The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 22), October 6, 2024

“What are humans, that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet,” says the Psalmist, “you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honour.”

The deutero-Pauline writer of Hebrews encourages second-generation Christians, possibly in Rome, not to abandon their Christian faith in the face of persecution. It is in Christ that we inherit this promised glory, honour, and proximity to God.

Christ is the eternal Word and Wisdom of God, in whom God made the world. Christ is, then, also the word which was spoken through the prophets and has now been embodied in the person of Jesus. Christ is not a radical break with the past, but is rather the continuation of God’s work since the dawn of time and through the prophets of Israel. This attention to Jewish themes led early Christian scholars to designate this letter “To the Hebrews.” Perhaps many among the intended audience were Jewish Christians; maybe some of those who have fallen away from the faith (to whom the writer alludes in Chapter 10) were persuaded to “come home” to Judaism.

Our writer continues to reason with Jewish themes, describing how Jesus made purification for sin. Our Christian habits of thinking may take us  immediately to Christ’s substitutionary atoning for our sins through the payment of his blood. The writer does refer to his “suffering of death,” but “making purification” recalls the Day of Atonement on which the high priest would purify the people by offering a sacrifice. The emphasis is not on Christ as passive sacrifice, but on him as actively offering that sacrifice.

Having purified us with that sacrifice, Christ then tastes death and is glorified in his resurrection and ascension. In providing this purification we see Christ acting for God. God is indeed mindful of us and caring for us. We are made close to God in glory and honour by sharing in the glory and honour given to Christ, for if he is the son of God then we are his siblings, for we all share one Father.

In Process terms I might speak of Christ as the embodiment of divine Creativity, in whom God brings forth new possibilities for our lives just as She stirs the stars and planets into being. Every creative act of God opens up new possibilities to be taken into my being and considered for realization. The Christ event which is Jesus of Nazareth is one such event; it changes what is possible, just as the Word spoken through the prophets did and does likewise.

If Christ is the divine Creativity of God, and the good news of the passage is that we share in and inherit the nature of Christ through our shared childhood in God, then the image of Christ as divine Creativity was, is, and continues to be in each of us. When I first opened up this passage to consider what it might say, I had just finished comforting my child’s night terrors. “In these last days he has spoken to us by a Son,” I read, and surely God has spoken to me by a child. Surely God has spoken and is speaking to me through their quirky humour, their sly grin before a sudden tickle, their passion for digital photography and TikTok. Surely they convict, purify, and redeem me as I see both my strengths and my flaws reflected, taken in, adapted, and transformed by my child in ways I cannot predict or control.

What, indeed, are human beings, that God chooses to reveal the wonder of divine creativity in the body of a human being, and in the glory of a pre-bedtime snuggle?

Surely God saves us, and daily.

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Tim Bowman is an Ordained Minister in the United Church of Canada, serving Gladwin Heights – St. Andrew’s Pastoral Charge in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. He is currently a ThM student at the Vancouver School of Theology, focusing on Process Theology. Tim is a contributor to Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God, Edited by Jeff Wells, Thomas Jay Oord, et. al., and lives in New Westminster with his wife, child, and two cats.