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What is
the significance of the ascension in the theology of Hebrews?
Hebrews’ homilist has written
a ‘word of encouragement’ (lo,gou th/j paraklh,sewj)
to believers
threatened from without by persecution
but, even more seriously, by doubts and back-sliding from within. The addressees are almost certainly
Jewish Christians
who stood zealously for Christ in the aftermath of their conversion
yet now are in danger of ‘drifting away’ (pararuw/men). They have not progressed in the faith
as they ought to have
but have instead been tempted to revert back to the old covenant,
their old priests
and their old cultic worship.
Through a “balanced combination of doctrinal
exposition and paraenesis”
the homilist exhorts his readers to faithfulness
– a renewed confidence (parrhsi,an)
in the Christian confession (th/j o`mologi,aj). This confession or hope does not
simply concern Christ, but in a profound sense is Christ. His Person and work is the central
concern of Hebrews
for, in Him, the long-promised fulfilment and surpassing of the old has
been won and offered. In Him, is
the true mediation (not angels),
the true priesthood (not Aaron’s),
the true worship (not the temple cult),
the true covenant (not the obsolete first covenant)
and the true sacred space (not the promised land nor temple sanctuary).
For the believer to partake (me,tocoi) in Him
is to partake in our heavenly calling
– our true and eternal destiny.
This is because, wonderfully, He has partaken of our
humanity, being made like us in every way
so to become our High Priest (avrciereu.j) and Brother (avdelfo,j).
Having ‘laid hold of’ us (evpilamba,netai)
and atoned for us,
He was also exalted to God’s right hand on our behalf.
Now we can enter the Most Holy Place,
in fact we have come to the place of God’s presence
– all through Him.
Jesus has not merely shown us the path, but as the ultimate Hero of
faith He is
the Beginning and End
and the Way from here to there. To have Christ is to have eternal
salvation,
eternal redemption
and an eternal inheritance.
There is no need for an alternative or additional priest, pilgrimage,
propitiation or perfection. Such
a High Priest clearly meets our need
and meets it entirely, enduringly and exclusively.
Yet these recipients of Hebrews were in danger of meeting their
needs elsewhere, namely through the ‘shadows’
of old testament worship.
It ought to be clear that a co-ordination of Christ plus cultic
supplements is impossible. Either
Christ is such an all-sufficient Saviour, or the Christ presented in Hebrews
is a fiction. The glorious
encouragement of Hebrews is also its solemn warning – to have Christ is
to have all. Yet the necessary
corollary is equally true: to miss Christ is to miss all. There can be no third way whereby
believers claim allegiance to Christ and yet ‘meet their needs’ with
earthly foods,
and altars and
priests.
We will now consider Hebrews’ teaching on the ascension.
A definition:
The Person of Jesus, having accomplished a once-for-all redemption,
passed through the heavens into heaven itself, to sit at the right hand
of God, entailing both a finished work and a continuing priestly
function.
We will discuss these six aspects in turn.
The Person of Jesus…
The news of a man having
entering heaven would cause excitement of a certain kind, but certainly
not the confidence and hope the homilist intends. For this news to benefit us, we need
to know who has ascended. Luther has said:
“…for Christ to have
ascended profits us nothing, if he ascended for his own sake. But now our glory and joy is in this,
that he went there to our advantage and not to our disadvantage.”
More specifically, we need to
know who He is to God and who He is to us.
We will briefly examine the
homilist’s teaching in three sections: 1:1-4; 2:5-18; 4:14-5:10.
1:1-4:
To God, Christ is His
Mediator of revelation, of creation and of His very glory and being. He is God’s ‘right hand Man’ – a
position of honour, power and blessedness. To us, He is the universal Sustainer and the Purifier of
sins.
It should be seen immediately
that there is a certain priestliness to the very being of the Son. God’s glory radiates outwards (avpau,gasma) in the Person of Christ. God’s business of revelation, creation
and providence all come through the Son. To the core of His being and even to the depths of eternity
He is a Mediator.
