Big game last Saturday — Florida State University against #1 ranked University of Florida, led by quarterback Tim Tebow whose illustrious career will make him the darling of NFL draft picks after he graduates this year. Tebow’s Christianity isn’t news, but the text in his eye black, “Hebrews 12:1-2” had them guessing… at least until they’d located the verses in a Bible. Hebrews is a New Testament book, and a peculiar one at that. It isn’t a gospel, it isn’t the historical narrative of Acts, and it isn’t a letter like any of the others. In it, Jesus is a Jewish priest. Hebrews is an encouraging sermon that portrays Jesus as the great high priest who steps in to satisfy all expectations and demands of the Jewish sacrificial system. It orients Jesus within the Jewish religious system while also presenting him as superior to or even transcending them. Tebow’s text, from the beginning of chapter 12, is a stirring call to the early Christian community to stand fast in their faith, to persist and endure despite the hardships and scorn this minority suffered on account of their beliefs. Their model — Jesus, and their communion, the “witnesses” — giants of faith from the Hebrew Bible, such as Abraham and Sarah (chapter 11). All that mention of “a cloud of witnesses,” running the race, and endurance in the face of severe challenges and hardship — well, it makes for easy application to American football, yes? I’ve no doubt that Tebow knows this text and its context, and hoped that it would point his Florida witnesses past him to Jesus in a kind of testimony. But I suspect that some people, once they had read the text, took it to be simply an eloquent statement of the challenge of a game played before thousands in which Jesus was believed to determine the outcome in favor of his faithful.
