Laid open to love.

`For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.'

What do we feel, yes, feel, when we read these words from the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament? Apprehension, fear, dismay? An old childhood reaction? Gosh! I have to be careful not only what I do, but also what I think? Someone is watching me! I can't live up to that.

Yet it is a passage which is actually meant to reassure. We don't like being known that well. We all have an inner world not shared easily, if at all, with others. We only let more of ourselves out when we feel loved. Even then we run a risk, and courage is needed.

Such disclosure to God is meant to spell safety. If God does not know me as I am, then indeed there is no hope. But if the hidden, dark material of my life is known to him, then he can work there.

This is not meant as an ethical demand. We often interpret biblical passages far too ethically. This passage is meant dynamically, so as to speak of how we work in the inside and how God works inside us. At the very place where I am my self, where spirit and body come together--for I can only live in my body--in the place of love and passion, giving, receiving, sexuality, suffering, dreaming, achieving, there where my body is the vehicle for `me', God is working. He `cuts all the way through to where soul and spirit meet, to where joints and marrow come together'.

Here then is a promise of rest, not a demand for `behaviour'. The whole of Hebrews 4, from which these verses are taken, is about resting in God, the rest of being in his presence, of the seventh day, of Jubilee. Resting in God as we are is part of faith, part of trusting--not avoidance of it, not reward for it, not extraneous to it. In the worst and best of my centre I can rest in God. It is the only way I can live, trusting, by faith.

The passage which first seemed so threatening of our performance is followed by a presentation of Jesus as a priest, who is able to sympathize with us in our weaknesses, tempted as we are. With other human priests, he says, `I too am a man.' He knows us as we are.

What a freedom, that Christ can stay within my inner life, so frail, so needy, so dark, so sinful and work there as the living Word.

Charles Wesley interprets the passage in one of his hymns:

Deepen the wounds thy hands have made

In this weak helpless soul;

Till mercy with its kindly aid,

Descends to make me whole.

The sharpness of thy two-edged sword

Enable me to endure;

Till bold to say: My hallowing Lord

Hath wrought a perfect cure.