That He is
the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of His being
betokens an eternal effulgence.
If God is light it is because of Christ, the true Light
radiating outwards the Father’s glory.
Here lies a breath-taking meditation on the over-flowing nature of
the Triune God.
2:5-18:
It seems clear that the
homilist (as with the seven-fold Scriptural catena in chapter 1)
considers Psalm 8 to be directly concerning Christ. Since the direct application of all
the previous Old Testament quotations was to Christ, it seems tortuous to
read the ‘him’ of 2:8 as Adam and then 2:9 as Christ. There is a profound link between the
‘under your feet’ motif of Psalm 110 and this Psalm. The true Man and Ruler is also true
Priest. Just as Psalm 110 has
Christ as its unique Referent (1:13; Mark 12:35-37!) so it is here. Christ is ‘the Man’. He is not a footnote to Adam, rather
Adam is a type (Rom 5:14) of the true and heavenly Man (1 Cor 15:49). Whatever application Psalm 8 has to
Adam comes from Christ, not the other way around.
From Psalm 8 we learn that
Christ is to God the true Man and object of His concern (mimnh,|skh|). He is
the One entrusted as Ruler over creation. Yet this rule is not established by simple divine fiat but
through the Father’s humiliation and, later, exaltation of Him.
To us, Christ is the Author (avrchgo.n) of our salvation who tastes death for us in
propitiatory sacrifice. To make
this, He becomes our Brother (avdelfo,j) who
shares in our humanity in every way. In this way He becomes our merciful
and faithful High Priest (avrciereu.j).
Yet as soon as this is said,
we realise that Christ is not only Priest to us, but also to God (ta. pro.j to.n qeo.n).
Here we understand the vital importance of Christ’s priesthood. It is necessarily two-way.
“Is not ‘high priest’ the title which
expresses most perfectly the mystery of Christ?… Other names express only
this or that aspect of the situation and the being of Christ. ‘Son of
God’ expresses only his relation with God; ‘brother of men’, only his
relation with us; ‘Lord’ evokes only his glory; ‘Servant’, only his
voluntary abasement. ‘High priest’ on the other hand gives an idea of the
two-fold relation and evokes simultaneously both Passion and glory.”
We see this again in 4:14-5:10:
here our High Priest is ‘Jesus, the Son of God’. His humanity and particular historical
existence is laid side-by-side with His pre-existent title ‘Son’. The two-fold importance of Christ’s
priesthood is again put in 5:1.
Notice the three prepositions:
Through incarnation, Jesus is from men (evx
avnqrw,pwn), and
ministers on behalf of men (u`pe.r
avnqrw,pwn), in
relation to God (ta. pro.j to.n qeo,n).
To put it even more succinctly, He is
Man for men to God. The counter-part to this is His divine
designation as recorded in 5:6. The ‘Lord’ from ‘the LORD’
is called
‘priest’. He is God from God
for men.
Our great High Priest mediates God to us
and us to God. Therefore His
ascension is not the journey of a lone victor but the fore-running
of our true Aaron
who has gone into ‘heaven
itself now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.
…having accomplished a
once-for-all redemption…
Just as the Person is
crucial in appreciating the ascension, so is His work. In fact His coming
is to the end of His redeeming work.
The death of Jesus is never
far from the homilist’s thoughts. (Heb. 2:9,14,17; 5:8; 6:6; 7:27; 9:12,14,15,26,28;
10:10,12,14,29; 12:2,24; 13:12,20)
This death is certainly not natural for the Son (Heb.
2:14f) but one He graciously ‘tastes’. It is explicitly a bloody,
sacrificial death. Blood was
offered in the cult for (u`pe.r) sins
and we can identify four cultic functions of the blood as outlined in the
homily. At Passover we see that
blood shields the believer from the Destroyer.
