PARTAKERS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT (HEBREWS
6:4-6)
The next reference to the Spirit comes
in a warning that catalogs the privilege of the Christian life, in chiastic
form:
For it is impossible to restore again
to repentance those
who
have once been enlightened,
who
have tasted the heavenly gift,
and
have become partakers [metochous] of the Holy Spirit,
and
have tasted the good word of God
and
the powers [dynameis] of the age to come,
if
they fall away, since they crucify the Son of God on their own account
and hold him up to contempt. (6:4-6)
This description is remarkable for its
experiential emphasis: Christian faith is not merely a set of doctrines but a
vivid experience of new things. The list of five elements is structured so as
to highlight the Holy Spirit at the centre. The readers have become “partakers
[metochoi] of the Holy Spirit,” just as Hebrews said earlier that they
are “partakers [metochoi] of Christ” (3:14). Through the Holy Spirit
they have been “enlightened”—that is, their minds have been illumined by faith
to understand the mystery of salvation in Christ. They have “raised” the
inexpressibly good gifts of God and the powers of “the age to come,” the
eschaton. These gifts “on the one hand proclaim that the messianic age has
begun (Acts 2;11ff) and on the other give a real foretaste, an actual beginning
of the age to come (Matt 12:32).” Here, too, there are unmistakable allusions to
the Pentecost event, where the infant church tasted the “new wine” of divine
life (Acts 2:13) and experienced the signs and wonders that signal “the last
days” (cf. Acts 2:17019). The word for “powers” (dynameis) in Hebrews
6:5 (elsewhere often translated “miracles”) probably refers both to power for sanctification
(cf. 10:14; 12:10, 14; 13:12) and to the healings, exorcisms, and other mighty
deeds that are visible evidence of the Spirit’s activity in Christians. As in
2:4, the writer is describing the new life into which Christ’s sacrifice has
introduced believers as one of perceptibly experiencing his own divine life
through the Spirit, as a foretaste of the glory to come.
The author of Hebrews, then, might be
said to view the Christians and the Christian community as living already now
penetrated to the heart by a shaft of light from heaven, a light that is
sweetness and joy as much as it is power. So permanent is this gift, so keen
its foretaste of glory and so assured it is by the Spirit even amid persecution
and temptation, that it would be thinkable to turn from “so great a salvation”
(2:3) and form such a “spirit of grace” (10:29). (Montague, Holy Spirit,
320) (Mary Healy, “The Holy Spirit and Christ’s Ongoing Priesthood in Hebrews,”
in Divine Action in Hebrews and the Ongoing Priesthood of Jesus, ed.
Gareth Lee Cockerill, Craig G. Bartholomew, and Benjamin T. Quinn [The
Scripture Collective Series; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Academic, 2023], 233-34)
