Luke 10:16-21 / Hebrews 2:2-10
Taken in tandem, these two readings shed a balanced light on the victory of Christ and the rightful attitudes of those who have been delivered from sin. While the author tells the Hebrews to be thankful that Christ was able to submit to death in order to elevate our stature above the angels, Christ himself reminds us through Luke that the victory won is not as important as the membership one has received by God’s grace in the kingdom to come.
Within the early Christian communities, as is often found even today, there is a difficult struggle to maintain the integrity and grace of the gospel without putting others down. We can see from the letter to the Hebrews that we have plenty of reasons to be thankful and to celebrate our release from the bondage of this world through our membership in Christ’s assembly.
At the same time, Luke’s gospel provides the same kind of balanced approach that St. Paul uses in his recognized epistles – that the Judaism that lost touch and became absorbed with the law and with sin is not something worth gloating about. They played their part in the drama – they may even have suffered on the basis of their own stiff-necked nature, but the victory – if it can be called that – belongs to God, and not the Christian communities.
The primary target of our remembrance – our boast, if you will – is that Christ was willing to lead us through the unnavigable depths of death, and that on resurrecting he was still working hard to gather us together and start us off on the right foot.
We never are great in the battle against evil – we are only blessed. Thankfully that is sufficient for anything this world wants to throw at us.
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© 2006 Jacob Gorny