Fix Your Eyes on Jesus

Pastor Mark opened Hebrews 12:1-3 by slowing down where he felt he had moved too quickly the week before. He worked through the passage phrase by phrase, tracing the logic from the hall of faith in chapter eleven through to the command to fix your eyes on Jesus.

What was said

The "therefore" that opens the passage carries the full weight of Hebrews 11. Every name in that chapter, Abel, Enoch, Noah, Moses and the rest, lived by faith, and nearly all of them had visible failures and shortcomings in their lives. That history of imperfect but faithful people is what the author of Hebrews is pointing back to before he issues the commands that follow.

The Greek word behind "witnesses" is the root of our word martyr, but its original meaning is simply someone who can testify to what they have seen and heard. Pastor Mark offered two ways to hold that image. One is that those who have gone before are aware of us and pulling for us. The other, which he leaned toward as the more likely reading, is that we are the ones paying attention to them, looking to their example as we run.

The passage calls for laying aside both encumbrances and sin, and Pastor Mark was careful to keep those two categories separate. Some things that weigh a person down are not sinful at all. Busyness, old habits that once fit and no longer do, even certain religious ideas carried from childhood can become dead weight. Sin is its own category and needs to go for its own reasons, but the call is broader than a list of moral failures.

The athletic picture in "let us run" assumes you have already dealt with whatever slows you down. Pastor Mark used his own ongoing struggle with his weight as a plain example of how daily attention to something keeps it moving in the right direction, and how losing track of it lets it drift. The same principle applies to the run the passage describes.

The title "author and perfecter" given to Jesus carries more freight than it might seem. The Greek word, archegos, points to someone who is not only the originator of a movement but who stays in it as its leader. Acts uses the same word when it calls Jesus the "prince of life." He pioneered the way and kept going through it, which is the basis for the command to consider him when things get hard.

"For the joy set before him he endured the cross, despising the shame" was read as Jesus knowingly and voluntarily accepting public humiliation because he could see past it to what it would accomplish. Pastor Mark connected joy here to the awareness of God's grace: receiving something you did not earn produces a particular kind of gladness, and that is the joy Jesus had in view. He sat down because the work was finished, and he now intercedes from the right hand of the Father.

The closing command, "consider him," is not the same Greek word used earlier in Hebrews for careful study, though it is close. This one carries the sense of reasoning something all the way through to a conclusion by every possible angle, and then returning to do it again at a deeper level. The point is that you cannot exhaust what there is to find in Jesus. The two examples Pastor Mark used were Nicodemus, who was told that being good enough would not get him in, and the Samaritan woman, who was told she was not too far gone to be welcomed. Fixing your eyes on that Jesus, he said, is what keeps a person from growing weary and losing heart.