Blood is also offered (especially on Yom Kippur)
for the forgiveness of sins,
though this forgiveness was expressly modelled through the blood
not won by it. Blood cleanses, at least outwardly. Finally blood inaugurates (evgkekai,nistai) the covenant
through the redemption (avpolu,trwsin), that
is, the ransom payment for, the covenant people.
The blood of Jesus fulfills
and surpasses all this. It is for
the sins of the people. (Heb. 2:17; 10:12) It truly shields, (Heb 2:17)
truly forgives, (Heb 9:22 ó 26; 10:18) truly
cleanses (Cleansed (kaqariei/): Heb.
9:14. Made holy (a`gia,sh|): Heb. 10:10,14; 13:12),
truly redeems. (Heb. 9:15) Since
it was offered by a sinless representative it was an unrepeatable,
unimprovable, irreplaceable a[pax offering.
(Heb. 7:27, 9:26-28; 10:10-14)
Regarding the link between
Christ’s atoning work on earth and His ascension to heaven we could make
two errors. On one hand, we might
suppose that the mere entrance to heaven of a Fore-runner and Mediator
entails our redemption. This
would be to construe our predicament as simply one of estrangement and to
ignore the question of sin. Hebrews
tells us that this view is sorely mistaken. Our estrangement from God’s presence is a moral problem
(Heb. 3:7-4:7) which must be overcome through the shedding of blood.
(Heb. 9:22) Jesus must enter
heaven through His shed blood. (Heb. 9:12) The cross is not an accidental
embellishment to Christ’s work but the necessary path to exaltation.(
Heb. 2:9,10)
The other error (more
prevalent in evangelical circles) is to conclude our thinking on Christ’s
Person and work, its superiority and cultic fulfilment, with Good
Friday. Yet, it is striking that
the homilist does not leave his exposition or paraenesis at the foot of
the cross. The Yom Kippur model, which
surfaces a number of times in the homily,
demands not only sacrifice but an entrance into the Most Holy Place. The
crowning conclusion to atonement is entrance into the presence of God. ‘By means of (dia.)
His own blood’ Christ enters. The
blood is essential, but it is essential in order to enter!
Atonement is said to occur
when the parties are in fact at one.
This is evidenced by the high priest’s actual entrance into the
LORD’s presence. Could Christ
ultimately and eternally remain ‘outside the camp’? If that were His final condition, we
could definitively conclude that His atonement was a failure. His exaltation to the right hand is a
necessary conclusion to His cross-work and its true goal. It is His ascension that truly
vindicates the Person of Christ as High Priest
and His work as finished.
… passed through the
heavens into heaven itself…
“Jesus
our high priest first secured our eternal redemption by the sacrifice of
himself in the ‘courtyard’ of this world, and then, by virtue of his own
blood, passed from sight ‘into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence
of God on our behalf’.”
Once a year Aaron would take
a journey from the Holy Place, through the curtain and into the Most Holy
Place. The fulfilment occurs when Christ
takes a journey from earth, through the heavens
and into heaven itself.
Given the importance of
sacred space in Hebrews, such a journey is extremely significant.
The wilderness congregation of Heb. 3:7-19 fell short of entering (eivse,rcomai) the promised land –
the sphere of God’s presence and blessing. The cause was their unbelief (avpisti,an). Subsequent generations, including the
addressees of this homily, are urged to enter this rest
and, in Heb. 4:10, given the encouragement of ‘o`
eivselqw.n’ – the One who entered His rest. The rest which the true VIhsou/j entered was
not the promised land but heaven.
So we see that the fulfilment of Israel’s geographical hopes is
ultimately heaven itself.
In this light,
Bruce writes on Heb. 8:1:
“This
‘real sanctuary’ belongs to the same order of being as the saints’
everlasting rest of chs. 3 and 4, the better country and well-founded
city of 11:10,16, and the unshakeable kingdom of 12:28.”
Jesus does
not simply fill-full the cultic rites of Israel but their entire life,
worship and hope. For the Jews, land
was a fundamental concern.
