NOTES for Heb 12:11-15

A quotation without quotation marks from the book of the prophet Isaiah points to the Messianic time that has arrived, the time when Christ, who has come into the world, points out and opens all paths. His paths are not our paths; they are straight. And our paths are not straight not because the road is crooked, but because we "swerve off course," and weakened legs cannot hold us steady. So Scripture calls us to focus our attention on the straightness of the path, to walk and through constant training strengthen our flabby muscles so that the skill of walking straight may arise. Of course, all this is a metaphor, where the path means life, and legs, knees, and muscles mean, above all, our will.

So Paul has said it. And we so wanted to pass somewhere along the edge, more or less decently... To fit within the bounds of "acceptable behavior"... But he speaks sharply: "Holiness, without which no one will see the Lord." That is how it is. We keep saying one thing is saints, another thing is us, ordinary people... The apostle Paul knocks the ground out from under our feet. Maybe they really are wiser, more righteous, maybe it really is easier for them than for us. But none of that will help us at all. Without holiness it is impossible to see the Lord.

But the essence of holiness is not "not doing this, that, the fifth thing, and the twentieth." The Hebrew word "kadosh," translated as "holy," literally means "set apart." A saint is one who belongs wholly to God and not to the world. And without this being set apart from the world and given over to God, to see Him... is impossible.

Continuing the discussion of Christian life, the author of the letter draws his readers' special attention to the need for no "bitter root," as he puts it, to take hold among them. By "bitter root," taking traditional Jewish usage into account, what was usually meant was a "root of sin," that is, sin that had taken root in the human heart or in some human community. And the issue here is not only the desire, as people say, to keep the ranks pure. Nor is it even only that bad company, as even pagans knew, corrupts good morals.

The issue is that every sin that has become the norm and is perceived as the norm disrupts the normal existence of the Church as the body of Christ, whether the members of the Church notice it or not. In fact, even in pre-Christian times it was already known that sin defiles, and not only those who sin, but also those with whom the sinner is in communion. Of course, there was much that was archaic and magical in this view, especially if we are speaking about the mass religious consciousness of the pre-exilic era.

But there was also something else, something no longer so archaic, connected with the perception of the people of God as a single spiritual whole, as a kind of spiritual body. In that case it was obvious that the sin of a specific person belonging to the spiritual body turns out to be more than only his personal problem. His sin becomes a problem for the people-community to which he belongs. And all that has been said is even more true of the Church as the body of Christ, for here we are speaking of people called to the life of the Kingdom, with which no sin is compatible.

And if sin takes root in such a community and becomes the norm, then all who share in it actually cease to be part of the body of Christ. The Church then actually disappears, preserving only the appearance of its true self. Such a substitution is all the more dangerous because often, especially at first, it is barely noticeable, so that many may think everything in their church is in order. It is this danger of unnoticed spiritual corruption of the church body that the author of the letter reminds his readers about.

Paul writes that Jesus endured the cross “instead of the joy set before Him.” We are so accustomed to the fact that Jesus came to earth, became incarnate, and became one of us in order to die for us. It seems so obvious—everything was for our salvation. We simply forget that, by His very divine nature, the Son of God was destined not for death at all, but for joy. What He did for us is by no means self-evident! It would have been far more natural for Him to come in glory, with a host of angels, and sit upon a throne over the whole earth. The small problem is that our salvation would not have been accomplished. And so today the apostle Paul reminds us WHAT Jesus did for us and how far it was from being self-evident. This thought can also sustain us in our temptations: when we want to take the path of least resistance, it is worth remembering that an easier path was fully available to Jesus too...

Like his teacher, the author of the letter compares the spiritual path with runners competing in a stadium: each one has his own race ahead, and only the one who runs without losing sight of Jesus can run to the goal. Jesus has gone ahead of all who are running, so that all the others run after Him, who has already reached the goal (vv. 1-2). At the same time he reminds his readers that the events of their own life, which they perceive as punishment from God, do not at all testify that God has rejected them and that they have nothing more to hope for in regard to salvation. The author of the letter gives them Christ Himself as an example, Christ who had to endure punishment He did not deserve at all, but without which He could not have done for those seeking the Kingdom and salvation what He did for them (vv. 3-5). Relying on the tradition reflected in the Book of Proverbs, the author reminds his readers that punishment is not an evil in itself, that it is part of what we today call the process of upbringing, and a necessary part at that. Since God's relationship with a person includes an educational aspect as well, punishment becomes inevitable; otherwise the relationship between God and the faithful would not be a relationship of father and children, but a relationship of people who are strangers to one another (vv. 6-11).

Of course, if we keep the author's analogy in mind, we have to think that the issue is persecution for the faith, as is directly suggested by the author's phrase "you have not yet resisted to the point of blood, struggling against sin" (v. 4), because when New Testament authors speak of shedding blood in struggle, they almost always have in mind confession or martyrdom. But the author of the letter brings new shades of meaning into the traditional expression. This may have been connected with the fact that some of his contemporaries began to perceive persecution and harassment in the traditional Jewish spirit not as an inevitability, but as God's punishment for one sin or another committed by the community as a whole or by individual people. The author tells them directly that persecution can also become punishment for sin if the persecuted themselves forget the sufferings of Christ. In that case what could have become witness, as it became for witnesses who understood the meaning of what was happening, turned into punishment for those who were seeking an easy path, trying to avoid what the Savior had directly and completely unambiguously warned His followers was inevitable, and had warned them more than once. And the goal of punishment in this case was to remind the faithful of the path from which they had turned aside or were ready to turn aside, having forgotten the price paid by the Savior for the triumph of the Kingdom to which they themselves had been joined, after choosing a path that now seemed too hard to them.