NOTES for Heb 2:16

Speaking of Christ, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews testifies that in His person God takes on not angels, but the "descendants of Abraham," meaning first, human nature, and second, the tradition of revelation that stands behind Abraham and is linked with his name.

This statement was very important and timely. The Epistle to the Hebrews was written, perhaps by one of the disciples of the apostle Paul, soon after 70 AD, after the anti-Roman uprising in Judea that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. That uprising took place under messianic slogans, and its defeat marked the beginning of the end of political messianism.

Mystical messianism quickly replaced political messianism: if before many saw in the Messiah above all a righteous Ruler who would head the earthly Kingdom, now they began to see in Him some utterly unearthly, purely spiritual being, more like an angel than a man. Against the background of these views, which were spreading quickly in circles around the Church, the reminder that Christ is not an angel and not a bodiless spirit, but a real, living man of flesh and blood, though with humanity transformed by the action of the Spirit of God, was more than timely.

No less timely was another reminder: that Christian, New Testament revelation is linked with the tradition of another revelation that preceded it, a revelation going back to Abraham. By the end of the first century AD, generations were already entering the Church who knew little or nothing of the synagogue tradition, and the catastrophe of 70 further widened the break between the Church and the Synagogue, gradually pushing the Judeo-Christianity traditional for the first two Christian generations to the margins of church life.

Of course, Judaism as such was foreign to new Christians who had not known synagogue life, and in itself they did not need it. Yet it often turned out that, together with Judaism, these new Christians also lost that Yahwistic tradition, the tradition of revelation that goes back through the later prophets and Moses to Abraham, without which Christianity hung in empty space, outside history and outside tradition.

From there it was only one step to supposing that the Messiah was not a man at all, but someone like an angel, who could have no earthly history and with whom no tradition could be connected. The result of such logic was the conviction that Christianity is, in fact, a teaching not about the incarnation of God, but about the disincarnation of man. Instead of the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that the real, living Jesus promises His disciples, such "Christianity" could offer its followers only a pale shadow of life in a half-illusory likeness of the Kingdom.

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.

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.

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.