Faithful Series

For six weeks we have been looking at the Letter to the Hebrews. If you hadn’t noticed before, you are probably aware by now that it is far from the easiest book of the New Testament to understand, with its frequent quotations from what often seem obscure passages from the Old Testament, and with its talk of angels and references to mysterious characters like Melchizedek.

On the other hand, I hope that at the same time you have begun to appreciate what an amazing piece of writing Hebrews is—and that you will realize this more and more as the weeks go on.

My own experience of Hebrews goes back some of my earliest days as a Christian, when I was an undergraduate student at university. A friend and I thought we’d like to get together to study the Bible. For some reason we landed in the Letter to the Hebrews. As the weeks went on, we invited others to join us and they in turn invited others, so that by the end of the term there were more than thirty participants in the group!

While we found it challenging and at some points even mystifying, we also found that we were being profoundly enriched, with its repeated calls to focus on Jesus, the incomparable Christ. Indeed, a year later that became the theme of a campus-wide mission: “Focus on Jesus Christ”.

The Letter to the Hebrews is unique among the books of the New Testament on a number of accounts. For one thing, nowhere does it tell us who its author was. Added to that, many scholars aren’t sure that it was intended as a letter at all, but think that it may have begun its life as a sermon. Whatever the case, it is clear that its author was a highly gifted teacher, a deeply caring pastor and a brilliant interpreter of the Old Testament. Most importantly, whoever he or she was, this writer was passionate about Jesus.

Unfortunately, that seems to have been less and less the case with some of the men and women to whom this letter was addressed. We cannot know for sure, but evidence suggests that Hebrews was written somewhere in the early 60s. And the likelihood is that the recipients were in the main Jewish converts to Christ living in Rome.

At that time Rome had a population of about a million people, of whom around fifty thousand were Jews. It is not unlikely that the good news about Jesus had first come to Rome with some of those who had been visiting Jerusalem on the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus’ disciples in the upper room. They were among those who had been cut to the heart by Peter’s proclamation of Jesus as Lord and Messiah. They had heard the challenge to repent. They had responded by being among the three thousand who were baptized. And they had brought the good news of God’s love in Jesus back with them to Rome.

However, the years between Pentecost and Hebrews had not been easy ones for the Christians in Rome. In AD 49 the emperor Claudius had expelled all Jews from Rome—and that undoubtedly would have included a number of those who had turned to Christ. Over the years that followed, many of them were able to return. But hostility towards Christians from both Gentiles and Jews was only growing. It would reach a climax under the emperor Nero in the year 64, following the great fire of Rome.

With all this in mind, it isn’t difficult to understand how many of the believers in Rome were suffering from discouragement. Some, I suspect, had reached a state of exhaustion. Others were tempted to go back to their Jewish roots. And a few were at the point of abandoning the faith altogether, if they hadn’t done so already.

This, then, is the audience to whom the Letter to the Hebrews was directed. And I’m wondering, does any of it sound familiar to you? Two years of covid have kept many believers isolated from the fellowship of the church. And even when we are able to come together, what we are permitted to do is for the most part a pale shadow of the worship and community life that we formerly enjoyed.

Besides that, we live in a milieu that is increasingly hostile to many of the truths we hold dear. Christian faith has become marginalized, if not demonized, in many of the mass media. Added to that, “cancel culture” makes it dangerous to say or write anything that conflicts with today’s social norms—norms that are becoming more and more inimical to Christian values.

The result is that we end up with Christian believers who suffer from what we might call faith fatigue—rather are like someone who is adrift in a rowboat in the middle of a storm. Row as hard as they will, the rain continues to lash down, the wind continues to whip around them, and the waves threaten to overturn their little craft at any moment. Does that match up with anyone you know? Perhaps it even describes where you’re at right now.