Let us be on our guard
while the promise of entering into his rest remains,
that none of you seem to have failed.
The promise of entering into his rest was not only about the eventual settlement of the people of Israel in the land of Canaan. The true meaning of this rest is fulfilled in those who receive the Good News with faith.
For we who believed enter into that rest
This is a present tense possibility leading us onward toward on eternal fulfillment. But to benefit we must not only receive the Good News we must profit by it by being united in faith with with those who listen. Faith alone can teach us how to enter a rest that transcends our earthly circumstances, can teach us to know a peace beyond understanding, one which the world cannot give or take away.
For he has spoken somewhere about the seventh day in this manner,
And God rested on the seventh day from all his works;
The rest to which we are invited is the rest of God on the seventh day of creation, when works, however good, were set aside, in favor of covenant relationship. God, of course, had no need of this rest, but he desired to elevate his creatures from the servitude of doing to the freedom of being, particularly of being in relationship with God himself. This rest at the beginning prefigured the rest that awaits us at the end. We can begin to taste and to share in it even now, and yet the promise remains to be fulfilled in fullness, and thus also our need to be on guard against anything that might cause us to turn aside from that destination.
Therefore, let us strive to enter into that rest,
so that no one may fall after the same example of disobedience.
We need to manifest the obedience of faith that was found to be wanting in the Exodus generation. They were for us what we might call a cautionary tale. We are called to enter deeply into the Sabbath rest that faith can make present here and now in order to orient and strengthen us to journey onward toward the fullness of that rest. The way we choose to live on Sundays thus becomes a metaphor for our entire relation to the spiritual life. Is our chief concern truly to listen with vulnerable hearts to the voice of the one speaking? There isn't actually that much difference between preoccupation with other things and what the Scriptures call hardness of heart.
They came bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men.
Unable to get near Jesus because of the crowd,
they opened up the roof above him.
It isn't always a smooth path by which we come to receive the promises of God. But God himself rewards those who pursue him with the faith, faith such as these men demonstrated. They might have chosen to let the obstacles they faced cause them to turn back and give up. But they persisted and persevered. Such faith was the basis for what is now often metaphorically called a breakthrough but which for them was also one literally. Things that seemed to be insurmountable obstacles were not obstacles to them because of their faith.
After they had broken through,
they let down the mat on which the paralytic was lying.
Some of us find ourselves unable to move onward on our journey to the rest promised by God. We are like the paralytic, in need of healing before we can stand on our own. May we be blessed to have good friends who will help bring us to the Lord and may we in turn be such friends to others in need. After all, we are all in some measure frozen in place by habits of sin that seem unbreakable. But none of this is finally a problem that Jesus himself, the Son of Man, is unable to solve.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to him,
“Child, your sins are forgiven.”
Even in hearing these words we might already feel as though we can stand again and journey onward, even before he tells us so. Already we feel our hearts enlarged, our capacities restored. We do not join the scribes in doubting and hardening our hearts against this action of the divine physician. Instead we welcome it. And as a consequence Jesus himself makes us to rise, makes our very existence to be a testimony to his goodness and power.
“I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go home.”
He rose, picked up his mat at once,
and went away in the sight of everyone.
They were all astounded
and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this.”
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