In ancient Temple Judaism, the Jews chose from among themselves a representative to go before the Lord in the Temple for them. He was chosen among the priests who served in the Temple. This role was called the High Priest; it was fundamentally a religious role which was meant to have little to no political power associated with it, since the Jews already had a king aside from the High Priest, though it developed into a more political role over time. Perhaps the most important thing that the High Priest did for the Jewish people was when he would enter into the Holy of Holies once a year to offer the blood of sacrifice on the Day of Atonement on behalf of all Jews. The role of High Priest was completely unique. He was not a regular Jew nor was he a regular priest. He was someone set apart to lead the people in acts of atonement just as Aaron had done both during the life of Moses and after his death. 

Considering what we know about this office and its origin, Catholics might begin to consider that we have our own continuation of this High Priest within the Church through the Papacy. To some extent, there is truth to this: the Pope is the singular head of the Catholic Church and his role is to lead his worldwide flock in living as faithful Christians, which primarily consists of repenting of our sins and partaking in the sacrifice of Christ through the sacramental life. However, when we read the letter to the Hebrews, Paul or whomever may have written this letter speaks often about the “High Priest” as being fulfilled in the person of Christ. The Pope is not the High Priest of Catholicism, Christ is. Like the Jewish High Priest, Christ offered the ultimate sacrifice for the good of his people, a sacrifice which could not be offered by anyone else. When we apply our understanding of Christ as High Priest to the Gospel, we see that this is a cause for joy because the Bridegroom is among us. But even Christ says that there will come a day when the Bridegroom is no longer with us, and we must return to fasting and penance. At Christ’s Ascension, he instructed us to await his return, which we took to mean that we ought to begin fasting and penance in the meantime. This is the role of the Church today just as it was for the Temple-worshiping Jews in the past; we have a representative among us who is meant to lead us for the time being, whom we call the Pope.

One of the titles that is bestowed upon the man who becomes Pope is “Servant of the Servants of God.” When we give titles of the utmost quality to Christ, we use a similar formula, such as when we call him King of Kings or Lord of Lords. We are servants of Christ, though. This is a quality that uniquely belongs to us, the faithful. Christ told us he did not come to be served, but to serve; however, by doing so, he taught us that the one with power and authority is required to serve and protect those whom he has been given authority over. There is no better way to express the purpose of this representative office for the faithful than to call them the Servant of the Servants. The beauty of Christianity is that Christ shares his authority with us, not that we may make individual decisions on what we want the Church to look like, but so that we can constantly serve each other and lower ourselves for the sake of our neighbor. Our sole representative before God, the vicar of Christ, embodies this expectation. We build him up with our prayers, and he maintains the safety and penitential life of his flock. Our entire existence as the faithful, though, is predicated on servitude to each other and humility in the sight of the Lord.

If you are a practicing Catholic who works hard to build up a prayer life and tries your best to be Christ-like to your neighbor, God will remember. This is the message given to us in this passage from the letter to the Hebrews. The purpose of this letter was to speak to the Hebrews in a way that incorporated their past and the world they knew in the context of Christianity. Considering Paul’s letters to different communities, such as the Corinthians or the Romans, he was speaking to Churches that he established. For many of these communities, living a life of worshiping the One, True God was a completely new experience. This was not the case for the Hebrews. They not only worshiped the One, True God before Christ, but it was blasphemous for anyone to consider that divinity existed outside of God. It must have been extremely difficult to accept that one of their own was God Incarnate, but they did. Acceptance of a radically new relationship with God, which defined the very essence of their identity, remained difficult, and they needed the comforting and motivational words shared with them in this letter.

