LAST WORDS
HEB. xiii. 15-25
The connexion of ver. 15 with the antecedent context is suggestive. We
have been led to a contemplation of the Lord Jesus in His character as
Antitype and Fulfilment of the holocaust of the Levitical atonement.
Even as the chief animal victim of the old covenant, the symbolical
bearer of the sins of Israel, was carried "outside the camp" to be
consumed, so our Victim was led "outside the gate" of the city to His
death, that there, by His blood-shedding, by His absolute and perfect
self-immolation in our stead, He might "hallow His people," bringing
them forgiven and welcomed back to God. The point of the dread ritual of
Calvary here specially emphasized is just this, that He "suffered
outside the gate." The old Israel, guiltily unknowing, fulfilled the
type in the Antitype by refusing Him place even to die within the sacred
city. He, in His love for the new Israel, that He might in every
particular be and do what was foreshadowed for Him, refused not to
submit to that supreme rejection.
From this the apostolic Writer draws two messages for his readers. First
(ver. 13) they are to follow the Lord outside, willing to be rejected
like Him and because of Him. They are to be patient, for His sake, when
they are "put out of the synagogues" and reproached as traitors to
Moses. They are by faith to conquer the cry of their human hearts as
they crave perpetuity for the beloved past; they are to remember (ver.
14), as they issue from the old covenant's gate into what seems the
wild, that "Jerusalem that now is" was built for time only, and that
they belong to the city of eternity, where their High Priest sits on His
throne to bless them now and welcome them hereafter. Then, secondly and
therefore (ver. 15), they are to use Him now and for ever as their one
sacerdotal Mediator. By Him, not by the Aaronic ministry, they are to
bring their sacrifices to God. They are to accept exclusion and to turn
it into inclusion, into a shutting-up of all their hopes and all their
worship into their glorious Christ. And what now is their altar-ritual
to be? It is to be twofold; the offering of praise, "the fruit of lips
that confess" the glory of "His Name," and then the sacrifice of self
and its possessions for others for His sake (ver. 16); "doing good, and
communicating" blessings; for these are "altar-sacrifices ([Greek:
thysiai]) with which God is well pleased."
Such, if we are right, is the connexion. The Lord, rejected, that He
might die for us after a manner faithful to the prophetic type, is to be
the Hebrew disciple's example of patience when he too is rejected. Such
rejection is only to unite him the more closely to the Christ as his way
to God, his Mediator for all the praise and all the unselfish service
which is to fill his dedicated life.
The lesson was special for the believing Hebrew then. But it has its
meaning for all time. In one way or another the true follower of the
crucified and rejected Redeemer must _stand ready_ for cross and for
exclusion, so far as he is called upon by his faith to break with all
ultimate and absolute allegiance save to "Jesus Christ and Him
crucified." He has to recollect, on one account or another, that he too
belongs to the invisible order, to the "citizenship that is in heaven,"
and not to any visible polity as if it were final, as if it were his
spirit's goal. But then he too is to make this detachment and separation
only a fresh means to unite him to his great High Priest for a
self-sacrificial life in Him. He is to be no frowning sectary, saying,
"I am holier than thou." He is to be simply a Christian, to whom,
whatever the world may say, or the world-element in the Church, Christ
the crucified is Lord indeed.
Following these appeals, in a connexion which we can trace, the thought
passes (ver. 17) to the Christian Ministry. "Outside the gate" of the
old order, the disciple finds himself at once not an isolated unit but
included in _a new order_. He is one of a spiritual community, which has
of course its system, for it has to cohere and to operate. It has amidst
it its "leaders," its [Greek: hegoumenoi], its pastoral guides and
watchmen, a recognized institution, which always as such (though always
the more as it is more true to its ideal) claims the obedience, the
loyalty, the subordination, of the multitude who are not "leaders."
These "leaders" are set before us as bearing a Divine commission, for we
read that they "must _give account_." So qualified, not as assertors of
themselves but as servants and agents of God, they watch for souls, with
a vigilance loving and tender, asking for response.
