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The word of God is living and effective,
sharper than any two-edged sword,
penetrating even between soul and spirit,
joints and marrow,
and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
The idea that the word of God as a sword seems innocuous enough when it is kept at a distance from us. But the author of Hebrew has been reminding us again and again that we ought not to harden our hearts. And it is upon these same hearts that the word of God is meant to work. It can cut so deeply into them as to divide that which is operating at the level of the soul, the natural and the human, from what is the work of the Spirit. We see both one after another in Peter's confession of the identity of Jesus:
Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven (see Matthew 16:17).
Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do (see Matthew 16:23).
Even for Peter this living sword was not merely a device for receiving safe words of affirmation. As Peter got closer to the truth, as the identity of Jesus was more precisely known to him and clear, the sword exacted a more precise, more cutting separation in order to reveal what was still only natural, and therefore insufficient.
The word of God is "effective" in many ways. It opposes the arguments of the proud and gives good ground for our hope. It helps us to believe in the promises of God and to stand against any lies that would strip us of those promises. But it is meant to go deeper than any of these. It is meant to reveal us to ourselves as we are before God, before whom no "creature is concealed". We read that "everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account", and it is this reality that the the word of God is meant to reveal to us. It is meant to help us to learn to see through our pretenses, through the stories we tell ourselves, to the truth.
It is difficult, precarious at best, to allow such a sharp weapon to come so close to such a weak thing as a heart of flesh. Yet it is better for the one who called himself a "physician" to wield sharp tools rather than dull ones, precision instruments rather than blunt force.
Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.
We might still feel reluctant to allow our hearts to undergo this divine surgery. If we understand the procedure it might intimidate us even more than a literal physical one. This is no doubt why the Letter to the Hebrews goes on to offer us such reassurance as no earthly surgery can provide.
For we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who has similarly been tested in every way,
yet without sin.
Jesus himself is competent to do the healing work he proposes, one which we desperately need. Sin never once made compelled him to choose self-interest over the mission, never once made him slip with the scalpel of divine love. And yet he himself has the most profound sympathy for our weakness, the heart disease which makes us candidates for this surgery. He wants to heal us even more than we ourselves want to be healed because he sees more clearly both the disease and the goodness of being free of it. Thus, whereas normally we would have trouble imagining it, being "cut to the heart" became, as we read in Acts, something desirable.
Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” (see Acts 2:37).
This joy which was known to those new disciples who Acts described hearing the word and responding with faith can be ours as well. If we had it once and lost it, this is how we can hope to find it again. If we have some now, there is more to be found. We should not shy away from the divine physician nor harden our hearts against him defensively. We ought not struggle in the operating table for to do so will only harm us. Let us more and more learn to welcome this word that is able to save us, not just at an external and forensic level, but deeply, to our very core.
receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls (see James 1:21).
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