Memorial of Saint Agnes, Virgin and Martyr

Lectionary: 314​

Jesus is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them. It was fitting that we should have such a high priest: holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, higher than the heavens.

 

I find the Letter to the Hebrews endlessly fascinating as it explores the role and mission of Jesus in our salvation. In today’s text we encounter Jesus as our priest/mediator in God’s presence. As we read the New Testament, Christians should understand that the word God almost always refers to God the Father. While our faith tells us that Jesus is the Son of God and coequal with the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the Breath – the spiration – of God and is coequal with the Father, the word usually refers to God the Father.

The Son and the Spirit obey the Father even as they are coequal to the Father; their obedience does not imply inferiority. There is joy, generosity, courage, and willingness in the Trinity, and no domination. Christians delight in that doctrine and strive to achieve similar relations with one another. The bishop, for instance, should regard his priests, deacons, and the faithful as fellow servants of God even as he leads them. And they should willingly defer to his leadership without slavish subservience. As Saint Augustine put it, “For you I am a bishop, with you, after all, I am a Christian.”  

And so, we receive this teaching from Hebrews, Jesus “is always able to save those who approach God through him.”

Denizens of the Roman Empire, most of them slaves, welcomed the Gospel of Salvation. Although Roman slavery was not as barbaric as American slavery, words like freedom (Latin: gratia), deliverance, salvation, and redemption coupled with the story of Jesus's conquest of death through obedience unto death attracted those whose daily hardships offered little hope for the future. 

But what does salvation mean today. For what do we long? What does a nation that cultivates individuality to the point of isolation as it flirts with chemical addictions, violence, and suicide, want? What do we want? 

The Christian mystery of the Holy Trinity describes an intense community even as it insists upon the individuality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We believe in one God, and yet each person is God; but the Father is not the Son, who is not the Holy Spirit. When the Father speaks the Word and breathes the Spirit they are sent infinitely far from the Father even as they remain infinitely close. They are united in one mind, heart, and will -- in complete self-sacrifice to one another -- and yet never become, or melt into, each other. 

Disciples of Jesus find community as our priest/mediator Jesus brings us to the Father, the very Father who gave us to him. This marvelous communion happens in our Holy Communion, the Mass. Their giving sacrifice to one another is our oblation, as we receive the Lord and offer him to the Father, impelled as we are by the Holy Spirit. The self is never lost in God even as we long to give more of ourselves to God. 

In this communion we know an intense satisfaction even as we retain eternally our separate identities. In the Spirit each becomes perfect without ever losing the haecceity which identifies each person in our common life and God's presence. 

Of course we can no more imagine what that perfection might feel like than a caterpillar can imagine the flight of a butterfly. 

Rather, we live in faith in the Gospel we have heard, hope for its fulfillment in ourselves, and the sacrificial communities of church, family, human society, and the Earth. And we are confident that Jesus, our priest, mediator, and savior, "is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them."