Such an ideal of the Christian Ministry is as remote as possible from
that of a sacerdotal caste, or indeed of anything that has to do with a
harsh and perfunctory officialism. Its position is totally different
from that of an agency of mediation between man and God, between the
Church and her Lord. We have one passing note of this in the fact,
present in other Epistles as in this, that the Ministry is addressed and
greeted through the Church rather than the Church through the Ministry.
See below, ver. 24: "Salute your leaders." If we may put it so, the
Christian clergy are so far from being the sole deliverers of the
apostolic writings to the people that the people rather have to deliver
such messages to the clergy.
Yet on the other hand this passage is one of the many which set the
Christian Ministry before us as a vital factor in the life of the
Church, an institution which has its life from above, not from the will
of the community but from the gift of God. In their anxiety to avoid
distortions and exaggerations of the ministerial idea many Christians
have failed to give adequate place in thought to its essentially Divine
origin and commission. A passage like this should correct such a
reaction. There is in the Church, by the will of God, a "leadership,"
recognizable, authentic, not arbitrary yet authoritative, not
mediatorial yet pastoral. It is never designed indeed to come really
between the believing soul and the ever-present Lord. Yet it is
appointed as the norm a human agency by which He works for the soul, not
only in the solemn ministration of His great ordinances of blessing but
in spiritual assistance and guidance as well. It will be the pastor's
folly if he so insists upon the imagery of shepherding as to forget for
one moment that the "sheep" are also, and in a larger aspect, his equal
brethren and sisters, "the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty." It
will be his folly, and the ruin of his true authority, if he forgets in
any part of his service that he is not the master but the servant of the
Church. If in his "guidance" he dares to domineer, and if in his
teaching he takes the tone of one who can _dictate_ any point of faith
or duty, on his own authority, apart from the Word of God, he is fatally
mistaking his whole function. Nevertheless he is called to be a
"leader," with the responsibilities and duties of a leader. This thought
is to keep him always humble, and always intently on the watch over his
own life. But it is to be present also to the members of the Church, to
remind them always to _tend towards_ that generous "obedience" with
which Christian freedom safeguards Christian order. The Church is never
to forget the responsibility of the Ministry; it is to assist the
Ministry in its true discharge. For in this also "we are members one of
another."
* * * * *
The closing sentences of the great Letter (ver. 18 and onwards) call for
little detailed explanation, with one great exception. The Writer asks
for intercessory prayer for himself and his colleagues, in the accent of
one who knows his own unreserved desire (ver. 18) to keep his whole
"life-walk honourable," [Greek: kalos anastrephesthai]. He asks
specially for this help, with a view to his own speedier return to his
disciples (ver. 19), an allusion which we cannot now explain for
certain. At the very end (verses 22-25), with a noble modesty, in the
tone of the true Christian leader, drawing, not driving, he asks for
"patience" over his "appeal" ([Greek: paraklesis]), his solemn call for
loyalty to the Christ of God under all the trials of the time.
He has "used brevity" ([Greek: dia bracheon]) in writing; he might have
expanded the vast theme indefinitely; he has only given them its
essentials. Then he makes his one personal reference, abruptly, as if
speaking about well-known circumstances; Timotheus (ver. 23) has been
released from prison, and is on his way to join the Writer, and the two
may hope to visit the Hebrews together again. Then follows the greeting
to the pastors through the Church; and then a message of love sent by
"those from Italy," that is to say, as the familiar idiom suggests,
brethren resident in Italy who send their greeting from it; an allusion
over which endless conjectures may gather but which must always remain
uncertain. The last word is the blessing of grace. "Grace"--the holy
effect upon the Church, and upon the saint, of "God for us" and "God in
us"--"be with you all."
* * * * *
We have thus followed this final passage to its end, but making, as the
reader will have seen, one great omission. The twentieth and
twenty-first verses stand by themselves, with such an elevation of their
own, with such a tranquil majesty of diction, with such a pregnant depth
of import, that I could not but reserve my brief comment on them to the
very last in these attempts to carry "Messages from the Epistle to the
Hebrews."
