Hebrews 3:12-4:1

Lingering behind this strange passage in Hebrews are several layered references to the Exodus from a Psalm. Just before verse 12 where we pick up the language of ‘wicked, unfaithful hearts,’ the writer of Hebrews cites Psalm 95 at length, and I’ll give it to us from the BCP: today if you would hear his voice, harden not your hearts as in the provocation, as in the day of temptation when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation…unto whom I sware that they would not enter my rest. The Psalm forms the material for this passage and is itself, then, a reference to the Exodus, a long day of temptation in the wilderness, testing God by asking him to cut water from a stone and rain bread from the sky. And the language of entering God’s rest recalls the faltering of the Israelites in the book of Numbers, who start to wish they were back in Egypt when they learn about all of the peoples in Canaan who stand imposingly against them. In that moment, when they cry out to Moses to turn back to Egypt, God says, ‘not one of them will see the land I promised.’

 What do we do with these images? What do they say to us? Notice the last paragraph that Stacey read: “Who are the ones who heard it and were rebellious? Is it not everyone who went out from Egypt with Moses? Or who was God angry with for forty years…? Is it not the ones who sinned, and fell dead in the wilderness? Who did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not those very ones who were disobedient?’ He reminds us of specifically who he had in mind, Israel in the wilderness.

But notice, too, the sleight of hand happening in the last sentence. After insisting that the Psalmist is speaking about the Israelites, Hebrews turns it around: Therefore while the promise is still open, let us take care that none of us seem to miss it.” Let us; we’re not just talking about Israel in the past. There’s a word for us too. What he means is this: God has not closed his promise, and the Psalm speaks to us just as much as it did to the Israelites. This week we could also say: Lent gives us forty days to wander about, trying not to harden our hearts against the call of God on our lives. Each day in Lent is the day for faithfulness, not looking back toward our former subjugation, but looking ahead to the promise of God that beyond the wilderness is a land of rest.

I think we think about that day of faithfulness in two ways. If you’ve started a Lenten discipline, keep at it. If yesterday your heart was hard, and this first week has been tough, today is a new day Hebrews says: “‘encourage each other as long as it is ‘today,’” he says. God has not stopped speaking, so the chance is still open to listen. Keep on the good work of walking in the wilderness, and maybe check on each other to see how it’s going.

Second, if we’re walking in the wilderness, we’re not walking aimlessly like the Israelites thought they were. They asked Moses: ‘have you brought us out here because all the graves were full in Egypt?’ If we lean on the image of wilderness in Lent, then we lean on an image in which God shepherds his people into a new land. If Israel was headed toward Canaan, and a land flowing with milk and honey, we are headed, in Lent, toward the Resurrection. Notice the language of rest. At the end of these forty days is true rest, when we begin to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. Christ is a Sabbath for us by setting us free from sin. If the Sabbath was a freedom from work, there is no more work to do for sin if we are in Christ. And that’s part of what we’re doing tonight in evening prayer—resting, and putting ourselves in the way of the Risen Christ to be free. So today is the day to listen, to keep our hearts from hardening over, to be attentive to the voice of God, who is calling us deeper into the Resurrected life. A week into Lent, we’ve started moving. Hebrews is just telling us to keep our ears open, and not to look back.

Learn more about other important updates in the latest church newsletter: The Epistle – February 29, 2024