NOTES for Heb 12:7-8

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.