We are moving to the conclusion of a long discussion of priesthood and sacrifice in Hebrews. Keep in mind that the letter is an exhortation for the tired people to find the endurance to keep on going. Jesus can be seen as a decisive divine move for reconciliation. Sacrifice was a system of bridging the human and divine (think thanks and well being offerings). God moves toward something that need not be repeated. OUr passage starts with the words of Ps. 40 as if Jesus were speaking them.
Peeler (Working Preacher) “eisercomai” could indicate then the cause of his speaking: “he says these things because he is entering God’s sinful world so that members of that world can enter God’s restful sanctuary or sanctified rest.”
The participle could also be an indicator of time. As a present participle, it would show that he is making this speech as he is entering the world. — His entrance into the world is the will of God that Jesus came to enact. “By God’s will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus the Messiah once for all” (10:10). God’s will, then, is the Son’s embodiment. The will of God is that God the Son take on a body, offer that body. In so doing, he brought the foreshadowing of offerings to an end and he began the process of reconciliation and built a bridge between the two realms and the two ages. . God’s command to offer the bodies of animals foreshadowed the offering of the human body of God.
V. 9-anaireó compound word (ana +haireó) “to take away,” “to abolish,” or “to claim (for oneself), to remove.” ana can signify “up” or “up to.” I dislike supersessionism, so let’s say Jesus works in a different key or dimension or phase, or that it is parallel to the system/structure of the temple in a alternative mode of being a priest, indeed a new high priest. Jesus embodies the function of the offering system into his very being and work.
Psalm 40:608- note what has been rendered here as “a body you have prepared for me”, in distinction to a literal translation of the Hebrew text , “you dug ears for me”--I like with as the Hebrew emohaisze hearing as in the shema, to keep and observe, but the LXX opens the door to the entirety of the life of Christ.Jesus lived his entire life as an offering of faithful obedience to God. God’s will is seen in the embodied life of Jesus, in his flesh and blood life. So either translation would work.John Van Nuys likes Placjer's use of Calvin's full measure of obeidence as referrign to the entire life, and that would work well here.
This passage then allows us to explore the meaning of the Incarnation. At a basic level, how does the Incarnation touch on the meaning of Emmanuel, God with us?
I wonder if the temple had long been destroyed when this was written.As the rabbi struggled to reconstitute the faith, as in settling the Hebrew Bible, Hebrews is speaking to the same issue, but through the lens of Jesus Christ as a different way of coming at some of the religious issues the destruction of the temple would create.
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