NOTES for Heb 2:5-12

Paul proceeds from the traditional understanding of angelic spirits that was characteristic of the Judaism of his era. In Judaism, angels are only lower created spirits, and specifically ministering and serving spirits who carry out entirely concrete assignments from God. They are close to God, but God did not set before them the broad tasks He set before humanity.

The world has been given into the authority of humanity, not of angels. And not least because, unlike an angel, a human being's spiritual life has a dynamism determined by his relationship with God. Angels, in their present state, possess the entire fullness of life available to them; they do not require spiritual formation - at least this is how the author of the epistle sees them. A human being, however, is constantly in the process of becoming, and precisely for this reason he can in the end become the ruler of the universe, the ruler appointed by God into whose authority the world is given.

But in the fallen state, the human being does not correspond to God's design for him, and the only one who is truly able to subject the world to Himself is the Messiah, for He alone can be called Man in the fullness of human nature. The world submits to the Messiah not only by virtue of His divinity, but also by virtue of His humanity, and even first of all by virtue of His humanity. The fullness of God revealed to the world within human nature is exactly what is needed for the full existence before God's face of both the world as a whole and the human being himself.

And the world's becoming before God is inseparable from humanity's becoming before God and in God - and that means it is inseparable from the person of the Messiah Himself. The being of the universe is connected with the existence of humanity, and the existence of humanity in turn is connected with the existence of the Messiah. This connection is dynamic; it presupposes the becoming of the world and of humanity in Christ and around Christ. Angels, however, play a purely ministering role in this process. They have no need of becoming; they are full in themselves from the beginning, and therefore they surpass the human being in his present state, for fallen humanity has been deprived of the fullness of life. But a human being who has reached the fullness of his life surpasses the fullness of the angel's life - this is one of the main ideas of the author of the epistle.

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.

Continuing the discussion of salvation, the Messiah, and angels, the author of the letter draws attention to an essentially important point in this regard. He speaks of the Messiah as a Human Being who can help people precisely because He Himself is human.

The world of angels is remarkable in its own way, and angels surpass people in their present condition because they did not fall, speaking, of course, about the angels who kept faithfulness to God and not about fallen spirits. Yet for all that, angels and people belong, in a certain sense, to different layers of reality. Angels and people were created differently from the beginning; their interaction was conceived by God from the very beginning as the interaction of beings that are spiritual, but each existing in its own way and in forms belonging only to it.

An angel can bring God's message to a person, for the Greek word "angel," like the corresponding Hebrew word, properly means "messenger." But he cannot help a person in the condition in which the person found himself after the fall. He cannot, in particular, because a person is a being at once spiritual and natural, in whom both components are united in a completely special way, unrepeatable either in the spiritual or in the natural world.

Of course, one cannot exclude in principle the appearance in the world of God's fullness contained within the bounds of angelic nature, insofar as one can speak of nature with regard to angels. All things are possible for God. But for a person such fullness would still remain inaccessible. It might perhaps be perceived by him somehow, but in any case it would remain separated from him in such a way that the person could never become at home in the Kingdom, could never become its true inhabitant. Only another Human Being could do this for a person: a Human Being who contained in Himself God's fullness and at the same time was absolutely "one of his own" by nature for every person.

So much "one of his own" that even the possibility of death was quite real for Him, whereas for an angel death in the human sense of the word is impossible in principle. And the Messiah became exactly such a "one of his own" for everyone, differing from fallen people only in the uncorruptedness of His human nature. But this "only" is precisely what made it possible for Him to contain God's fullness and unite it with His humanity. And therefore it made salvation possible as well, opening the road to the Kingdom for those who seek it.

Continuing the conversation about angels and about the Messiah, the author of the epistle especially emphasizes the fact that the Savior suffered on the cross in a completely real way, just as anyone else would have suffered on it (v. 10). This is precisely where the humanity of the Messiah is shown: an angel in principle cannot suffer the way a human being suffers; he cannot be crucified, for he is free from bodiliness and from all the problems connected with it. But the Messiah is not an angel, not a being from another world. He calls the people He saves brothers, thereby emphasizing His real, essential unity with those being saved (vv. 12-13). Only in this way was it possible to save the whole human being, not only his soul, but also his body, which God also intends to become part of the Kingdom (vv. 14-15). If the Kingdom had entered the world through an angel, a human being would never have been able to enter it whole. Then one really could have spoken of the salvation of the soul alone, which has more share in the spiritual world than the body does, of salvation in the sense in which people began to understand it in the Middle Ages, with postmortem bliss or postmortem torments in mind.

