Tuesday in the Second Week of Ordinary Time, January 19, 2021

Hebrews 6:10-20

God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love you have demonstrated for his name by having served and continuing to serve the holy ones. We earnestly desire each of you to demonstrate the same eagerness for the fulfillment of hope until the end, so that you may not become sluggish, but imitators of those who, through faith and patience, are inheriting the promises. When God made the promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, and said, I will indeed bless you and multiply you. And so, after patient waiting, Abraham obtained the promise. Now, men swear by someone greater than themselves; for them an oath serves as a guarantee and puts an end to all argument. So when God wanted to give the heirs of his promise an even clearer demonstration of the immutability of his purpose, he intervened with an oath, so that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge might be strongly encouraged to hold fast to the hope that lies before us. This we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm, which reaches into the interior behind the veil, where Jesus has entered on our behalf as forerunner, becoming high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.

At the beginning of this portion of the Letter to the Hebrews, which the Church uses for the First Reading of today’s Mass, Paul is contrasting the wickedness of Christians who give up the Faith with his congregation, which has not.  

“Your work and the love you have demonstrated for his name by having served and continuing to serve the holy ones.”  This work and love are for those suffering for their belief in the Lord.  As Paul will say later in this letter, “You endured a great fight of afflictions. And on the one hand indeed, by reproaches and tribulations, were humiliated; and on the other, became companions of them that were used in such sort. For you both had compassion on them that were in chains and took with joy the being stripped of your own goods, knowing that you have a better and a lasting substance” (Hebrews 10, 32-34).  Paul alludes here to the persecution which the Jewish leaders waged following their stoning of St. Stephen (in which he himself had been involved).  Those to whom he was writing were continuing to “serve the holy ones” undergoing persecution.  God, he says, “is not unjust so as to overlook” their charity, but will reward them for it.  They must persevere in this faith and in these good works, however: “We earnestly desire each of you to demonstrate the same eagerness for the fulfillment of hope until the end.”  This brings to mind the warning our Lord gave to the Ephesian Christians: “I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Be mindful therefore how far you are fallen: and do penance and do the works you did at first” (Revelation 2, 4-5).  Paul warns them that they may not become “sluggish” but that they might burn with the same fervor as the persecuted Christians they are assisting: “[Become] imitators of those who, through faith and patience, are inheriting the promises.”  Let us note his use of the verb “are inheriting”: these are the adopted sons and daughters of God who receive what their Father has promised them.  They receive the grace of adoption at baptism, and then “act” like God’s sons and daughters, imitating the Father’s only begotten Son.  

Paul compares these Jewish Christians to their ancestor Abraham, and reminds them of how Abraham believed in the Lord’s promise to him: “And so, after patient waiting, Abraham obtained the promise.”  Abraham was ninety-nine years old when Sarah gave birth to their son Isaac.  He persisted in his trust for decades through all his hard labor, travels, and battles.  He persisted in the face of failing biology.  He did not give in even when no reason remained to hope except that God had promised him a son.  This is faith: when there is no rational reason to believe and every reason to give up, but a person holds on.  This is the faith that leads to heaven, the faith held by the martyrs in their torments, the faith clutched by missionaries in faraway places.  Almighty God promised Abraham, “I will indeed bless you and multiply you.”  He makes the same promise to us who are baptized: I will bless you with grace, and I will multiply your joys in heaven.  

We are “strongly encouraged to hold fast to the hope that lies before us”, as were the first Christians, by the promise of God, and also by his Son, who suffered for us and has become the “anchor” of our souls through entering the throne room of heaven on our behalf as our “forerunner”, as our “high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek”, presenting his Sacrifice before the Father.  The crucifix that hangs in our homes and churches, which the early Christians disguised in their art as an anchor, is the divine guarantee of the promise the Lord makes to us.