Hebrews 2:1-9 – 7/16/2026
We do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
Hebrews 2:9 (NRSVue)
Who is Jesus? Who was he? As a Lutheran I affirm that Jesus is both God and human. I know, generally speaking, what it is to be human. I have no trouble conceptualizing Jesus the human creature. What I do not know, and what I don’t think anyone knows, is what it is to be God. Words like “higher” and “lower,” “glory” and “honor” among many others are attempts to understand the nature of the deity in relationship to our existence. On their own these relative terms tell us next to nothing about God because “higher” leaves open the question of higher in what regard? And “glory” and “honor” leave open the question of honorable for what? Glorious in what sense? Etc. If God is wholly and completely other from us as humans, God remains a total mystery. If God is like us in some respects and not others, it remains open to question what that resemblance is like. We are, on our own, left almost completely in the dark about what God could be like.
Even if we grant as an assumption that the Bible can give us knowledge of God and God’s nature, we are left with the problem of the Bible’s conflicting understanding of God from author to author and book to book. Even when the Bible speaks with unanimity about God, we are left with the above problem with how to interpret and apply predicates to something that is in some ways wholly other.
Jesus then becomes an interesting case if we assume him to be both completely human and completely God. Jesus is knowable with respect to his humanity but unknowable with respect to his divinity. And as God, Jesus is a being we can know, at least partially, insofar as we know anything about humans at all.
One might not grant the assumptions of orthodox Christianity, the trinity and the divine-human nature of Jesus. If we take them as working assumptions, it turns out we can know a few things about God insofar as God became human. It’s not much, but it’s a conditional foothold, a place to imagine and create even as we cannot know for sure.
This lack of knowledge and lack of certainty could be used as arguments that we should withhold our assent and remain agnostic to the existence of God and to the nature of God, if God exists. This is the epistemically responsible approach, withhold assent to a belief when we do not have sufficient evidence. The life of faith need not be an epistemic stretch into territory where we cannot know. Instead, faith can be conceptualized as a radical choice to see existence a particular way and to form community, express gratitude, and relinquish pretensions to control. It’s a kind of letting go, oriented around both the command to love and the affirmation that God is love.
Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 7/16/2026:
Isaiah 41:21-29
Hebrews 2:1-9
Psalm 86:11-17
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary by Justin Marquis
Dionysus on a Bike 
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