Saturday in the First Week of Ordinary Time, January 16, 2021

Hebrews 4:12-16

The Word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart. No creature is concealed from him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account.  Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin. So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.

The First Reading for today’s Mass continues with the Letter to the Hebrews.  Many beautiful passages adorn this Letter like pearls strung as a necklace.  The present Reading is one such pearl, amply repaying deep reflection of its lustre .

“The Word of God.”  For the most part, modern translations treat this phrase as pertaining to the Scriptures, but St. Thomas Aquinas and others saw this as meaning the Son of God, of whom St. John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1, 1).  Thomas understands the passage that makes up this Reading as about the two natures of Christ, the divine and the human.  First, the divine: “The Word of God is living and effective.”  The Lord’s divine nature, once cloaked in human flesh, reigns forever in heaven.  In union with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he created all life, and by joining himself to a human nature gave us life by dying on the Cross for us.  Indeed, he called himself “the life” (John 14, 6).  He is “effective”, that is, he accomplishes all that he has a mind to do.  He is “sharper than any two-edged sword” in that he penetrates “even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and [is] able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.”  The Jewish Christians understood the soul as the immortal part of a human in which the mind and personality resides, as distinct from the spirit (from spiritus, the Latin word for “breath”) which they understood as that which caused the life of the body.  When the spirit left the body or was extinguished, the soul departed from the body and the body died.  Thus, the soul and spirit are very much connected to each other, just as the “joints and marrow”, or “bones” are.  The Son of God penetrates thoroughly into a person’s inmost recesses, discerning his “reflections and thoughts” and informing his conscience as to what is right and wrong.  “No creature is concealed from him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account.”  This brings to mind the words of the Psalm: “I said: Perhaps darkness shall cover me: and night shall be my light in my pleasures. But darkness shall not be dark to you [O Lord], and night shall be light all the day: the darkness and the light are alike to you” (Psalm 138, 11-12.  We have an implicit warning in these words: The Lord sees and knows all people from the inside — he knows their motivations as well as their actions.  Therefore, we must truly live virtuous and faithful lives and not be as the hypocrites, for it is he who will judge us.

“We have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens.”  Now Paul speaks of the human nature of the Lord, through which the Son of God is the High Priest who offers himself as Victim upon the Cross.  He is not like Annas or Caiphas who would stand in the midst of the holy of holies in the Temple interceding for the people: this High Priest, “Jesus, the Son of God”, has “passed through the heavens” to intercede for us directly to his Father, presenting to him the wounds he suffered on our behalf.  Since he does this for us, “let us hold fast to our confession”: let us persevere in the Faith we first professed at our baptism.  “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.”  Through taking on our flesh he “has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.”  Tested by the devil and tested by the ordinary sufferings of daily human life.  In the Gospels we see him tempted, nearly killed on several occasions, mocked, hated, scorned, rejected, hungry, thirsty, betrayed, beaten, pierced, and suffocated.  In Matthew 25, 35-36, he gives a partial list of his sufferings.  He does not know our the human condition merely as an onlooker, but from the inside.  This assures us of his merciful stance towards us: “so let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help”, and encourages us to feel and act with compassion towards our neighbor.  And just as he did this “without sin”, so can we, through his grace.  

We can now understand something deeper about the call of the tax collector Matthew, recounted in today’s Gospel.  The Lord “saw Levi, son of Alphaeus, sitting at the customs post. Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me.’ ”  The Lord saw Matthew (his Jewish name was “Levi”) at his customs post with his eyes, but also at the “customs post” of his heart — from within it.  He knew Matthew through and through; he knew the “reflections and thoughts” of his heart.  And Matthew knew that he was known by the Lord and felt the Lord within himself, and this gave Matthew the strength to at once “confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help”, for “he got up and followed Jesus” (Mark 2, 14).