Jesus has identified with us and become the mediator between us and God. Our part now is to keep our eyes fixed on him. The writer will return to this idea powerfully in
12:1–3. He will have much more to say about Jesus as our high priest. Jesus is also an ‘apostle’, or someone who is sent.
This is the only place where the word ‘apostle’ is used of Jesus. Paul uses the term to describe Epaphroditus (
Philippians 2:25) and Titus (
2 Corinthians 8:23) – in both contexts they were sent. Moses too was sent by God (
Exodus 3:10); but when Aaron and Miriam claimed that they too spoke for him, God warned them that it was not so – it was with Moses that he spoke ‘mouth to mouth’ because Moses was ‘faithful in all his house’ (
Numbers 12:7,
8 ESV).
We saw in chapter 1 that Jesus is superior to the angels. Now he is presented as superior to Moses, whom the Jews looked up to as the bringer of the Law. Like Moses, Jesus was faithful, but Jesus, as God’s only Son, is over, not in, God’s house (v 6).
God’s house. That’s us, with a proviso (v
6). We have to keep firm our
parrhēsia (‘confidence’) and our
kauchēma (‘hope’). Neither of these Greek words has an exact English equivalent, and they can be misleading. Literally,
parrhēsia means ‘speaking freely’, but its meaning extended to any kind of honest, open behaviour.
It is not hard to see how it comes to mean ‘boldness’, as in
Acts 4:13.
Kauchēma means ‘boasting,’ but it does not have the arrogant connotations of the English word. These two words are also paired in
2 Corinthians 7:4. In the present context, ‘the hope in which we glory’ is perhaps the best translation. The hope is, of course, no vague wish for the future, but certainty about what the future will bring.