NOTES for Heb 13:14

In today’s reading, the Apostle Paul calls us to imitate the faith of our teachers. We should not use this passage to discuss whether our parish priest is worthy to be called a teacher in the faith. That is not what we are being told today. In the life of each of us, there have been people whose faith and words made a deep impression on us. Let us consider what they had in common. What was most striking and most important about them? For myself, I define it as “transparency.” Those who were true teachers for me were transparent—Christ could be seen through them! Each was a vivid and unique individual, yet their human personality did not obscure His light. This is why Paul continues his thought about teachers with the words: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Whoever may teach us, what matters most is not the person of the teacher, but the Person of Christ, the One True Teacher.

As if responding to the events of A.D. 70, the author of the letter speaks of the altar to which the "servants of the tabernacle," that is, representatives of the traditional Levitical priesthood, have no relation (v. 10). He mentions the practice of Yahwist sacrifices, according to which the meat of the purification sacrifice (except for the part burned on the altar and the part allotted to the priests) was burned away from the place of sacrifice (Leviticus, ch. 4). In the same way, according to him, after the defeat of Jerusalem and the Temple all Christians found themselves "outside the camp," which, however, should not trouble them: after all, Jesus Himself shed His blood for the salvation of the faithful in the same place, "outside the camp," beyond the walls of Jerusalem (vv. 11-14). Such is the essence of the purification sacrifice: it cleanses a person while at the same time depriving him of the sacrificial meal. So it happened with the people of God: after the defeat of the Temple, they were deprived of the sacrificial meal not for no reason, but while receiving the possibility of being cleansed by the blood which, for those who accepted Christ's sacrifice, became the blood of the new, messianic covenant.

For those who rejected the sacrifice, the catastrophe was only a catastrophe, without hope and without a way out. For the Christians who accepted it, it gave hope that the end of the earthly Jerusalem was not yet the end of the history of the people of God, that the history of the Kingdom continues, and that over the ruins of the earthly Jerusalem the outlines of another Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem descending to earth, would soon appear. And while awaiting that day, the day of the triumph of the Kingdom and the Savior's return, the author of the letter calls his fellow believers not to betray the norms and foundations of Christian life that they had learned from the first generation of Christians (vv. 1-6). This especially concerns those foundations of spiritual life that the author's contemporaries learned from their mentors: during a spiritual crisis, "teachers" inevitably had to appear, and evidently really did appear, who wanted to revise them and adapt them to the spirit of the age. That is why, as can be seen, the author calls his readers not to forget the mentors who once helped them set out on the path leading to the Kingdom (v. 7). Indeed, Christ has not changed, just as the Kingdom itself has not changed (v. 8). And the main task of those walking in troubled times was not to turn aside from the path on which they had once set out.