Not Loss, but Arrival

Welcome to Hebrew Reflections

There are moments when following God faithfully feels like betraying everything you were taught to honor. Not because those things were wrong, but because God has brought them to their fulfillment in a way no one expected. That is the tension Hebrews is written into. It is not a cold theological argument about replacing one religion with another. It is a pastoral word to people trying to follow Messiah while their families, traditions, and familiar patterns of worship still pull on them with tremendous force.

Before we jump into the text, let’s have a seat at the family table with Saba and Satva. In an Italian home you might know them as Nonno and Nonna. Pappou and Yiayia, if you happened to be Greek . For my mom it was Granddad and Nanny. For me it was simply Grandpa and Grandma. But let’s suppose we are living in ancient Judea. It’s around 60AD and for centuries our fathers have followed Torah. We kept Shabbat. We brought our offerings to the Temple. We honored the priesthood with our tithe. We went to synagogue on Saturday. No unclean thing had ever passed our lips. No bacon cheeseburgers. No bratwurst. This house is kosher. 

I can almost hear the thunderous bellow of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof shouting ‘Tradition!’ 

If you wanted to obey God, you knew where to go and what to do. You lived inside a framework that every generation before you had also lived within.

For nearly fifteen hundred years there had never been a faithful Jew who had to answer the question, ‘How do we stay true to God now? What does authentic covenant adherence look like? There wasn’t a Jew alive who had ever had to ask that question before. Not Moses. Not Joshua. Not David. Not Isaiah. Not Ezra. Not the Maccabees. Not even John the Baptist. No one. 

Every generation since Abraham knew exactly what covenant faithfulness looked like. But now. It was the question on the lips of everyone who recognized Yeshua as Messiah. 

Messiah had come. Messiah died. Messiah rose from the dead. Messiah ascended. Yet, the Temple is still standing. The priests are still singing in the Temple courtyard. They were still burning incense on the altar. The trumpets still sounded to announce Rosh Hashanah. Jerusalem is still there. Even John and Peter were known to go up to the Temple from time to time. Even so, everything had changed. 

Nobody had ever lived in this moment before. Their entire covenant grid had been built around realities that were still visibly present. The Levites still opened the gates of the courtyard. The air was still fragrant with the aroma of the morning and evening sacrifices. The high priest still went into the Holy of holies on Yom Kippur. Outwardly, nothing seemed different. 

Yet those who had come to believe Yeshua was the Messiah knew they could no longer live as if His death and resurrection had not altered everything. They could not carry on as they had before. They could not return to life as usual. They were living inside a question no one in history had ever been asked to answer.

Now, let’s sit back at that table for a minute. Can you image Grandpa’s words? Let’s assume he was a religious man. Maybe a Pharisee, or even a priest. Maybe he was a zealot. Even if he was none of those, he was still a Jewish man with family lineage that traced back to Abraham.

Do you think for one minute he’s going to take it lightly that his favorite nephew, son or granddaughter has suddenly stopped participating in the traditional family way of worship?  Can you image what Mama had to say? This hit families where they lived. This split families apart. 

You don’t have to have lived in ancient Jerusalem to know that when someone changes a long-held family practice, the family interprets it as: “You’re rejecting us.” And in this case; “You’re rejecting God!” 

Imagine telling your deeply committed Christian parents that the way you’ve come to understand Christ has led you away from the traditions they treasure most. Whether they agree with you or not, the first thing they may feel is loss.

Think about what it actually cost to sit at that ancient family table. You are there. The candles are lit. The prayers form in your mouth without a thought— you have spoken them since childhood. The meal is the same meal it has always been. And somewhere in your chest something is pressing against your ribs that you cannot say out loud. Not because you are ashamed of it. Because you know what it will cost the moment it leaves your lips.

You want to say His name. You want to tell them what you have seen, what you now know, what has become as certain to you as the bread on the table in front of you. You want to say: He is the One we have been waiting for. He has come. Everything we have been doing in this room, what’s been done for a thousand years — it was always pointing here.

But you look at your grandfather’s face. And you love him. And you stay quiet.

You’re sitting inside the most sacred space you know, carrying a revelation that you know will fracture it — and choosing, for one more evening, to simply be present with the people you love before the conversation that changes everything.

But the family reads the quiet. And quiet, to them, looks exactly like rejection.

Even though that isn’t what’s happening at all — even though they are still at the table, still saying the prayers, still reaching for the bread — it’s the way family sees it. They have their lens. And if they didn’t get ignited with the revelation of Messiah, you can’t control that. But that doesn’t change the tension in the room. It’s deeply painful. Knowing you broke your mother’s heart or disappointed your father. This could not have been easy by any means.

It can be easy for us in our modern American culture to have a harsh view of the Jews of Jesus’ day. Many of us have inherited a reading of the Gospels that makes it easy to judge the Jewish people of Jesus’ day without stopping to consider the extraordinary moment in history they were living through. After all, didn’t they crucify the Lord of glory. Yes. But let’s remember they were human beings with questions, concerns and needing to navigate very challenging relationships. How do we continue loving those closest to us while following Yeshua?