But God wanted to sanctify and transform the whole human being; that is why He sends the Messiah into the world not as an angel, but as a man. The author of the epistle does not compare Christ with a high priest by accident (v. 17): both one and the other are human beings, and through both one and the other God sanctifies His people, in the first case the New Testament Church, in the second the Old Testament Church. But for both the Old Testament high priest and the New Testament High Priest it was absolutely necessary to belong to the world of human beings wholly and to the end; otherwise there could be no question of sanctifying the people. An angel can show the way, but he cannot sit at one table with a human being, sharing a sacrificial meal with him. Yet the road into the Kingdom lies precisely through the sacrificial meal that sanctifies those who are walking. And one can walk it to the end only with Christ, not with angels.

Could the Lord help a person facing temptation before the Incarnation? Of course He could, for He was almighty even then... What, then, is today’s reading saying? What does it mean that “because He Himself suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted”? It seems that the point concerns the following aspect. The issue is not whether God is able or unable to provide help. It is whether a person is able to accept that help, or even simply to ask for it. It is very difficult to relate to One who, by definition, not only could not do anything wrong, but had no possibility of doing so. He is only power, only wisdom; clearly, He will never act against His own will... In becoming incarnate, God became true man, and this means that the Son received the potential possibility of violating the Father’s will. Like each of us, He had the possibility of choosing an easier and more comfortable option. He chose the Father’s will. The Son, more than anyone, knows the terror of making a choice. When we face temptation, we can say with confidence: He understands what is happening to us, because He knows it from His own experience. If we come to Him with our problem, He will understand.

The language of the Letter to the Hebrews differs greatly from that of the apostle Paul's other letters. When speaking to Gentiles, he explains everything with simple examples and in simple language. With Jews brought up on Holy Scripture, he uses quite different arguments and words. The first part of today's passage echoes the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14-30), which poses one of the most important questions for a believer: if we consider God harsh and obey Him out of fear, how much more should we do when we know that He is merciful and good? So it is here: if we obey messengers, how much more must we obey Christ! Continuing what was said in Heb 1, the apostle uses examples from Holy Scripture to show us plainly the obvious superiority of Christ over everything that exists in the material and spiritual world, for He is perfect man and God.

While affirming the superiority of humanity over the angels, the author of the epistle nevertheless does not forget that, in the present state both of the world and of humanity itself, this superiority still turns out to be more of a spiritual and metahistorical prospect than a present reality. He understands the words of Holy Scripture that a human being is, in God's eyes, a little lower than the angels as referring more to the future than to the present (vv. 5-8). And, of course, the future in question is not the future of our world, which is being transformed but is not yet transfigured, but the fullness of the Kingdom that will be revealed to the world with the Savior's return. It is no accident that the author of the epistle speaks specifically of Jesus as the One in whom the words of the psalm that he mentions, about a human being in no way inferior to the angels, have been fulfilled (v. 9). For Jesus from the very beginning, from the moment of His conception on earth, already bore in Himself that fullness of the Kingdom which will be revealed to us only at the end of time. In a certain sense one could say that He Himself is the Kingdom, and the whole Church, as the community of people living in this Kingdom, is His continuation in the world that the Church is to transform.

Jesus, in the fullness of His transfigured human nature, reveals in Himself that image of humanity which stands above the angels. And it is He who points the way into the Kingdom for those who seek. Of course, God's revelations can be given to people through angels as well; that is why they are "ministering spirits." But no angel has ever contained the whole fullness of the Kingdom, and no angel has ever become fully part of our human world. Angels are spirits, though created spirits, and human nature is alien to them, as is any nature at all. They can be God's messengers in our world ("angel" properly means "messenger"), but by definition they cannot enter it, always remaining beings from another world in relation to it. The Messiah, however, entered the world as a Man and, despite all His uniqueness, never ceased to be precisely a Man. That is why the revelation of the Kingdom brought by Him into the world is greater than the revelation proclaimed by angels (vv. 1-4): for angels, though also sharing in the Kingdom, still could not become the living embodiment of the Kingdom opened to people. That embodiment is what the Savior became for those seeking the way.