Daily Manna · Day 190 · July 9
The Same Forever
“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.”
A stone doorstep worn into a curve by feet.
Everything you lean on has a shelf life. The phone updates overnight and the buttons move. The clinic changes hands. A friend answers differently than she used to.
In the year 252 plague came through Carthage. The sick were put out into the streets and the dead left unburied, and the city blamed the Christians, having spent the previous years persecuting them. Cyprian, their bishop, told his congregation to bury the dead and nurse the sick, and not only their own. Some of them caught it and died doing it. What is worth noticing is the argument he used. He did not appeal to a new word for the crisis. He appealed to what Christ had always been, and reasoned from that to what should be done on a Tuesday in a stinking street.
That is what the sentence in Hebrews is for. It sits between a command to remember the leaders who first spoke the word to them and a warning about being carried about with divers and strange doctrines. It is the reason the faith of dead people is still of use to you, and the reason a new teaching that contradicts it is worth nothing.
The truth has an edge, and both sides of it are yours. What he was to Peter after the denial, he is to you. And what he said about greed and about pride, he is still saying, in the same words, to you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 190 is Purer Eyes (Habakkuk 1:13).