Amending the Will--July 22, 2021

Amending the Will--July 22, 2021

"For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised inheritance, because a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant.  Where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only a death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive." [Hebrews 9:15-17]

Here's a little bit of Probate Law 101 for you from the Bible: a will only takes effect when the person making it has died.  

That might seem obvious, because it is.  But that notion is important, as any number of mystery novels and whodunnit movies will remind you when the plot hangs on a last-minute change of will before a murder, or casts a would-be heir in a suspicious light. Pop culture aside, I've seen more than my share of conflict and animosity in families erupt over matters of changes in a will made before a dear patriarch or matriarch died.  Families get torn apart when one grown child expects they'll get such-and-such in the will, only to find out that their mother or father changed their wishes at some point before their passing.  And all of that happens because, of course, a person is free to change their will at any point as long as they're alive to make those changes. 

Now, all of this also helps to clarify what sometimes gets lost in the layers of litigation: namely, that a will is basically a promise of a gift.  The person writing the will says, in effect, "These things are mine, and I am giving them to the following people."  I remember, before my wife and I had adopted our children, that our pre-adoption agency had us prepare wills even before there were children in the picture, that basically said, "If we adopt children, they will be our legal heirs--whatever we have, we will give to them upon our death."  Even without specifying our estate or the names of the children, it was a declaration of our commitment to give them whatever we had of value. That's just it--a promise of grace.

The writer of Hebrews sees that this is a really helpful way of understanding our relationship with God, because it, too, is build wholly on promises, gifts, and grace.  We might miss what was clearer in the original Greek of this passage, because in Greek, the same word means both "will" and "covenant."  So as our author talks about Jesus as the one who brokers a "new covenant" between God and humanity, it has the same feel as saying that God has "amended the will" to include us--and that "us" includes us outsiders who didn't belong to the ethnic group of ancient Israel or live within its laws.  We "Gentiles" (anybody who isn't Jewish) have been adopted into the family, as the other New Testament writers describe it, and God has simply amended the will--or initiated a new covenant, if you like--to include us through Jesus.

This whole idea of a will being enacted helps us to make sense of what the cross of Jesus might mean, too.  We saw the other day that there's this tension throughout the Bible about the sacrifice of animals, which were definitely a part of ancient Israel's worship life, and yet which the prophets said never bribed or fed or powered God.  We saw yesterday that the temptation was to think that God was somehow bloodthirsty and needing other things to die in order to keep things copacetic for the rest of us.  Under that thinking, sometimes people assume that Jesus has to die on the cross because God demands X-amount of suffering or pain or blood in order to love us.  But the writer of Hebrews reframes this meaning of Jesus' cross--it's not that a bloodthirsty deity needs to be appeased by a certain amount of death, but rather more like the logic of a will, where the person giving away their estate dies in order to make the gift happen.  In other words, it's not that God needs to be paid with someone else's death, but rather that God chooses to be the One who dies, in order to enact the will and give away the farm to us.  That is radical.

How does it change our picture of God--and thereby our outlook on the day--to see God, not demanding payment from us in blood for our sins, but offering everything to us through Christ's death on the cross?  How will you see the your beloved-ness differently, knowing that it's not that God has to hold the divine nose and grudgingly accept us because a payment of blood has been made to settle our accounts, but more that God chooses to give us everything God has, and the will is made effective through God's own self-giving, all the way to death?  

Maybe we can finally let it sink in that God loves us for us, warts and all, failures and all, even for all of our mess-ups, and that God has already declared us part of the family.

That seems a good way to face the day.

Lord God, thank you. Thank you for the lengths you go to in order to give us everything.