Main news for 9 January 2025

It is interesting: why did the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews suddenly start speaking about angels, asserting that God placed not an angel but a human being at the head of creation? It would seem that there is no need to say much about this, for the correctness of the sacred writer's words becomes clear to everyone who has read at least once the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. And yet, clearly, there were certain spiritual tendencies in the Church that forced the author of the epistle to emphasize the thought that the human being is by no means lower than the angel. What was the matter? Most likely, the matter lay in those spiritualistic and gnostic tendencies that began to appear in church life soon after the catastrophe of A.D. 70, when the epistle, apparently, was written. Before the catastrophe, the main problem of the Church and of the circles around it had apparently been political messianism; now, after the collapse of the messianic uprising and the destruction of the Temple, the problem was becoming mystical messianism, perhaps connected with the messianic ideas of certain Jewish sectarian and semi-sectarian movements such as the Essenes. And these movements were characterized by a spiritualization of the image of the Messiah and the Kingdom. The Savior's words that His Kingdom is "not of this world" were understood literally in this environment, so that the Kingdom began to be perceived as something transcendent, having no relation either to our world or to our reality in general. And concerning the Messiah as well, suggestions were put forward that He perhaps had never been a Man at all, that His whole life was something like an angelic manifestation, that His body was illusory, and therefore His crucifixion and His death itself were also illusory. And His resurrection was merely the disclosure of His true, nonhuman nature and its liberation from that appearance of human bodily existence which in reality He did not have and could not have had. And now the Church had to oppose not political messianism, but this kind of bad mysticism, which left only the external form of Christianity, and even that was often seriously distorted. And the author of the epistle has to remind them again and again that at the center of the earthly world stands not a "pure" bodiless angel, but a human being. And God was incarnate not in a "pure" bodiless angel either, but in a Man. He has to remind them so that the Church would not cease to be itself: the body of Christ, filled with the genuine life of the Man who really lived, really died, and really rose from the dead.