Hebrews 6:19
“This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and entering into that which is within the veil;”
Where this sits
Written to believers considering going back. The verses before it recall God's oath to Abraham, given so that those who flee for refuge might have strong encouragement.
Reflection
An anchor is a strange image for hope, and the strangeness is the point.
Hope, as we normally use the word, is the lightest thing in the language — a wish, weightless, attached to nothing. The writer picks the heaviest object on a ship. And an anchor's whole function is to hold a moving vessel against forces it cannot resist on its own. Nothing about it is optimistic. It is equipment for bad weather.
Then the metaphor does something no anchor does. It enters into that which is within the veil.
Anchors go down. This one goes up and in, past the curtain of the sanctuary, into the place where the high priest went once a year and no one else went at all. The image breaks on purpose, because the writer wants the reader to see where the holding is happening. The line does not run down into the seabed, which is only sand and shifts in a storm. It runs into the one place that cannot be moved.
And the next verse names who is already there: Jesus, entered as a forerunner. The anchor is not fixed to an idea. It is fixed to a person who has gone ahead into the room, and the rope, wherever the ship happens to be, ends in his hands.
- Theme:
- Hope
- Book:
- Hebrews