NOTES for Heb 11:24-12:2

Speaking about people of faith and the works of faith, the author of the letter states that they too reached "perfection," but, in his words, "not without us." By "us" he undoubtedly means Christians, the Church as the body of Christ.

Of course, statements of this kind are often understood to mean that Christianity is the final and most correct religion, containing in itself the whole fullness of Revelation and therefore the whole fullness of truth. In that case, everything true that existed in the history of Revelation before Christ belongs to Christianity, because there is no other truth in the world. It must be recalled, however, that representatives of some other religions have asserted something similar, each having in mind, of course, his own tradition. And if Christianity really were a religion, there would be enormous room here for arguments, discussions, and rivalry.

But Christianity is not a religion, but life with Christ in His Kingdom. And in speaking of "perfection," the author of the letter clearly has in mind the fullness of the Kingdom, not the fullness of some religious tradition. In that case it turns out that all people of faith in all times were seeking one thing: the Kingdom and its fullness. And now they too have been joined to this fullness, together with Christians.

Of course, if one absolutizes the time of the fallen world, one has to imagine approximately the following picture: all the righteous who died before Christ found themselves in the world of shadows, which the Old Testament books call sheol in Hebrew and the New Testament books call hades in Greek. There they wait until the Messiah comes and frees them, bringing them into the Kingdom. But the picture looks like this only when one perceives it through the prism of the reality of the fallen world. Here time is one-dimensional and absolute, directing the unfolding of all the cause-and-effect chains that determine the existence of this world.

In the Kingdom, however, everything is somewhat different. There is no one-dimensional time there, and cause-and-effect chains exist there differently from the form familiar to us. Therefore the sequence of events there turns out to be different. In the Kingdom there is no "first" and "then" to which we are accustomed. The reality of the Kingdom can appear at any point of the space and time within which our world exists. And the measure of a particular person's involvement in the life of the Kingdom is determined only by the quality of his existence, by what determines this existence: fallen nature or God's breath of life.

It is no surprise that people who strove to build their lives so that only the breath of life would determine them receive the Kingdom and its life insofar as they can reach the goal they have set. But they reach it only with the coming of Christ, when sin loses all power over them. For them this is not a story of staying in the world of shadows, as their life may appear to us, but a path into the Kingdom, completed by meeting Christ. For us such a meeting often turns out to be the first step; for them it is the final one, after which the life of the Kingdom opens to them in all its fullness.

Here the Apostle Paul contrasts the champions of faith, who devoted all their strength and their whole lives to serving God, with “us,” ordinary people. In this comparison the apostle reveals to us an astonishing joy: “we” are not left aside. Unfortunately, we often imagine God anthropomorphically; to put it simply, we judge Him by ourselves. That is why, and only why, it seems to us that the reward, life before the face of the Almighty, can be received only by those who have earned it through unimaginable labors. This explains the Jews’ rejection of Christ, the shocking unexpectedness of the parable of the workers of the eleventh hour, and our daily concentration on ascetic exercises at the expense of fellowship with God and service to people. But God, the Apostle Paul says, has provided something better for us.

Life, the apostle says, is not given to those who have earned it; it is granted to those who suffer from its absence. And like the workers of the eleventh hour, we must make at least some effort, as far as our strength permits, in order to receive it. This is an astonishing hope for us, so immense that grasping it is almost beyond our strength. And the best way to receive the better thing that God has provided for us is to thank Him.

Concluding the discussion of faith and faithfulness, the author of the epistle mentions many cases of those testimonies of faithfulness to God and to the covenant made with Him, cases that would take so long to list that he simply would not have enough time for such a listing (vv. 32-38). But none of them, the author says, received what was promised, because they could receive it only together with those for whom, in his words, "God had provided something better," those who, having become witnesses of the Savior's coming into the world, through Him shared in the life of the Kingdom, "having been made perfect" (vv. 39-40). Clearly, this refers to that fullness of the Kingdom which, of course, could not be opened to the world before the coming of the Messiah. But now, when the Kingdom, according to the Savior's word, has "drawn near" and opened itself to the world, transforming it more and more, it turned out that all who had sought it and waited for it, regardless of when they lived and when they completed their earthly path, received the possibility of sharing in the fullness of life that they had sensed beforehand but could not receive. Clearly, the action of the breath of God that permeates the Kingdom extends not only to the present and the future, but also to the past.

Of course, within the boundaries of our world, which has not yet been transformed, such an effect on the past would be completely impossible, but the Kingdom lives by other laws, and, as it spreads in the world, it clearly includes within its boundaries not only all existing space, but also all existing time (or, as it appears to us, all times, both the present and all others, whether past or not yet come). Of course, this does not mean at all that everything that has ever happened or is happening in the world today automatically becomes part of the Kingdom, transformed and brought into its life. Only what is akin to the Kingdom, what does not contradict its nature and its laws, can enter it. The evil in which, according to the Savior's word, the world lies today will have no place in the Kingdom, just as there will be no place in it for those who consciously choose the path of evil. But those who have chosen the Kingdom and the path of righteousness will enter it even if the laws of the untransformed world do not allow such a thing: for they are one with the Kingdom, the Kingdom is their spiritual homeland, and therefore, as soon as its laws reach our world, which has not yet been transformed, those who sought and awaited the Kingdom immediately find themselves in it and begin to live by its laws, while the laws of the untransformed world lose all power over them. Only in this way can the triumph of the Kingdom become complete; only in this way can every seeker obtain it, regardless of when he was destined to pass through his earthly path.

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.

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...

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?