The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

SERMON FOR EVENSONG

HAMPSTEAD PARISH CHURCH

21 JULY 2024

One of the commentaries I consulted on our second reading, from the Epistle to the Hebrews says: ‘This is by no means an easy passage of which to grasp the meaning; but when we do, it is a tremendous thing.’[1]  Following in the steps of Jesus, and swept up in his triumph, we are invited to rediscover the high glory of our human destiny.  We stand here on the brink of deep water, but I invite you to take a deep breath and plunge in with me.

The letter to the Hebrews was written towards the end of the first century for one or more communities of Jewish Christians who had suffered persecution in the past, and had reason to fear that such days would come again. It used to be attributed to St Paul.  Like his letters it is deeply imbued with the religious and cultural foundations of Judaism, whilst also reflecting the Greco-Roman culture within which the scattered Jewish communities of the Diaspora, including those familiar to Paul himself, had grown up.   But the author’s Greek is not the same as that used by Paul.  Nor is it addressed, as are all Paul’s letters, to a specific community.  So we don’t know who wrote it.  

There are several references to angels in our reading tonight.  In contemporary Judaism angels were generally thought to be a class of heavenly beings distinct both from the Godhead and from humanity.  I don’t know what you think about angels, but the author of the book of Hebrews takes their existence pretty much for granted.  They are heavenly beings, surrounding the Godhead with worship and praise, but their role in relation to mortals is to act as messengers, and that is how we might experience them, if indeed we feel able to acknowledge their existence at all.  In Biblical times messages could only be delivered by one person speaking or perhaps writing to another, so if angels were essentially messengers, it was natural to think of them as embodied, and if they were coming to us from the heavens they would need wings, wouldn’t they?   Nowadays we might prefer to think of angels as a disembodied source of those little promptings we sometimes receive, popping up like an unexpected message in a computer In-Box.  Francis Thompson’s poem In No Strange Land has this to say about our tendency to disregard the intimations we may receive:

The angels keep their ancient places;

Turn but a stone and start a wing!

‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many-splendoured thing.

Perhaps the important thing is to take delivery of such messages, however they may find their way into our heads, to ponder them in our hearts, and to act on them if we judge them to bear a Christian impulse. 

Turning back to our reading, the letter to the Hebrews belongs to a culture which believes in embodied angels, and the author is concerned to show where Jesus fits into a hierarchy of creation which includes angels as well as humanity.  Citing Psalm 8, which says that God has made humanity a little lower than the angels, crowning us with glory and honour, and subjecting all things under our feet, the author of Hebrews notes that this statement doesn’t seem to be true of humanity in his experience.   But it is true of Jesus.  As Son of God, Jesus was evidently superior not only to humanity, but to angels as well.   Yet by coming to earth as a man, he put himself into the same situation as us.  

The poet who was inspired to write Psalm 8 was deeply conscious of the relative insignificance of human beings in the great work of creation:  

When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8.3-4)

The humility of that perception marks the huge step down which God took in Jesus when he came to earth as a man.  But then the psalmist goes on to marvel at the high status that has been accorded to humanity in God’s plan:

You have made them a little lower than the angels – [that is what the Greek of the letter to the Hebrews says, but the original Hebrew of Psalm 8 refers to Elohim, or the Lord] – you have made them a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honour, giving them dominion over all creation (Psalm 8. 5-8).

The author of the letter to the Hebrews notes that this statement is very far from being true of humanity in general – we are not in total control, and certainly we are not worthy of being crowned with glory and honour.   But it is wonderfully true of Jesus.  By choosing to come to earth as a real man, he did take his place a little lower than the angels, just as Psalm 8 says, and unlike the rest of us, he really has been crowned with glory and honour.   But if he was to experience human life fully and completely, he had to experience everything, including suffering and death.  That was the path he had to follow to the very end if he was to become the pioneer of our salvation, bringing many children to glory.  To a people facing persecution the message was intended to be a profound source of encouragement. 

But what might it mean for us?   If the intention of God in creation was to make us in his own image, inviting us to share with him the divine joy of making creative use of earth’s abundant resources for the good of all, we have made a rotten job of it.  On the contrary we have treated the gift of dominion as a license to exploit the earth’s resources for our own benefit, and never mind the consequences for others.  Our stewardship has been a disaster, but we do see that Jesus has fulfilled the promise where we have fallen so far short.  In St Paul’s words, ‘he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form he humbled himself, accepting death on a cross.  Therefore God also has highly exalted him’ (Philippians 2.6-11).  In the letter to the Hebrews, he becomes a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, making a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people.

However we look at it, the example of Jesus calls us to reject the exploitation for our own benefit of such power, influence and authority as may be ours, and to choose instead to follow the path of loving service in the use of whatever resources may be ours by virtue of our education, our status, our resources, both as individuals and as a church community.  It is a path which entails sacrificial love, sacrificial service, sacrificial giving.   But if we are to recover by his grace the glory of the human destiny for which we were created, that is the path we are invited to tread, following in the steps of Jesus the pioneer of our salvation.

[1] William Barclay, The Letter to the Hebrews, Revised Edition, Edinburgh, 1976