Sunday's sermon on Hebrews

The writer of Hebrews in his homily to the Christian community, reminds them that they are masters of all they survey and reminds them how amazing it is that God entrusted stewardship of the world not to angels, but to human beings.

"Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels," he says, "but to human beings, subjecting all things under their feet." But he goes on to say, "Now in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them..."

In fact, these days - nearly 2000 years later - we probably do see almost everything subject to us human beings.

Our lives and our powers have extended dramatically since the days when the book of Hebrews was written. It's now largely up to us to decide whether or not certain species of animals survive or die out altogether. We have hunted even magnificent, fearsome beasts like tigers practically to extinction and are now in the position of protecting them in order to ensure the survival of the species.

 So what is not yet in subjection to us?

I think perhaps one answer is death. We now have much more control over life than we did when the

book of Hebrews was written. With the advent of IVF we're able to encourage life in circumstances which were impossible only a few years ago, and even very small, very premature babies weighing no more than a bag of sugar can now often be saved. In a number of countries human cloning is permitted, although in the UK scientists are still very concerned that cloned individuals would suffer from abnormalities including premature aging and cancer, and human cloning is still forbidden in our country. But the time is foreseeable when we will be able to create viable human life using not sperm and egg, but cloned human cells.

We're also able to delay death much more than used to be possible. Sick people are saved more often than not and they mostly get better. We're told that in another generation or so, the normal human life-span at least in the West, will be around 120 or 130 years, nearly double what it is at the moment. But no matter how much we delay it, eventually all human beings die. We have not yet conquered death. Death is not subject to our whims, or even to our science or our medicine and a time when human beings never die on this earth is not yet foreseeable.

Perhaps allied to our failure to conquer death is our failure to conquer sin or to change our human behaviour. Whatever experts we produce and whatever calming drugs we discover, we still have a prison population which goes on increasing so rapidly and so alarmingly that our prisons are bursting at the seams. We still have a society where elderly or vulnerable people are afraid to walk in parts of our cities after dark. We still have a society where so many people are so deeply unhappy in their marriages that almost half end in divorce.

We still have a society which is ruled by wealth and by the incentive to always strive for more wealth. And we have a society which is either apathetic to Christianity or downright hostile to it.

In some ways the situation was similar when the book of Hebrews was written, probably before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. Even at this early stage the unknown author is concerned that Christianity is under threat not so much from outside hostility, but more from a weariness with the demands of Christian life and a growing indifference to the faith. Hence he impresses on his readers the high regard in which God holds the human race quoting Psalm 8:

"What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honour."

Yet despite all this trust and honour from God, who subjected all things to human beings and left nothing outside their control, people still died and still suffered. But into this mix, came Jesus. The writer describes Jesus as for a little while being made lower than the angels, i.e. a human being, and goes on to say that Jesus is now crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death, and that by the grace of God Jesus tasted death for everyone. But that wasn't all. Jesus didn't simply taste death, he changed death on our behalf.

The writer describes it like this: "It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings."

How does Jesus dying make him a pioneer of our salvation?

The word "salvation" comes from the Latin, "salveo", which means to heal and make well. Through his death on the cross, Jesus not only conquered death on our behalf, but also makes us well through that death. Here is a means of conquering death and of changing our human behaviour so that we find happiness instead of misery. Here is a means of achieving that final subjection of everything, which God always had planned for us.

How does it work?

Partly by following Jesus. The writer of Hebrews describes Jesus as: "the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being." Through the Gospels, we have a very full account of the life and character of Jesus.

We can discover what sort of a person he was, how he treated other people and how he communicated with God, and we can follow him in all those ways. But we can go deeper than that.

By suffering the worst that any human being could suffer even to the extent of dying at the hands of the state as a criminal, yet without losing any of his integrity, his idealism, his value system, his love for human beings or his trust in and faith in God, Jesus overcame even death itself. It's true that he still died, but his death was very different to anything known before or since. He was not only seen again alive by many of his friends, but he was also experienced by them in a different kind of way. Somehow, he could now be experienced inwardly, even by those who had never known him in person. It was as though the essence of Jesus, the real person, could be absorbed into other human beings.

The Acts of the Apostles described this momentous experience as being "filled with the Holy Spirit". Although he had died, Jesus was clearly alive, albeit in a very different way, and his love and power and courage and strength and faithfulness and so on were available to any human being who desired those characteristics. Through absorbing Jesus into ourselves, into our own inner beings, we are able to change our human behaviour.

Not everything is subject to us human beings because we proved incapable of the dizzy heights God foresaw for us. But one human being

achieved those heights and that was enough for God. It opened the gateway for all the rest of us. Everything proved subject to Jesus, and through him, we too can conquer all that we have to conquer, even sin and death.

We are a little lower than the angels. But through Jesus, we too can reach heights we would never have dreamed possible. In the name of Jesus, let go and let him fill your life.