Unplumbed Depths

One thing that really struck me my senior year of college was just how much knowledge is out there. There's a bunch that I had absorbed through classes but I was really struck by how, when I was deep into a course of study, there was so much there I had no idea. Every minute of lecture, every turn of a page, they all brought new information that I had no idea. After college I began to recognize the limitless chasms of knowledge in every area: rock climbing, WWII, comics, football, gardening, etc. It's all out there with just huge amounts to learn. There is just so much out there we don't know. Think about all the spy/war movies you've seen with commandos sneaking into an enemy base and hiding behind a door while sentries march by. What a huge difference it could make for that sentry if he knew one little fact, a sentence of four words: "enemy behind the door." Knowledge is a tricky thing.

Recently I've started to become just how much I have to learn about religion. Faith I've known for a while that I have only skimmed the surface. But then I attended a mini-lecture on the theology of confirmation. Wow. Talk about out of my depth! It really opened my eyes to the fact that confirmation isn't something that we just do because it's a good idea, it's something that's been considered, studied, debated over, and then decided upon before put into the Book of Order for the Presbyterian church. And the reasoning and Biblical backing behind it all. It's crazy.

And that brings us to chapter 5 of Hebrews. The opening verses (1-3) bring us this little nugget: "Every high priest selected to represent men and women before God and offer sacrifices for their sins should be able to deal gently with their failings, since he knows what it's like from his own experience. But that also means that he has to offer sacrifices for his own sins as well as the people's."

I'm not going into anything about Christ really here but rather my, and our collective ignorance, of Judaism. Paul wrote the book of Hebrews as a letter to a church in Jerusalem, a bunch of Hebrews as it were. Christianity, to them, really didn't look all that different from Judaism. In content it was vastly different, the knowledge of an arrived Messiah is a little bit life-changing, but the form of their worship and everyday life probably didn't change a whole lot.

I think that today, with Jewish and Christian worship so far away from each other we really lose a lot of understanding of our faith that these very early Jewish Christians had. Unless we're Catholic, we don't really have a concept of a high priest. While I greatly enjoy contemporary worship, it takes us even further away from our Jewish roots. We both have a lot we could learn from each other and it's a shame that we don't have more interaction between our religions. Christ himself didn't come to abolish Judaism, he came to build on it. Christianity is the next level of bricks built on that foundation, not a fresh start.

So, here's where all of this gets tied together: we know so little about our Hebrew roots, it's a depth of knowledge that we haven't even begin to plumb in many cases but one that could be extremely valuable. And just like the sentry completely unaware of the enemy commando hiding under the grate, it's that tiny little bit of knowledge that could make all the difference in our understanding of our faith and religion.