NOTES for Heb 11:13-14

What is the faith of the Patriarchs, and what is our faith in comparison with it? But perhaps we simply do not quite understand what faith is. It appears to us that faith, especially the faith of the patriarchs, is something unshakable, a certain rest for their great souls that enables them to do their great deeds. But let us look more closely at what the Apostle tells us today: "...they said of themselves that they were strangers and exiles on the earth; for those who speak this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland." In these words, on the contrary, there is a certain unrest, a search. And according to the logic of our language, this is something opposite to faith. Searching is associated more with doubt than with faith. We even have expressions such as "established in faith" and "firm faith." And although in the first word the root is "firm," not "faith," this consonance shapes us apart from our conscious awareness.

But in reality, the faith of our fathers consisted precisely in not letting their thought find rest in anything earthly, and in general in not letting it rest in anything at all. For "if they had had in mind that homeland from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return." If we have something formed in our thoughts, not necessarily something strictly defined, concrete, and material, even if it is only an idea, it draws our actions toward itself, and we find time to realize it. But faith is something else. Faith is always striving; it is dynamism, impulse, and at times even wandering, but not meaningless wandering; it is wandering with hope in Him. And this very hope must be our stronghold. As soon as we stop hoping, we cut ourselves off from the vine and dry up. We shut off the oxygen of grace for ourselves.

And therefore doubts must exist. But these must be doubts not about God, but about our idea of Him. This small clarification is always forgotten when people speak of doubts in faith. Only one thing must be unshakable: the One who created me loves me, because: "You love all things that exist, and loathe nothing that You have made, for You would not have made anything if You had hated it" (Wis 11:25). What is there to doubt here? The fact that I exist, and therefore someone wanted me to exist, is obvious. It is also clear that He created responsibly, not as a childish amusement: since such a complex world stands, and everything in it is so beautiful, its Creator cannot be irresponsible. Therefore, He loves. That is all. That is all of faith.

And doubts about dogmas, about people, even those vested with rank, about the structure of the Church... all this is the very wandering of which the Apostle speaks to us today when he speaks about the descendants of the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah. And let us not cling too tightly to the earthly, for "they desired a better country, that is, a heavenly one; therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them."

Continuing the discussion of faithfulness and trust in God, the author of the letter says of the righteous of antiquity that they died without receiving what was promised. This, however, did not drive them to despair and did not make them betray promises once given or the covenant-union once made with God: they did not abandon hope for the Kingdom whose coming they awaited (vv. 13-14). And this hope and faithfulness were expressed above all in the fact that none of them ever thought about the possibility of turning back and returning to the former life they had left when they believed the God who had revealed Himself to them and followed Him (vv. 15-16). The author of the letter gives numerous examples of such faithfulness, well known to every reader of the Old Testament books (vv. 17-31).

These reminders, of course, were not accidental: the righteous of antiquity were to become examples of faithfulness and hope for the Kingdom for the author's contemporaries, many of whom apparently possessed such qualities to a far lesser degree than their great spiritual predecessors. The crisis experienced by the church communities after the catastrophe of AD 70 was first of all a spiritual crisis: many of those who had expected the imminent triumph of the Kingdom were disappointed in their expectations, and along with that, in messianism as such, turning, perhaps, to the traditional Jewish way of life as a kind of religious refuge in which they could live through an inner crisis and the collapse of hopes that had not come true. Certain signs of such a crisis had appeared already during Paul's lifetime, when representatives of the first generation of Christians began to die, people who, like their fellow believers, were certain that the Savior would return and the Kingdom would triumph during their own lifetime. But after AD 70, one may think, it intensified sharply. And the author of the letter gives examples of those who believed in the coming of the Kingdom even when centuries still remained before its coming; they believed while knowing with complete certainty that they themselves would not have to see it, and they hoped that they too would not be left out of its triumph, even though they had no exact ideas about the resurrection of the dead, just as they had none about their own fate after death, and therefore had no guarantees that they themselves would become participants in this triumph. And if, despite all this, the ancient righteous did not despair, how could those to whom the Kingdom had not only been promised, but who had already been joined to it, lose hope merely because the triumph promised by the Savior turned out not to be as near as it had seemed to those who were waiting?

In today's reading the apostle Paul offers a very interesting interpretation of Abraham's behavior. For us, who grew up in Christian culture, it may be completely obvious that if we believe in God, then we also believe in the resurrection of the dead. Yet even in Paul's time this was by no means obvious. It was still less obvious in Abraham's time. Strictly speaking, Abraham had no special grounds for believing in resurrection. For a person of that time and culture, immortality was found precisely in children; Abraham could not imagine any other continuation of life. But Paul says that Abraham trusted God, who had promised that Isaac would be the father of a great nation, so completely that he did not doubt for a second that the promise would be fulfilled, even if Isaac were offered as a sacrifice. How can this be? Does the how really matter? Abraham does not think about how it will happen. He simply accepts as fact that God's words cannot contradict one another, and therefore they will somehow fit together... And this trust is credited as righteousness.

How impoverished our concept of faith has become. We call someone a believer if they declare that they belong to a particular religion or simply believe that God exists. In many passages of Scripture, faith is spoken of in an entirely different way. Faith is our openness to God, a channel of communion with Him through which we receive His revelation. What is beyond comprehension becomes known to us with certainty. Paul calls this “the assurance of things not seen.” More than that, through this connection God's active power can pour into this world, and then things happen in it that we could only dream of. The Apostle says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Thus, faith is a living connection with God through which we come to know Him, while He acts in us and in the world.