The Great Cloud Cheering You On

The letter to the Hebrews had just explained that Jesus was the last sacrifice anyone would ever need. Its readers believed it. They were tired anyway.

When they first trusted Jesus, they had been brave. Neighbours jeered at them in the street: "There go the troublemakers!" Some were thrown into prison, and the others brought them food. When their things were seized and carried off, they were glad anyway, because God had something better saved for them.

But years had passed, and the better thing had not come. Some had stopped coming to the meetings. So the teacher who loved them kept writing.

"Faith," he wrote, "is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we cannot see." Then he made a list.

Abel trusted God, and his brother Cain killed him. "He is dead," the teacher wrote, "but he is still speaking."

Noah built an enormous boat under a clear sky, because God said a flood was coming.

Abraham left home not knowing where he was going, and lived in tents his whole life, "looking ahead to the city whose builder is God." Sarah was far too old to have a baby, and she had one, because God had promised. Moses could have lived as a prince in Pharaoh's palace, and chose to suffer with God's people instead.

"What more shall I say?" the teacher wrote. "I do not have time to tell about Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jephthah, David and Samuel and the prophets." (He had more heroes than parchment.)

Some shut the mouths of lions. Others were whipped and locked in chains. Some were stoned, and some were killed with the sword. "Every one of them was praised for trusting God," he wrote, "and yet none of them received what was promised. They had only seen it from far away and waved to it."

Then the list became a racetrack. "Since such a great cloud of witnesses surrounds us, let us throw off everything that slows us down, and the sin that trips us so easily. Let us run with endurance the race marked out for us." (Nobody runs a race in boots and a winter coat with a sack of rocks on their back.)

The stands are packed with runners who have already run their part, Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Moses, cheering for the ones still on the track.

"Keep your eyes on Jesus," the letter says. "For the joy set before him he endured the cross, paying no attention to its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

But not one runner in those stands had reached the finish. Abraham never moved out of his tent into God's city. Moses died on a mountain, looking across the river at a land he never entered. God was saving something better, the teacher said, so the old runners and the new would finish together.

One runner went the whole course. He carried a wooden cross, and when the crowd laughed, he kept going. He died, rose again, and became the first one home. The race is still running in every country, and the stands keep filling. Beside the throne at the finish sits the one who started our faith and finished it, Jesus, watching for every one of his runners to come in.