Therefore, a demonstration of Christ’s relationship to the
promised land is crucial if the homilist’s case is to be made. His essential argument runs along
these lines:
We
are to enter (eivse,rcomai) God’s rest but cannot.(Heb.
4:11,18f) Christ enters (eivse,rcomai; Heb. 4:10; 6:19,20; 9:6,12,24; 10:19) the true
rest, that is heaven itself, on our behalf. Thus our great High Priest
guarantees our eternal and unshakeable inheritance through His ascension.
Christ has passed through (die,rcomai; Heb. 4:14) so now we may draw near.
(prose,rcomai; Heb. 4:16) When the Day has finally come we will receive in its
fulness the unshakeable kingdom secured by Jesus. (Heb 12:26-29) In the meantime, we enter (eivse,rcomai) by hearing the gospel confession and
believing. (Heb. 4:3,11.
See also 10:19, ‘eivj th.n ei;sodon’) All this is possible through the entrance into rest of
Fore-runner Jesus. (Heb. 6:20) He
is the ‘pro,dromoj’ who, like the ‘pro,dromoi’ of Numbers 13:20, entered
the promised land in advance of the congregation. His journey to heaven
is the fulfilment of all our pilgrimages.
…to sit at the right hand
of God…
His sitting is in
the aorist (evka,qisen) in 1:3; 8:1 and
10:12 and the perfect (keka,qiken) in
12:2, denoting that it was completed for all time and has enduring
present consequences.
Again, this tells us of Christ’s Person
and work. First, as to His
Person:
“Although
no priest of Aaron’s line ever sat down in the presence of God in the
earthly sanctuary, Christ has done so in the heavenly sanctuary.”
Christ sits as One who belongs to the
very centre of divine life. The
right hand is “the place of highest honour and authority”
Christ’s ascension is the installation of
the Psalm 2 Son,
the crowning of the Psalm 8 Man,
the enthronement of the Psalm 45 King
and the session of the Psalm 110 Priest. To know that Jesus is seated at the
right hand of God is to know everything we need to know about His
Person. But it also speaks
volumes about His work:
… entailing both
a finished work…
“A seated
priest is the guarantee of a finished work and an accepted sacrifice.”
Nothing could better indicate the finality and
sufficiency of Christ’s atonement than His sitting down. In temple terms He was meant to
sprinkle the seat and leave quickly, trusting that the incense would hide
Him from the LORD ‘that he would not die.’ Christ does not sprinkle the seat but
sits on it as His throne.
The atoning work is done
and the race of faith is run.
Yet, Christ’s
session does not only entail a finished work but also…
… a continuing priestly
function…
While
in one sense Christ’s ascension marks a finishing – the completion of His
propitiatory sacrifice, in another it marks a kind of inauguration into
eternal service.
We
see on several occasions how the sitting of Christ signals an ongoing
significance. In 1:13 it ushers
in a time of waiting while the Father subdues Christ’s enemies. In 8:1 it
begins a new aspect of Christ’s ministry (leitourgo.j), which we will discuss
below. In 10:12 it again means waiting (v13), the sanctifying of the
people (v14) and our ‘drawing near’ (v22ff).
Christ’s session is not meant to imply His inactivity but rather His “ceaseless
activity… constantly sustaining the universe by his dynamic word. He is active as, enthroned on high, he
rules over history until every enemy has been subdued. He is active on behalf of his chosen
people as he dispenses mercy, grace and help to them in the hour of their
testing and
as in heaven, whither he ‘has gone as a forerunner on our behalf’,
‘he always lives to make intercession for them.’(Heb 7:25)”
Hughes summarizes Christ’s on-going
ministry under
three headings: representation, benediction and intercession.
His representation is perhaps the most
contentious aspect of the ascension.
Is there a continual re-presentation of the blood of sacrifice
before the Father? Heb. 9:12 is at the centre of this
controversy. Does the preposition
dia. mean ‘with’?
