Abstract
Several recent studies have highlighted the heavenly dimension of Jesus’s sacrifice in Hebrews. Joshua Bloor explores the potential import of this aspect of Jesus’s saving work for the homily’s original recipients. Specifically, Bloor argues that Hebrews’ emphasis on Jesus’s heavenly offering addresses an existential problem faced by the audience – their ongoing consciousness of defilement from sin.
Whilst Jewish sacrifices brought worshippers some sense of purification from the defiling effects of sin (this is clearly true, e.g., for the guilt offering, as Bloor notes), Bloor suggests that the community addressed by Hebrews have not found the same ongoing assurance from their confession about Jesus. They understand that they have been redeemed by Jesus’s death, but they are not experiencing lasting, subjective feelings of purification. They may have even begun to look back to the repeated Jewish sacrifices and the relief they provided. Hebrews seeks to persuade them that in fact they are no longer defiled. Here, the author emphasises Jesus’s heavenly offering of blood, the cosmic scope of which brings an even better, ongoing assurance of purification than they had from Jewish sacrificial practices. Their consciousness, that is, has now been perfected.
This perfect purification follows from the heavenly dimension of Jesus’s sacrifice, which has done something Levitical sacrifices could not do – purified the heavenly tabernacle. (Bloor refuses to allow assumptions about Hebrews’ Platonism to blunt the straightforward claim of Heb 9:23.) Following J. Milgrom, Bloor thinks of defilement as a kind of miasma-like thing that marks the offender’s consciousness and spreads to sacred spaces. This creates barriers that prevent people from drawing near to God. The original recipients of Hebrews therefore need to know that Jesus’s salvific work has not only objective dimensions (the death of Jesus is a redemptive, Passover-like event), but also ongoing subjective ones (Jesus’s blood offering in heaven purifies the heavenly tabernacle and consciousness of sin in ways analogous to the Day of Atonement offering). Because of the heavenly dimension of Jesus’s sacrifice, the congregation can both avoid turning back to Jewish customs and rituals (Bloor argues for a modified relapse theory to explain the nature of apostasy in Hebrews) and go boldly into God’s heavenly presence.
Bloor’s study takes seriously the positive function of many of the analogies and intertextual connections Hebrews draws between Jesus and Jewish scripture and sacrificial practice. Many will quibble with any number of Bloor’s specific exegetical and historical conclusions. Numerous questions remain unaddressed (e.g., Given the association of God’s presence with purification, how does the distribution of the Holy Spirit within the congregation [Heb 2:4] fit within the larger hypothesis? If Jesus’s heavenly offering was objectively effective, why has the congregation not felt its effects?). Nevertheless, Bloor’s sensitivity to Hebrews’ appeal to Jewish scripture and ritual has reopened aspects of the conversation on conscience, defilement, and purification in helpful ways. Perhaps chief among these aspects is his careful attention to the possible distinctions in Hebrews between the functions of Jesus’s death and those of Jesus’s heavenly offering.