That is not a rhetorical question. It is the question. It is the one the author of Hebrews is sitting with when he picks up his pen. He is not writing to win a theological argument. He is writing to people who are exhausted from trying to hold it all together — their faith, their families, their identity, their conscience — and he knows that what they need is not a verdict. They need a place to stand. They need someone to show them that the ground beneath their feet is still solid, even though it no longer looks the way it used to.

The question wasn’t any longer simply: “Who is Jesus?” The question had become: “How do people who know who Jesus is now live?” That’s the very practical burden running through the book of Hebrews, and I would imagine the pressure on the pastoral heart of its author.

The question the Hebrews homily is answering is not: “Should we abandon Judaism?” But: “What does covenant faithfulness require now that God has fulfilled His promises in His Son?”

The author never says. “Forget Moses.” He says, “Look where Moses was leading.”

He never says, “The Temple was a mistake.” He says, “It was a copy.”

He never says, “The sacrifices were meaningless.” He says, “They were preparing you for something greater.”

Think about what that means for someone who has smelled the morning sacrifice his entire life. Who has watched the smoke rise from the altar and understood, in his bones, this was the moment God drew near. 

The author of Hebrews does not tell him that smell was a lie. He tells him it was a word — a word God was speaking across centuries, waiting for the day when the thing it pointed to would finally arrive. The smoke was not the presence. It was the announcement of the presence. And the presence has now come.

Despite how the family has interpreted it. Despite how the Rabbi might speak against Him. Despite how this has impacted your life on every level. You know in your heart, this is not loss. This is arrival.

You just need to know. “How do I come to terms with what I’ve known my whole life?”

That is precisely what the author sets out to do. He doesn’t exactly call them witnesses. But that is the way the author portrays them. Moses, the Temple, Melchizedek — each one is introduced not to be discarded but to be understood more fully than they ever could have been before Messiah came. They are not being removed. They are being read correctly, perhaps for the first time.

Think about what that would mean to someone sitting in that original audience. Moses is not being taken from you. You are finally being shown where Moses was always going. The Temple is not being condemned. You are finally being shown what it was always saying. Melchizedek — that strange, ancient priest-king who appeared without genealogy and without explanation in the pages of Genesis — is finally making sense. He was never a footnote. He was a signal. A preview. A figure standing in the text like a signpost pointing toward a priesthood that had not yet arrived.

Every witness is strategically placed. Nothing is accidental. The author moves through these figures the way a guide moves through a gallery — not rushing past the paintings but pausing at each one long enough for you to see what was always there. This. Look at this. Do you see what this was telling you?

And what the author is inviting his readers to do is not leave the gallery. He is inviting them to see it with new eyes.

That is the relocation Hebrews is inviting its readers to experience.

It does not mean you abandon the story you were born into. It means you finally find out where you are standing inside it. You are not at the beginning, waiting. You are not in the middle, wondering. You are on the other side of the moment everything was building toward — and the witnesses are still there, still speaking, but now you can finally hear what they were always saying.

For the original readers of Hebrews, that was not a small thing. It was the difference between feeling like a traitor and knowing you were a fulfillment. Between feeling like you had walked away from something sacred and understanding that the sacred thing had walked toward you — had arrived, had taken on flesh, had accomplished what no priest or sacrifice or temple architecture could ever fully do — and had brought you with Him into the presence of God.

That is the place the author of Hebrews is trying to help his readers stand.

Not outside the story. Inside it. Farther in than any generation before them had ever been.

And that is the book we are about to open.

It is often said that Hebrews explains the superiority of Christ.

True.

But perhaps that’s only half the story.

Perhaps Hebrews is also explaining the superiority of the new covenant way of living.

Not superiority in the sense of condescending arrogance.

Superiority, in the sense that life itself has fundamentally changed.

When Hebrews speaks of something “better,” it is not inviting contempt for what came before. It is announcing that what came before has reached its goal. The new covenant way of living is superior because it is life on the other side of fulfillment. 

Go back to that table for a moment. Saba is still there. The questions are still real. The cost has not disappeared. But something else is also present — something that was always coming toward them through every Passover, every sacrifice, every reading of the Torah, every Yom Kippur when the high priest disappeared behind the veil and the whole congregation held its breath, waiting.

They were always waiting.

They just did not know what they were waiting for had a name. Had a face. Had walked among them, eaten at tables not entirely unlike this one, and had gone through a veil not made with hands into the very presence of God — not once a year, trembling, with borrowed blood — but once, finally, with His own.

The new covenant is not an abandonment of everything Granddad loved. It is the moment everything he loved finally arrived at where it was always going.

That is what Hebrews is asking its readers to see.

Not the end of the story. 

The arrival.