Certainly it means ‘through’ in the preceding verse which is by far the
more usual meaning. But perhaps,
as Attridge argues, there is a shift in meaning necessitated by the
underlying Yom Kippur allusion. We do not agree with this interpretation of 9:12,
however it is true that the purifying work of the blood of Christ did have
to be applied to the heavenly places in a Yom Kippur fulfilment. In saying this we should remember the
cultic difference between blood shed – which is for sin,
and blood sprinkled – which is for cleansing. Christ’s blood in heaven is not there
in a sin-bearing capacity but for cleansing – Heb. 9:22. Further to this, the blood of Jesus continually ‘speaks’
in our defence.
It is not necessary to distance ourselves
from every kind of literal understanding of this, as some have done. Our evangelical forebears did not see
the blood of Jesus in heaven as a catholic compromise.
[Calvin
on 13:11] “Christ took his own blood into the heavenly sanctuary” (quoted
on p330 of Hughes).
[Calvin
on 13:20] “God raised up his Son, but in such a way that the blood which
he shed once in death, continues powerful after the resurrection for the
ratification of the eternal covenant and brings forth its fruit just as
if it were ever flowing.” (quoted on p330 of Hughes)
What we must insist
on is the aorist participle ‘having obtained (eu`ra,menoj) eternal
redemption’.
The evfa,pax of
Christ’s single (mi,an)
offering,
the perfect ‘perfecting’ (tetelei,wken)
accomplished by the single offering
and the glorious truth that ‘there is no longer any offering for sin.’
Jesus does not
re-present Himself before the Father continually in atoning
sacrifice. On the other hand,
Jesus does not do less than the Aaronic sprinkling of the mercy seat. He does more. As the Lamb once slain He sits down
for all time on the ‘i`lasth,rion’ – His
once-for-all propitiatory sacrifice declared forever before the Father –
thus He makes it a throne of grace. With Ellingworth’s warning in mind,
we should not shrink from declaring an eternal presentation (not
re-presentation) of the blood
in heaven.
More briefly we will
consider His work of benediction and intercession. The former is not given great emphasis
in Hebrews yet the Aaronic blessing (Num. 6:22-27) finds
some expression in Christ’s shining (1:3), in the ‘peace’ of God (13:20)
and of His Priest (7:2) and in the grace to be found flowing from Him
(4:14-16). His intercession
(7:25) is a direct outcome of His Aaronic fulfilment and perfection. Christ is before the Father like Aaron, carrying the names of the
people on his heart before the LORD. Keeping this type in mind saves us
from any crude thoughts about desperate pleas before an unwilling Father.
As Swete has rightly said “Our Lord’s life in heaven is his prayer.”
Conclusion
Alexander Nairne called his commentary on Hebrews ‘The
Epistle of Priesthood.’ If pushed to encapsulate the theology
of the homily with one word, you could do no better than
‘Priesthood’. Atonement is won
through it,
the law is under it,
the covenant is inaugurated by it
and the Person of Christ Himself is known best in it.
The addressees are presented with the ultimate Priest and His ultimate
work since, to appreciate this is to understand themselves, their Israelite
history, the nature of true worship and the Lord Whom they confess.
The ascension fits into Hebrews as the ratification and
fulfilment of Christ’s true priesthood.
In the light of the seated and reigning High Priest, all attempts
at perfection through the law
or cult must
evaporate. It is Jesus who is
made perfect through His suffering, sacrificial death – the evidence of
this is His exaltation to the right hand.
In Him and the grace He offers from on high, we are perfected.
This will be our encouragement and our warning – Christ has sat down on
the throne of heaven. To know
this, is to lay aside the cult, to confidently
hold fast the confession
and to draw near
(prose,rcomai) by the blood.
Thus we see again, ascension and atonement cannot be divorced, yet
when held together they explain the true priesthood of Christ and its
implications. This is the concern
of Hebrews.
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