NOTES for Heb 4:12-16

Speaking of God's word, which "pierces to the division of soul and spirit," the author of the letter has in mind, on the one hand, the living revelation that is inseparable from God's presence, and on the other hand, the inner Torah, that inner spiritual and moral imperative and spiritual backbone without which the first generations of Christians could not imagine spiritual life. This living word of God is what judges a person. Speaking of "soul and spirit," the author of the letter has in mind, on the one hand, human nature, which he calls "soul," although the corresponding Greek word in the biblical context can simply mean "life," and on the other hand, that "breath," that "spirit," which God gives each person at creation. Here is the deepest level of the human person, the level connected with the very existence of the human being as the image of God.

At this depth it is decided what a particular person is before God, before other people, and before himself. For a Christian, such judgment takes on an added meaning: here the question is also decided whether he is faithful to Christ, whether the life of the Kingdom is an absolute value for him, or whether there, in the very depths of his soul, he is ready to seek something else, something more important. And there too, at this final depth, the question of faithfulness to Christ as High Priest, with a capital letter, is decided. Indeed, the high priest in the traditional Yahwist understanding is the head of the people-community standing before God.

Every community always consists of persons, each of whom is fully aware of himself and of his relationships both with God and with the other members of his community. Otherwise the community degenerates into a religious collective, where individual people dissolve into a large collective "we" that at times has quite vivid religious experiences, but is spiritually completely barren. And each member of the community comes to God together with all the relationships that bind him to others. The presider of the community and its head stands at the center of this complex system of relationships that the community, going to God, represents.

The question of the presider's full inclusion in the system of relationships within the community is extremely important in the context of the community's spiritual path. In this sense the Savior is the ideal Head and Presider: His bond with everyone who belongs to the Church as His body is absolute. No one, not even the most zealous high priest leading the Temple community and the people of God, can have such a bond with his community. Betraying such a Presider means losing the Kingdom, and therefore salvation.

Returning to the image of the Messiah-High Priest, the author of the letter does not separate it from those ideas of the living Torah that were widespread at that time in both Jewish and Christian circles. For him, Jesus Himself becomes this living Torah. His high priesthood is due to the fact that He succeeded in doing what no one had ever succeeded in doing before: fulfilling the ideal that had previously remained unattainable. In order to become the living Torah, a human being had to be completely free from sin while still remaining human and not turning into some disembodied being. And Jesus proved to be the first and only one in human history to whom this was given (v. 15).

Such a Teacher cannot be deceived: the living Torah is the embodied word of God, and His action on the human person touches those depths of human being where its spiritual ("spirit") and natural ("soul") components meet (v. 12). It is as impossible to hide from Him as it is to take refuge from God or hide anything from Him (v. 13). But this Messiah-High Priest bears in Himself the whole fullness of the grace of the Kingdom that He brought into the world, giving every faithful person the opportunity to share in it (v. 16). The living Torah, the embodied word of God, the Man who bears in Himself the whole fullness of the Kingdom, and therefore the fullness of God: this is how the author of the letter sees the Messiah, whom he calls the new High Priest, the High Priest of the Kingdom.

In what sense does the author of the epistle call Jesus high priest? At first glance, this comparison can seem like pure allegory. But if one thinks through the symbol used by the sacred writer, one has to admit that it has a definite spiritual meaning as well, especially in the context of the events during or shortly after which the epistle was written. It was written, it appears, after Paul's death by one of his disciples, and it came to light after the catastrophe of 70 AD, when Jerusalem and the Temple were razed to the ground after the anti-Roman uprising raised by militant messianists, the "zealots." Naturally, Yahwist sacrifices ceased after this, and the history of Yahwism ended: Judaism and Christianity finally separated, nothing any longer bound the Church and the Synagogue together, and each went its own way. Against this background the question inevitably arose: how is one to go on living without the Temple and sacrifices, which for millennia had been the main form of communion with God for Yahwists, and later for Jews and Christians?

The answer to it is the image of Christ as high priest. Of course, the image of the Messiah as high priest was also known to Jewish tradition. But there the issue was that the Messiah, when he came, would take the place not of a ruler, as the earlier and more traditional approach suggested, but of a high priest who would reform temple worship, making it an expression of the fullness of God's presence that would accompany his ministry. The author of the epistle, however, clearly has something else in mind.

He relies on the traditional Yahwist idea of the priestly community as a community of mediators between God and His people. Already in the Book of Leviticus the call sounds for the people "to be holy," to preserve the state of consecration that can be received only at the altar. But the whole people could not remain at the altar constantly; for the overwhelming majority, consecration was only an episode, though a most important one, in their spiritual life. Representatives of the priestly community, however, were at the altar constantly, though of course not all at the same time. And thus a certain part of the people was consecrated constantly, not from time to time as the majority was. And from this small part the whole people, which formed one spiritual body, was also consecrated.

The author of the epistle transfers this traditional idea to Christ: He, unlike any of us, always preserves the full consecration accessible to human nature. Strictly speaking, only He can do this, for sin hinders consecration, and in order to be fully consecrated one must be sinless. And His holiness consecrates the Church, including each of us.

Such a Mediator, of course, the people of God could not have had before Christ's coming: for with all their zeal, priests could not become sinless and be consecrated to the end. With such a Mediator, one did not have to fear even the absence of the Temple and sacrifices: through Him the Church receives the possibility of sharing in the fullness of the Kingdom, which is greater than the fullness of the Temple. And therefore, the possibility of salvation.

This is already the second episode described by Mark in which the Lord heals by using saliva. Perhaps this is another prophetic action, in which Jesus symbolically portrays what is really happening on the invisible plane of being.

The point is not even that these symbols reflect what is happening better than anything else, but that they themselves are a reflection of the heavenly reality brought by the Son of God, who became the Son of Man. Thus the very words "Father" and "Son" are taken from human vocabulary for family relationships. But who knows whether these family relationships were not created to reflect the heavenly unity of the Father and the Son? Human saliva has always been considered a carrier of a person's qualities. The saliva of the unclean is unclean (Lev. 15:8); the saliva of the sick is contagious. In exactly the same way, the saliva of the One who sees gives sight, and the saliva of the One who hears and speaks gives hearing and speech (Mark 7:33).