As Catholics, many of us might feel a certain sense of empathy with these Hebrews who were the recipients of the letter. They had spent their life serving, loving, and worshiping God in such a way that literally no one else in the world was doing. Once Christ came among them, though, he opened up a relationship with God to the entire world, even to the pagan gentiles. This could be disheartening to those who were not only faithful before the public ministry of Christ, but came to accept Christ and follow him as God Incarnate. As the first of those to know and love God, shouldn’t they be in a privileged position? How could it be that after spending a lifetime sacrificing the things of this world for the sake of God, while others who did not were now coming into their fold as equals? This calls to mind two biblical stories: the first is the offerings of Cain and Abel. God accepts the offering of Abel while rejecting the offering of Cain and Cain becomes jealous of his brother. God’s beautiful message of warning and accepting what He does and does not accept is not enough for Cain to avoid falling into despair and sin by murdering Abel out of anger. The second story comes from Christ as the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Some workers begin working early in the day, while others do not begin working until the very end of the day; regardless, they are all paid the same wage by the owner of the vineyard. The Hebrews, as recipients of the promise of God, were given “early access” to know and understand God. God eventually gave that same access to the world through Christ and his Apostles. But the gift of knowing God is infinite; it is like a flame that does not extinguish but can produce infinite light and warmth for others to experience.

Lifelong faithful Catholics will find themselves in the same situation as these Hebrews. The risk we run, though, is assuming that since others have come to Christ late, our faithfulness need only last as long as theirs, or it can give rise to envy like with Cain. It does not matter how long you accept and honor Christ, as long as you continue to accept and honor him all the days of your life from the moment he was given to you. For some, the light and warmth of knowing Christ has been a gift from the earliest days of their lives. This is a good thing, but it does not mean we can now fall into the darkness of envy or apathy. God remembers His servants. He remembers how they loved Him and served Him. He will remember the time and effort you put into your relationship with Him. Let that comfort you as you continue to love Him day by day. 

When God became man, He chose a very specific point in history to make His presence known to the world. As He promised, He came as a Jew to minister to the Jews before opening Himself up to the entire world through His chosen Apostles and disciples. There are many reasons why Judaism plays such a significant role in the Incarnation, but one of these reasons is the existence of the High Priest in Temple worship. High Priests are not necessarily a uniquely Jewish idea; even the Romans, who occupied the homeland of the Jews at the time of Jesus, had a High Priest whom they called the Pontifex Maximus, which was an official title held by the Emperor in the newly formed Empire at this time. What made the Jewish High Priest so unique of a role was the role he played as a representative of the Jews in the presence of the One, True God, especially in the Holy of Holies in the Temple, where no other human being was allowed to enter except for him. 

When Christ came into this world, the High Priest was still in practice, though occupied by a man who ended up sending Christ to his death. It is no accident that the Temple was destroyed only 40 years after the death of Christ, which rendered the office of the Judaic High Priest obsolete. We must understand, though, that Christ did not mean to eradicate the practice of Judaism; rather, the world of Judaic Temple worship, from the office of High Priest to the Holy of Holies, was radically transformed to accommodate the new and everlasting High Priest who was to serve as the arbiter of the new and everlasting Covenant between God and His people. The reason why the High Priest would enter into the Holy of Holies once a year was to offer atonement on behalf of all the people. Christ offered this exact same sacrifice, although in a much more perfect way, through his death on the cross. Christ is the Heavenly High Priest. The concept that Christ would have learned about the priesthood in his lifetime, just as all Jews did, was the priesthood as it was understood and established in the Scriptures. The office of High Priest was established first through Aaron, but Moses and Aaron only understood the role of priest through the mysterious figure in the Abraham narrative named Melchizedek. Melchizedek was described as the King of Salem, who came to offer bread and wine to Abraham. Abraham responded by offering Melchizedek a tenth of everything he owned. No one knew anything else about this mysterious priest.

