemption of our humanity in Christ.
What we seek is what is above precisely out of the awareness of the limitations of the human condition. We seek what God provides for us and which he enables us to seek by the mercies of his redeeming grace. Even the fragments that remain are enough to sustain us in that heavenly city, “Jerusalem which is above is free.” She is “the mother of us all,” and in that Jerusalem, we seek what is to come. Such are the mercies of Christ.
“For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come”
Fr. David Curry
Lent IV, ‘10