Worthy of Our Hope--April 19, 2021

Worthy of Our Hope--April 19, 2021

"Of the angels he says, 'He makes his angels winds, and his servants flames of fire.' But of the Son he says, 'Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, and the righteous scepter is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions'." [Hebrews 1:7-9]

It's good to have hope--but hope needs to be rooted in someone worthy of our trust, or else we're setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Here in these opening thoughts of the letter to the Hebrews, the author is still making his case that Jesus, the Son of God, is superior to the angels.  And he's trying to show us that the Scriptures themselves point beyond angels to someone even more important, even more righteous, and even more worthy of our hope, namely Jesus. In all honesty, that's probably not the hot-button issue in our day that it might have been in the first century.  I don't run into many people these days in my ministry whose deepest struggle is that they worship angels too much. But, okay, Hebrews, your point is well-taken. Jesus outranks and outperforms the whole heavenly host--fair enough.

But there's another dimension to these words that we might struggle with more, and we need to deal with it.  Here in these verses, the author quotes passages from the Psalms as he's trying to make his case about Jesus' superiority to the angels.  But interestingly, the psalm he's quoting, which begins, "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever..." (Psalm 45, in case you were keeping score) is written as a tribute to one of Israel's kings--it was written about a human ruler!  In Israel's worship life, they often would ask God's blessing, or offer praise to God, for the prosperous reign of their kings.  And this psalm in particular is, if you read it in its entirety, sort of the soundtrack for a royal wedding.  

Okay, so what? Well, here's what I think is worth our consideration today.  Those ancient words of the psalm pinned a lot of hopes on an earthly ruler... and no matter who the king was in Israel, he didn't live up to those hopes.  None of them did.  There was often a lot of wishful thinking that "Maybe the next king will finally get it all right," and it turned out to be just that--a lot of wishful thinking.  Even the ones who were remembered as the best of the best and the most righteous of the righteous (like good ol' king David himself) had some pretty glaring flaws, lapses in judgment, and disastrously bad choices.  The bad ones were outright dangerous.  And seeing these words of effusive praise heaped up on any human leader sounds, well, pretty dangerous, too, if not like outright propaganda.

And this is the move that the writer of Hebrews makes.  He knows, of course, that the words he is quoting originally came from a psalm that was written to celebrate a new king.  And he knew just as well that all of Israel and Judah's kings had fallen short of justice, mercy, wisdom, and faithfulness in their reign.  But the writer of Hebrews doesn't criticize the ancient psalmist for having such lofty hope--instead, he redirects them.  He says, "Maybe this was never about any one king or administration--maybe the kinds of hopes in these words can only be met by God."  He reorients our hope, rather than razing it to the ground.  He helps us to change trajectory--instead of pinning our hopes on some human leader or family dynasty (or political party or platform, in our era), the writer of Hebrews points us to Jesus as the one who really is worthy of the hopes we had settled for pinning on kings, princes, political parties, presidents, and the like.

We know what it's like--if we're truthful with ourselves--to pin too much hope on any human leader, political platform, or personal relationship.  The ancient Israelites did it to their kings, and we do it with our political systems as well.  It's dangerously easy to overlook failures of the figures we like or support, and awfully tempting to make our favorite candidates or parties into savior figures.  And once we've done that, it becomes even harder to pull out of the tail-spin and admit it, so we double down on our misplaced trust and start making golden calves and other idols out of them--sometimes quite literally.  It's a powerful drug, that misdirected hope--it clouds our vision so we don't see what we don't want to have to deal with, and it encourages us to think that the figures I like or have thrown my support to are backed unquestionably by God.  But the writer of Hebrews offers an alternative--instead of giving up hope when one leader or ruler after another lets us down, he points our hope toward Jesus, the Son, who really does embody God's justice, God's goodness, and God's mercy.  Jesus is really worthy of our hope, and if we have been struggling with allegiances to figures who don't--and can't--live up to that trust, Jesus doesn't disappoint. He actually lives up to our faithful expectations.  He really is and does what all the old royal enthronement psalms were wishing for.

So again, maybe our era is not particularly tempted to worship angels, rather than Jesus, but we do wrestle very much with the temptation to pin our hopes on some lesser figure who will inevitably disappoint us.  And when we are in that vicious circle, the voice from Hebrews calls us to redirect our hope into one who is truly worthy of it--the One in whom we see God with a human face, even Jesus.

Lord God, help us to place our trust only in you, and not to fall for the sales pitches or sweet talk of pretenders.