For the Jews before Christ, the role of Melchizedek was quite simple: he came to establish the priesthood by teaching it to Abraham, the father of Judaism. In the context of Christ, though, the parallels were clear: Melchizedek was a prefigurement of the one who was to come. He was the Heavenly High Priest long before Christ established the office for himself. Perhaps, because we knew so little about Melchizedek, this royal priest was the Son Himself who came first to Abraham so that His fulfillment of the Law and the Scriptures would be perfect, from beginning to end. Psalm 110 sings that the king of God’s people is both king and priest for them, though not just any priest; he is a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek. As we read in this passage from the letter to the Hebrews, the order of Melchizedek is marked by perfection enabled by “a power of a life that cannot be destroyed.” Only Christ is worthy of such a title, yet he shared it by passing it onto his disciples, the forerunners of modern Catholic priests. Because of the perfection of the Incarnation, we are participants today in the power of a life that cannot be destroyed.

The most important holy day in Judaism has always been the commemoration of Passover, when the Seder meal is ritually performed to remember the escape from Egypt. Absolutely crucial to the historical meal was the Passover Lamb. God had instructed Moses that the Lamb must be completely unblemished with no broken bones. After it was slaughtered, its blood was used to mark the doors of the Jews so that the angel of death would pass over their houses. After the slaughter, the lamb was roasted and consumed before the Jews began their journey. The blood of this sacrifice remained paramount to the practice of Judaism; every year, those Jews in Jerusalem who were going to celebrate the Passover took the lambs that they had bought to the Temple to be ritually sacrificed. Apparently, the priests who were responsible for these sacrifices had perfected the sacrificial act performed hundreds, if not thousands, of times on this one day out of the year. The people consumed the flesh of the lambs, but the blood was reserved for the Temple. The blood was the part of the sacrifice offered to God alone.

Jews at the time believed that the lifeforce of living things resided in the blood. The flesh that could be eaten was merely that which was left over to be consumed; the most significant aspect of the sacrifice was left in the Temple to be drained so that no other received it but God. There are so many parallels between the Passover Lamb and the sacrifice of Christ that it is difficult to ignore just how perfect the sacrifice of Christ was in the context of Judaism. We even hear about it this passage from the letter to the Hebrews - Christ as High Priest enters into the sanctuary, not with the blood of the sacrificed animals, but with the blood of his own sacrifice for us. The Temple offering of blood sanctified the flesh of the sacrifice; how much more, the epistle writer expresses, will the blood of Christ sanctify the unblemished flesh of sacrifice. Our participation in the sacrifice of Christ is through the consumption of his unblemished flesh in the Eucharist, but the parallels run deeper than that. Consider Saint Agnes, an early Christian who is venerated with one of the most lofty titles in Christian sainthood: Virgin Martyr. Agnes was Roman nobility before the legalization of Christianity; her martyrdom for Christ was brought upon her by her refusal to give her body over to any pagan man. She desired that she remain unblemished as a virgin, which led her to be given the greatest opportunity a Christian can have: to reciprocate the sacrificial love of Christ back to him through martyrdom.

St. Agnes is always associated with lambs. The name Agnes itself comes from the Greek word for “chaste,” and is close to the Latin word for lamb, agnus. Agnes is often depicted in art with a lamb to emphasize this relationship with chastity and innocence, and on her feast day every year, lambs from the site of St. Paul’s martyrdom in Rome are presented to the pope to be blessed so that their wool can be used to make the pallia worn by metropolitan archbishops to symbolize their authority. Agnes is a powerful testament to the continuity of Christ’s perfect sacrifice lived out through the faithful. She so loved Christ that she was able to shed her own blood for the growth of the Church just as Christ did, while enabling her flesh to remain unblemished in her virginity. Moreso, the authority of the Church today invokes her name to be reminded of the chastity and innocence that empowers the Church to thrive through sacrifice. Yes, Christ’s sacrifice was perfect and complete. But Agnes shows us that we can share in his sacrifice perfectly by remaining unblemished for him.

