"[Therefore let us go on toward maturity, leaving behind the basic teaching about Christ, and not laying again the foundation]: repentance from dead works and faith toward God, instruction about baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And we will do this, if God permits." [Hebrews 6:1-3]
If yesterday's devotion was intended to make the case for moving beyond the basics of our faith to deeper and more involved elements of it, today the writer of Hebrews is going to lay out what some of those elements might be. And to be honest, at first blush, this list might just seem like a collection of random churchy ideas, picked at random. But let's give our unnamed author the benefit of the doubt--let's start from the assumption that he has reasons for saying and choosing what he does here. And maybe we'll find there is a method to this madness, and we'll find ourselves being led deeper into our own faith here and now.
For starters, once you know the love of God in Jesus--once we "get" it that we have been so loved as for God to come among us in the human life of this homeless rabbi who welcomed outcasts and healed the hurting--then a lot of other things come into focus. For one, you realize you don't have to spend time trying to win this sort of God's favor--you've already got it! You don't have to get God's attention or earn heaven points with your good behavior or religious rituals, and there are no merit badges to be awarded or won. You are freed, then, from what the writer of Hebrews calls "dead works" and you are freed to life of trust in this God who is already so completely in love with you as to come into the world sharing our humanity to get through to us. In other words, once we are grasped by the reality of God's love in Christ Jesus, we can quit trying to earn (dead works) the love that God has already given us for free--we can simply trust (faith) the God who promises we are already beloved.
Okay, but that sounds almost too good to be true, right? I mean, how do I know I really am beloved? How do I know I belong? How do I know God's grace claims me, the real person, the actual individual, and not just some abstract group of "humanity in theory"? Well, we need these tangible, touchable, experiential events in our lives where the promise of God is made available to our senses, as real and certain as the sound of splashing water and the touch of human hands. In the early church and still today, we baptize and lay hands on people as tangible signs of the promise and power of God. We don't baptize people because God somehow needs a ritual to be accomplished in order to stop hating us; we baptize because we need the assurance of the promise that God already loves us--we need a word so powerful you can feel it pouring all over you as well as hearing it spoken. We don't lay hands on people at times of blessing, or prayer, or being set apart for a particular role and calling because our hands are magic and God needs the physical touch for a spell to be cast or power to flow; we need those signs of touch because we are physical beings whose lives are experienced in touch and feel as well as in words and ideas. It's our need, not God's, that brings the physicality of the water and the laying on of hands. But in that gift of the tangible, we are given assurance that the promise of grace which can otherwise sound too good to be true is the real deal.
And then, once we know the reality of God's love, for all of us and for each of us personally in the waters of baptism and the laying on hands, our faith points us to the future. The good news of Jesus moves like a story toward a culmination, and it insists that love wins in the end, because God wins in the end. And so death doesn't get the last word--God does, and the word is resurrection. And injustice doesn't go on forever--God promises to set all things right. As scary as the phrase "eternal judgment" might sound, it's really simply the assertion that the bullies and blowhards of history don't rule the day forever. It's the claim that the systems that harm people and the crookedness that seems rampant will not be in place forever, but will be set right, because God cares about justice and God is in the business of setting all things right. It means that God does not simply look at the brokenness of the world and give up on us, nor does God just zap the universe out of spite--but God insists on there being justice, so that those who have been stepped on can be lifted up, so that those who are hungry can be fed, so that those who are puffed up in arrogance can be taken down a few pegs, and so that all our strained relationships can be restored. Resurrection and justice are the future of this story--and because we know what God is like in Jesus, we can have confidence that God's justice is good, merciful, and restorative.
So even though at first, these phrases from Hebrews can sound disconnected or random, they all flow from a common center point: the goodness of God as we have seen God revealed in Christ. Knowing Jesus, then, helps us to quit wasting our time trying to earn the love God has already given us for free. It helps us to know God's love is for each of us specifically, and not just in theory, as surely as you can feel the outpoured water on your head at the font. And it helps us know we can entrust our lives and the world's future into the God who restores the lost, returns justice from crookedness, and raises the dead.
There was a method to the madness after all here. Knowing Jesus helps shine a light to make sense of everything else in our lives, so that we can keep on putting one foot in front of the other and walking our way through this life in faith, in hope, and in love.
Lord Jesus, help us to make sense of our lives in light of who you are.
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