Hebrews pt 1

Hebrews


Hebrews sounds like it should be an Old Testament book, but it's actually not. It is, however, an attempt to tie together the OT and the new. Hebrews is grouped in with Paul's letters, but it's been speculated since Origen (who lived in the second century C.E ) that this book wasn't actually written by Paul. It expresses some Pauline ideas, but it's not his writing style at all and it doesn't open with "Hey guys, it's me, Paul" like the other ones do. Somebody said this might have been written by a woman. There's nothing in the text to explicitly contradict the idea anyway.

I found chapter 2, verses 12-15 interesting.

13 And again, "I will put my trust in him." And again, "Here am I and the children whom God has given me."
14 Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15

Have I totally dragged this out of context? Maybe. Leaving aside the reference to children, because I think that is probably metaphorical, it's that combined with he himself likewise shared the same things that I see as being important. The same things. He was born, he hit puberty, he got hungry, thirsty, sleepy and sick. He got angry, he got sad, he got drunk. He cried. He probably felt embarrassed sometimes. He does everything the rest of humanity does, except never once feeling lust or falling in love- experiencing everything except marriage and sex? There's just something off about that, that the hero of the story is a thirty year old virgin who lives with his mother. If he really experienced everything we do, then he experienced sex and marriage too, it's only logical. Maybe even fatherhood.

Hebrews tells us that Jesus was more important than Moses, and insists for several paragraphs that this is true. They use as reasoning the whole "the Jews turned their backs on God so God chose someone else" argument. Which I can't imagine went down well with the Hebrews who are receiving this letter. And I think it points to evidence that the author of this book is not a Hebrew themselves. They use a lot of Jewish imagery, and Jewish references but they only seem to understand Judaism in a kind of sheltered, academic way. Which is true of a lot of Christian writers including probably yours truly but…

I was thinking about the argument that "the Jews turned away from God" and it just doesn't work. Not just because the Jews would have, and still do, disagree. But because the person writing Hebrews has lost sight of the fundamental flaw in their theory. The people in the Old Testament are always accusing each other of having turned away from God. It happens so often it becomes routine- "yeah, yeah, turned away from God, where's my toast, woman?" Yet God keeps taking them back, so why would it now be suddenly different? The prophets keep telling these people that they've strayed in order to remind them not to stray, sometimes it doesn't mean they actually had.

It's very much a part of Christian insecurity that the author of Hebrews doesn't understand the relationship between the Jews and God. The natural child knows that family will never really leave you or throw you out.. if your dad locks you out of the house for coming home late and drunk, just wait a few days until he calms down and everything will be okay. But the adopted child is coming from an abusive home, or a place of abandonment and feels desperate to prove that they deserve a place in the family. It's not enough just to be there, they have to have constant reassurance that they're the special and favorite child. It becomes a competition.

His work has been finished since the creation of the world.

This is one of those religion moments where you just have to sit there and go "whooaaa" for like half an hour.

I've speculated once or twice to myself, that God is operating on literally a different erm.. time frequency…than this world. God knows how everything will turn out, because God has already been and gone. There's a reason why the symbol for eternity is a snake eating its own tail, perhaps time moves in a cycle, and God with it.

The stars we see in the sky today are actually millions (and billions) of years old, the light we see is old light. But we're surging forward toward something we can't see, eventually we must end up at the end of somewhere, and when that happens we'll have no choice but to start again.

It's the reason for deja vu- that strange feeling you get sometimes randomly, that you've done something before. I've gotten that a lot- standing in line at the store, arriving in cities I've never been to and being sure I've walked those streets before. We're getting echoes of the future, which is really the past.

There are other circles out there as well, and sometimes those circles pass through our circles, so not only do we get echoes of what we've personally done, we get echoes of what we've done in other realities.

God is waiting for us at the end of time, which means God is actually waiting for us in the past and that's why we can't see him now.