We spend our whole lives working towards goals, achieving ends, prioritizing certain things, all because we were created to recognize the telos. Telos is a Greek term which refers to an ultimate object or aim towards which all of your behavior is guiding you. You wake up in the morning to be productive, you are productive to earn a living, you earn a living to survive, you survive to enjoy life, you enjoy life to find happiness and meaning. Everything we do has an ultimate aim, even our very existence. Our telos as human beings is to love, but love has its own telos. Love is by its nature incarnational; all love ends in an incarnation, even God’s. The ultimate aim for all of existence, then, is the incarnation of God’s perfect love for us. The telos of life is the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Towards the end of his life, Christ spoke to his Heavenly Father in prayer before he was put to death, expressing his gratitude for us. Christ saw humanity, the people for whom he would suffer and die, as a unique gift that the Father gave the Son when the Son became Incarnate. The Incarnation was an act of love itself, as we know from the most popular verse in all of Scripture: “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life.” Love transcends every person; because it is in the nature of love, we are driven to make our love physical and tangible when we want to share it with another. This explains how gift-giving is so integral to expressing love. God, the author of Love itself, allowed Himself to be driven by this element of love, determining that it would best express His love for us by giving us Himself, becoming physical. He did so through the person of Jesus Christ. But Christ promised us before he ascended into Heaven that he would never leave us. How is it possible for Christ to never leave us, to ascend to Heaven, but also to remain with us in love by remaining physical to us? He shared with us his Body and Blood, which we continue to receive as a gift of God’s love in the Eucharist. All of salvation history was preparing us to be ready to receive and to be satisfied by the gift of the Eucharist, because the Eucharist was the ultimate aim for all creation. This Body and Blood of Christ is precisely the Divine Love we so desire in the exact form we want it - physically, tangibly, real. 

For millennia, God deemed it enough to give burnt offerings as a sacrifice in atonement for sin, as a sign of our love. The blood of these sacrifices served as a sign of the covenant between God and His chosen people. In a relationship, gift-giving is essential because it makes love tangible through the expression of something offered, but it must be reciprocal. God did not just take our offerings; He gave back to us a perfect gift that can never be repaid. He gave His entire Self, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Every interaction of love between two human beings is a mere reflection of this love God has for us; just as it is with a human relationship, no amount of gifts or burnt offerings or material goods can be as meaningful and as fulfilling as giving your entire self, body and soul, to another. We do not want “things”, we want the love of another. God does not want our “things”, He wants us. He wants you and your entirety. You can be assured of this because He offered His entire self to you for no other reason than He loves you. His love became incarnational, as it is ordered to do. It became a human body, and that body is able to be received in its entirety through the Eucharist. Reciprocate. Give God your entire self.

To know God is to know life. Albert Einstein once famously said, “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.” What Einstein encapsulated in these words is the understanding that the quest for knowledge and meaning in this life will immediately be put to rest in the single moment when God shares Himself with us fully, when we understand His will perfectly. The ultimate search for the truth, then, can only be found through human reason by studying God Himself, which must be done within the science of theology. Fortunately for us in the Catholic Church, we have never run out of brilliant figures who mastered the study of theology from the earliest days of Christianity to the modern age. 

The one figure synonymous with the intellectual tradition of Catholicism is Saint Thomas Aquinas, who literally wrote the book on the summary of Theology. However, even Aquinas, who spent his entire life focused on the intellectualism of trying to reach God’s thoughts through theology, decided to completely stop his work once he had a mystical encounter with God. God reportedly told him in this vision, “you have written well of me, Thomas. What reward will you receive from me for your labor?” Thomas’ response was “Nothing but you, Lord.” When we are given access to God’s thoughts, just as Einstein desired, we do not receive such a gift like an academic or a researcher who seeks out answers out of a sense of curiosity and who wants that intellectual itch to simply be scratched. To be deeply entrenched in the thoughts of God is to realize just how insignificant and futile any effort is within human reason to try to understand God. He is utterly incomprehensible and we are incapable of even coming close to realizing what Aquinas was able to experience: when our thoughts are merged with God’s, there is no amount of effort we can exert with only our human reason to even know a sliver of who God is. So why do we do it? Why do we continue to study God, to listen to sermons on God, to read reflections and books on the mystery of God? If to come to know Him is to find that everything else is meaningless in comparison, why do we continue to try to understand Him in our impossibly limited reason? St. Anselm of Canterbury defined the science of theology as “faith seeking understanding.” We do not know God when we begin our pursuit of studying Him through theology; however, we do know that there is something that is possible to grasp in pursuing that knowledge of Him, even if it is only through our insufficient human reason. At the onset of the study of theology is faith, which motivates us to seek understanding of who God is. When God is ready, He will reveal Himself fully to us, just as He did to Aquinas. But in the meantime, to seek after understanding Him is to show Him that we desire to know and love Him.

