Thursday in the First Week of Ordinary Time, January 14, 2021

Hebrews 3:7-14

The Holy Spirit says: “Oh, that today you would hear his voice, harden not your hearts as at the rebellion in the day of testing in the desert, where your ancestors tested and tried me and saw my works for forty years. Because of this I was provoked with that generation and I said, ‘They have always been of erring heart, and they do not know my ways.’ As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter into my rest.’ ”  Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart, so as to forsake the living God. Encourage yourselves daily while it is still “today,” so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin. We have become partners of Christ if only we hold the beginning of the reality firm until the end.

Paul begins the third chapter of his Letter to the Hebrews by comparing the Lord Jesus to Moses.  In so doing, he describes the Lord as “the house”, whereas Moses is but the servant in the house.  After thus establishing the greatness of Jesus, Paul equates him with the Father by replacing the Father with Jesus in Psalm 95, the source of the quote: “Oh, that today you would hear his [Jesus’s] voice, harden not your hearts as at the rebellion in the day of testing in the desert where your ancestors tested and tried me and saw my works, etc.”  Now, reading this line, we may be confused because it begins with its subject as the Psalmist, but without warning halfway through, the subject becomes the Lord.  The Hebrew text contains no punctuation, forcing scholars to make decisions about where a sentence begins and ends.  In the present case, there are no ways to translate this verse into good English without distorting the meaning of the Hebrew, and so this rendering is the course pursued in most translations.  At any rate. Paul is exhorting his congregation to listen to the voice of Jesus as their ancestors ought to have listened to the voice of the Father.  The whole quote  should be read as the words of the Lord Jesus. Proceeding in this way with the verse, we see the Lord Jesus as if complaining about the faithlessness of the people he had striven to save.  

We can interpret the verse then, as follows: “Oh, would that today you hear my voice and harden not your hearts as at the rebellion in the day of testing in the desert of this world, where your ancestors tested and tried me and saw my works for thirty-three years. Because of this I was provoked with that generation and I said, ‘They have always been of erring heart, and they do not know my ways.’ ”  Speaking to Jewish Christians perhaps twenty or even thirty years after the Lord’s Death and Resurrection, Paul recalls for them how their “ancestors” “tested and tried” Jesus and ultimately rejected him.  Paul appeals to them to cling to the Lord in their faith, for not to do so only further “tests and tries” him.  The Jewish Christians, knowing that none of those who left Egypt under Moses lived to settle in the Promised Land, would have understood the inference: to test and try Jesus through a lack of faith and perseverance would cause that they should not enter into the Promised Land of heaven.  Driving home the point, Paul admonishes them, “Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil and unfaithful heart, so as to forsake the living God.”

“Encourage yourselves daily while it is still ‘today,’ so that none of you may grow hardened by the deceit of sin.”  That is, each of you continuously encourage yourselves through prayer, meditation, and spiritual reading in the time God gives you, and encourage each other, lest you “grow hardened by the deceit of sin; putting off prayer, meditation, and spiritual reading leads to neglect, and this leads to a gradual hardening in secular ways of thinking and acting.  Sin, which Paul personalizes here, is “deceitful” in that it cloaks itself as prudence: You are tired or busy or not in the right mood; do these things later, maybe tomorrow.  But neglect of our souls is more dangerous than neglect of our bodies for the effects of the neglect of our bodies merely lead to physical decline.  Sin only pretends to care for us.

“We have become partners of Christ if only we hold the beginning of the reality firm until the end.”  The Gospels, the Letters and Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelation persistently hammer this out for us.  As the Lord himself tells his disciples, “In your perseverance you shall win your souls” (Luke 21, 19).  And as the Lord says in the Book of Revelation: “To him that shall overcome, I will give to sit with me in my throne: as I also have overcome and am set down with my Father in his throne” (Revelation 3, 21).