"Now the God of peace, who hath brought again from the dead the Shepherd
of the sheep, that great Shepherd, with blood of covenant eternal, even
our Lord Jesus--may He perfect you in all good unto the doing of His
will, doing in you that which is acceptable before Him, by means of
Jesus Christ; to whom be the glory to the ages of the ages. Amen."
Here is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the benedictory
prayers of the Bible. At every turn it sets before us truths of the
first order, woven into one wonderful texture. It presents to us our God
as "the God of peace," the God who has welcomed us to reconciliation and
is now and for ever reconciled; at peace with us and we with Him. It
sets full in view the supreme fact upon which that certainty reposes,
the Resurrection of His Christ, recorded here and only here in the long
Epistle, as the act and deed by which the Father sealed before the
universe His acceptance of the Son for us. It connects that Resurrection
with its mighty antecedent, the atoning Death, in words pregnant with
the truths characteristic of the Epistle; the Lord, the great Shepherd,
was "brought again from the dead" (the phrase is reminiscent of Isa.
lxiii. 11, with its memories of Moses and the ascent of Israel from the
parted waters), "in the blood" (as it were attended, authenticated,
entitled, by the blood) "of covenant eternal," that supreme Compact of
Divine love of which twice over (chapters viii., x.) the Epistle has
spoken; under which, for the slain Mediator's sake, God both forgives
iniquity and transfigures the will of the forgiven. Then the prayer
follows upon these mighty premisses. The Teacher asks, with the
authority of an inspired benediction, that this God of peace, of
covenant, of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus, would carry out the
covenant-promise in His new Israel to the full. May He "perfect" them,
that is to say, equip them on every side with every requisite of grace,
for the supreme purpose of their existence, the doing of His will in
everything. May He so inhabit and inform them, through His Son, by His
Spirit, that He shall be the will within their will, the force beneath
their weakness, "working in them to will and to do for His good
pleasure's sake" (Phil. ii. 13). To Him, the Father, be glory for ever.
To Him, the Son, be glory for ever. Who shall decide, and who need
decide, to which Divine Person the relative pronoun [Greek: ho]
precisely attaches? The glory is to the Father in the Son, to the Son in
the Father.
One closing word remains. Observe this designation just here applied to
the Lord Jesus Christ; "the Shepherd, the great Shepherd, of the sheep."
It is noteworthy, because in our Epistle it stands here quite alone. We
have had the Christ of God presented to us throughout under the totally
different character of the High Priest, the great Self-Immolator of the
Cross, now exalted in the glory of His High Priesthood to be the Giver
of blessing from the Throne. To Him in that sublime aspect the thought
of the Hebrew believer, so sorely tempted to look away from Him, to look
backward to the old and ended order, has been steadily directed, for
spiritual rest of conscience and for loyalty of will. But here, true to
that _habit_ of the Bible, if the word may be used, with which it
accumulates on Him the most diverse titles in the effort to set forth
His fulness, the Writer exchanges all this range of thought for the one
endearing designation of the SHEPHERD of the sheep. It was as such that
He went down to death, giving for the flock His life. It was as such
that He is "brought again," to rescue, to watch, to feed, to guide His
beloved charge, "in the power of life indissoluble."
Not without purpose surely was the Lord left pictured thus in the view
of His tried and tempted followers. In the region of conviction and
contemplation He was to shine always before them as the High Priest upon
His throne, the more than fulfilment of every type and shadow, the goal
of Prophecy, "the end of the Law." But He was to be all this as being
also, close beside them, their Shepherd, great and good. He was to be
with them in the pasture, and in the desert, and in the valley of the
shadow of death. They had followed Him indeed as their Sacrifice without
the gate. But precisely there He took to Himself His resurrection-life,
to be their Companion and their Watcher for evermore. The Lord was their
Shepherd, and He is ours; they should not, and we shall not, want.