As it is so beautifully written in the letter to the Hebrews, faith is the realization of hope. In studying God and trying to learn more about Him, we manifest our hope in what we know about Him through faith in Him and His goodness. Faith and hope will disappear when we encounter God’s thoughts; when Aquinas had his vision of God, his faith was now actual knowledge and his hope was now fulfillment. The only thing that remains in such a state, then, is love, which remains forever. When all is perfectly known in the mind of God, what else can we possibly desire besides God Himself? Faith is the realization of Hope, but Love is the realization of God.

The Theological Virtues - Faith, Hope, and Love - are the tools by which we navigate life. Faith motivates us to pursue our purpose and meaning in life, Hope keeps us motivated on that pursuit, and Love is simultaneously the purpose we seek out and the ever-present grace that reveals its constant presence in our lives when all is said and done. This journey towards finding the meaning of life, though, must begin with Faith. Faith is by far the most under-appreciated and misunderstood of the Theological Virtues because it is often considered as antiquated, superstitious, or even unscientific by many. In reality, Faith is the fire that ignites under each and every single one of us when we want to make our lives more meaningful. Every person experiences and knows Faith, regardless of what they may or may not believe in - Faith moves.

In this passage, we hear one of the most beautiful explanations of the nature of this Virtue in the letter to the Hebrews. The words in this letter stand alone: “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” In a world that has convinced itself that it is “scientifically” and “rationally” based, every human being still has direct experience with things that exist beyond the senses used in science and reason. We all know what it means to be in relationship, to love a child or a parent, to satisfy one's curiosity, to philosophize and ask for the meaning of things. The rejection of what Faith insists, namely in the context of religion, is always pushed back against because of a claim of “lack of evidence” for what is unseen. But according to the letter to the Hebrews, that is precisely the nature of faith. For example, it would be impossible for an individual to weigh all rational options and to scientifically test whether or not someone is worth marrying; instead, the individual simply takes a chance with the unknown, and learns through experience that the other is someone they want to spend the rest of their life with. This common real-world example of faith is also the impetus towards learning love, which is exactly how faith in the context of religion is used. As Catholics, there are many things we take on faith because Christ has revealed that he is worthy of being trusted in those things that are seen; therefore, when it comes to those things that are unseen, all we can do is trust in his Word. When life makes it difficult to accept and to believe that which continues to be unseen, Hope carries us forward. Eventually, the unseen and the unknown become seen and known - Love reveals itself to be the culmination of all that we have worked for. 

At the Transfiguration, Jesus reveals himself in full glory to only three men; he had countless followers, 72 of whom were worthy of being sent by him, 12 of whom were worthy of being set apart by him, yet only 3 were witnesses to this amazing sight. Peter, James, and John were witnesses to the divinity of Christ as representatives of humanity. Their purpose was not to be special and preferred, but to share what they saw so that others may believe through faith. As we hear in the letter to the Hebrews, “without faith it is impossible to please God, for anyone who approaches God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.” Peter and James went to their death to attest to what they saw. John dedicated the rest of his life to write and to teach on the love he witnessed in Christ. These men are worthy of belief, which is exactly what God wants us to do. He wants us to have an open heart, to trust Him and His instruments, to be guided by faith towards Him, so that we may come to fully understand love when the time is right.