Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12

Year B - Pentecost +19 or Energy to Witness ¹⁹
October 4, 2015

Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12

“We do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” (Hebrews 2:9)

Setting the whole subjugation argument aside, imagine the change in tone had the author rephrased this affirmation as: “We do see Jesus, our partner in flesh, radiating glory and honor in life and in death as he engaged and revealed the grace of G*D in the presence of and in connexion with everyone.”

In this way we might recast a creed of “pioneering wholeness through suffering”. Without discounting either the reality of wholeness or of suffering, we might more directly get to the end of the passage with a proclamation of praise that might sound a bit more like this section of The Saviors of God by Nikos Kazantzakis:

Profound and incommensurable is the worth of this flowing world: God clings to it and ascends, God feeds upon it and increases.
   My heart breaks open, my mind is flooded with light, and all at once this world's dread battlefield is revealed to me as an erotic arena.
   Two violent contrary winds, one masculine and the other feminine, met and clashed at a crossroads. For a moment they counterbalanced each other, thickened, and became visible.
   This crossroads is the Universe. This crossroads is my heart.
   This dance of the gigantic erotic collision is transmitted from the darkest particle of matter to the most spacious thought.
   The wife of my God is matter; they wrestle with each other, they laugh and weep, they cry out in the nuptial bed of flesh.
   They spawn and are dismembered. They fill sea, land, and air with species of plants, animals, men, and spirits. This primordial pair embraces, is dismembered, and multiplies in every living creature.
   All the concentrated agony of the Universe bursts out in every living thing. God is imperiled in the sweet ecstasy and bitterness of flesh.
   But he shakes himself free, he leaps out of brains and loins, then clings to new brains and new loins until the struggle for liberation again breaks out from the beginning.
   For the first time on this earth, from within our hearts and our minds, God gazes on his own struggle.
   Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them.
   The Universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body. It is Love and War both, a raging restlessness, persistence and uncertainty.
   Uncertainty and terror. In a violent flash of lightning I discern on the highest peak of power the final, the most fearful pair embracing: Terror and Silence. And between them, a Flame.