The Secret of the Easy Yoke
Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Within the last decade, I have shifted my perspective in a significant way as I approach the New Testament, and especially in the epistles of Paul. While I know Hebrews is not a Pauline epistle, my interpretive shift in reading Paul now bleeds over into the rest of the New Testament. The shift came when I was introduced to an ambiguity in the translation from Greek to English, an ambiguity that seems less ambiguous to me as time goes on.
We often read about “faith” in the New Testament epistles, and Paul has a lovely little phrase that is often translated “faith in Christ.” The ambiguity comes from that choice of preposition – a choice I believe to be altogether inaccurate. There is a push in some New Testament scholarship to change that translation (and an updated version of the NRSV reflects that change in many instances) to another, more plausible (in my opinion) translation of the prepositional phrase. To oversimplify, if there is a place in your New Testament that reads “faith in Christ,” I would suggest reading the same passage, but change the phrase to “faith/faithfulness of Christ.” A prime example comes in Galatians 2:15-16: “We ourselves are Jews by birth and not gentile sinners, yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through the faith of Jesus Christ.”
If you’re still awake at this point, I want to suggest that this change is not a simple quibble over prepositions. Rather, this apparently tiny shift in translation might bring us to a better understanding of and, hopefully, a greater sense of gratitude for the work of God “for us and for our salvation.” The translation change ultimately moves the agency of justification or “making righteous” from our capacity for fidelity, and it places it firmly on the cross-bearing shoulders of the Faithful One.
To read the scripture from this angle, we are relatively secure from the temptation of making faith or fidelity into yet another “Law” by which we might be justified. In this perspective I have offered, faith/faithfulness is something we witness God offering as an act of unconditional, unilateral grace on our behalf, despite our flimsy efforts to respond in kind.
Now to the text at hand.
Over and over, we repeat the short but potent phrase “by faith” or “through faith”. But, given the above prolegomena, I hope we would at least ask the question, “Whose faith?”
I wonder how it changes our perspective on this litany of histories – of the miraculous and the devastating, the tragic and the triumphant – if we change our assumptions about whose faith it is that remains constant in the face of such history? I want to consider the possibility that it is not the faith of David, Gideon, (God forbid) Samson, or the rest, but rather that it is God’s fidelity we ought to remember and recount, and upon which we rely. For it is God’s faithfulness that delivered Israel from the Philistines and the Midianites despite the many infidelities of these named in their legends. And at their best, these men and women pointed to the fidelity of God as their strength and shield. But Gideon wavered, David conspired and murdered, Samson was a womanizer and full of hubris, and yet God remained faithful to Israel for its deliverance because God is faithful when we are not.
Perhaps we could look at verse 39 of chapter 11 and see that it refers to these people being commended for “their faith,” but I would point us to the Greek text again, where the possessive pronoun does not appear. The text literally reads (in my unpracticed translation), “And all of these who were martyred on account of the faithfulness did not receive the promise.” In the same way, “our faith” does not appear in the Greek text of 12:2. It is simply, “Jesus, the author and perfecter of (the) faith/faithfulness.” Whether one agrees with my translation or not, we are still left with more ambiguity than our English text allows.
No one needs to enumerate these details in a sermon, but the technical details serve to emphasize the theological point that is essential for those of us tasked with presenting our people actual Good News rather than a new set of tasks to pile onto our people atop the ongoing demands of capitalist and consumer culture. The history of the church, and the history of Israel on which we depend for so much of our story, bears witness to the faithfulness of God, a faithfulness made perfect by Jesus Christ. His faithfulness is the source of our grace and the path which, for us and for our salvation, he pioneered so that all might follow without the fear of wilderness wandering. The witness of this Hebrews passage is that the faithfulness of God was not exhausted in the stories of these witnesses and martyrs. Rather, the same faithfulness of God to create a new people, a new Kingdom, a new heaven, and a new earth, remains active with us, enfolding us into the cloud of witnesses, and drawing us ever closer to the joy set before us.
I recognize that this exegetical route might come with plenty of questions, and I am not beyond submitting to a “smoking gun” that undoes my exegetical points. But I remain convinced that the most important character throughout the course of scripture is God, and that the Gospel rests on the truth that God is the primary actor in salvation history. We are those of little faith, prone to wander, prone to leave the God we love. And so it is the faithfulness of God, a faithfulness manifest in Jesus Christ, that forges a clear path where there was once no way, so that we might run with perseverance the race set before us without fear. He is the alpha and omega of faithfulness, and we are the grateful beneficiaries of a risky-but-abundant life otherwise unintelligible but for the faithfulness of God in Jesus Christ.