By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
Tuesday of Holy Week
Viewers of the promise
from afar
Hebrews 11: 8-16
The letter to the Hebrews is a 13-chapter tract addressing the problem of apostasy. The epistle is concerned about people who start out strong believers and then fall away. The writer swings back and forth from warning the readers of what a dreadful fate will befall them if they renounce so wondrous a salvation as is theirs, to encouraging them with how profound is God's love of even the most blatant sinner.
His swinging discourse is riddled throughout with some of the most penetrating insights into what is good about the good news.
Admittedly, in the verses suggested for today, he is talking about Abraham and Sarah and their immediate relatives, not his fellow Christians. It is also true that this author is continually pointing out how much better the new promise is than the old, the new priesthood than the old. But he cannot always keep his distinctions clear. And he does commend the behaviour he finds in Abraham and Sarah. Throughout his tract he maintains his own form of the "already and not yet" character of life under the new covenant. Christians also have no lasting city here but seek a city that is to come.
It is a safe and just procedure therefore to hear a word for our lives in this description of those early sojourners, Abraham and Sarah.
First of all, they obeyed when they were called to go to a place they were to receive as an inheritance. Not knowing where they were to go, they nevertheless set out. But they didn't receive the inheritance. They sojourned in the land that was their inheritance as in a.foreign land, living in tents.
Let that metaphor do its own work for a while before reading on. Is that what a Christian's life in the world is like?
Remember this is the author who invites us to go outside the gate with the contaminated animals of the sin offering - because that is where Christ is (13: 11-13). What enables people to join God's chosen one under the burden of the world's sin? It is that they long for a city that is to come.
Back to these old-timers. "They did not receive what was promised but they saw it and greeted it from afar. People like that are seekers after a homeland. If they'd been thinking of the land from which they came...they could have availed themselves of many opportunities to return. But they desired a better country...that is a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God."
Is that how it is with us?
Thy Kingdom Come
God, the world is out of joint.
Your good gifts are not being justly shared, nor is your bounty being
properly husbanded. All of us, in our land of plenty, have apart in this deprivation and waste.
You made us for each other. Male and female you made us. You made us members of one another .
But we are alienated from one another and divided against one another: man against woman, east against west, haves against have-nots, powerful against powerless. Peoples and nations are imagining vain things all over the place. Armies clash in religious zeal. Clouds of an ultimate conflict darken the earth.
Hear us as we pray for the coming of your kingdom. Where power is held, enlighten and temper it. Where power is lacking, strengthen those without it. Sustain the hands of the people who intercede on behalf of the needy. Have mercy on your saints who battle the hosts of hell. Uphold those who pay the price of wresting change from the reluctant. Cheer the warriors for justice.
Give us all eyes to see your glory even now, the glory we behold in the face of Jesus Christ, the glory of the Lamb who bears the sin of the world.
Amen