In telling the story of faithful people over the centuries, the author of Hebrews told of people who gained much and of people who lost much. What is the effect of faith?
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the end of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews and the first two verses of chapter twelve (Hebrews 11:29-12:2).
Hebrews is not an easy book. The author confronted a disconnect between the emerging practices of the Christian Church there in the first century, and the vast majority of the people that surrounded them, including certain sects of Judaism but definitely including the vast majority of those who were worshipping the Roman or the Greek gods. The difference was the practice of sacrifice.
The author of Hebrews argued that sacrifice had, through its entire practice, been a symbolic one. That is, it represented a deeper reality of the relationship between God and human beings. The author of Hebrews called it faith: the reliance upon God to create a reality that it was even greater than the one that people currently lived in.
In this section, the author listed a large number of people who had trusted in God. Some of them had obtained great good fortune. They had become monarchs; they had received the resurrection of their loved ones. Others? Well, they didn’t do so well. They suffered tortures; they suffered execution. They came to sad places in the desert to live out their days.
“Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,” wrote the author of Hebrews, let us hold firm into that same faith.
It’s a puzzling passage, in great part because how is one supposed to understand the effectiveness of faith or even the effect of faith? If people of faith over the centuries had both attained great heights and been dropped into deep pits, what is the worth of faith? If so many great names of faith had not seen the fulfillments of their hopes, and that we (in the author of Hebrews day) are the ones experiencing the fulfillment of faith, then what is the effect of faith? What was the effect of faith for all of them?
Two thousand years later I have to look at this and say there was certainly a fulfillment of faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but we still live in “the already and the not yet” — the already of God’s care and compassion and love for us; and the not yet of a world of peace and justice and harmony. Whatever we might want to say about the world, we cannot call it that.
So what is the effect of faith? I would argue that the effect of faith is to keep us in relationship with God, an active, ongoing, real, and deepening relationship, not simply one of bringing occasional gifts to some sort of transactional deity that vaguely promises that everything will be OK. Instead, the practice of faith, the discipline of prayer, these are the things that hold us closer to God, that that bring us closer to God, that buttress our hopes, that strengthen our limbs and our minds for the tasks which will in the end help us and the others working with us to build that world that God has promised.
It is always the already. It is always the not yet, at least, until the end of time.
But in that relationship with God, we can see our hopes fulfilling as we work, as we pray, and as we are filled with the Holy Spirit.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
