"I Crucified Thee"

What is this wisdom which God will destroy? Or let us put it in this way: which human wisdom is most offensive to Him? It must surely be the human opinion that He does not exist. For He loves us all out of proportion to everything else in His visible Creation. And surely the history of the Creation tells of this one-sided love — of a God Who literally has done everything for His beloved and of a beloved who just does not care. Even within human capacity, we know how painful unrequited love can be — humiliating, draining of all life, without hope. But our offense to God rises far above unrequited love: it is outright betrayal, even torture and murder of Himself. For the Fathers are crystal clear on this point. It is not the man, Jesus, Who dies on the Cross, but God. And core Orthodox theology teaches that where One Person of the Trinity is Present, the fullness of the Holy Trinity is Present.

Do we protest that we had nothing to do with it? That we were not within two thousand years of the crime? This weak objection only deepens our part in it. Our only hope in obtaining God's forgiveness is abject humility, owning to our ongoing participation in this most heinous crime. For what is worse than the murder of God if it is not the greater annihilation that He never existed. However passively, however silently, our failure to worship Him, to commemorate Him, to witness to Him in public, to openly weep for this general calamity, both personal and universal, is an act of violence without end.

To borrow St Paul's words,

In our failure to honor and venerate the Cross and our neglect of the One Who hung upon it, we may count ourselves among the perishing. But to embrace the Cross, to stand at the foot of the Cross in the sight of all expressing real compunction and sorrow, is to participate in the life-saving power of God. It is a matter of the heart — of a heart that is dead-unto-stone or a heart that is tender, beating in unison with God's.

We in the twenty-first century live in the midst of a great war — the greatest of wars, for its outcomes are far, far-reaching, and its causalities are far, far greater than any war past or future. It is nuclear war reaching beyond the material world. But in our foolishness, we practice no air raid drills; we train no one in its particular warfare; and we do nothing to prepare ourselves and our children for its most deadly might. For in our wisdom, we see .... no threat .... of any kind.

I do not mean to say that God threatens us. The warfare we face in within ourselves.

What exactly do we mean when we say we are made in God's Image? If each and every one us bears the physical Image of God, then surely visiting every village in every country with a camera or sketchpad, and meeting each and every person, would eventually yield a true portrait of God, finding all that is in common. But this survey of every human visage has the opposite effect. The dimensions and colors and textures and facial qualities seen over the whole range of the human race causes us to stumble. Before long, the project is paralyzed, for no common Image arises — not among men, and when women are brought into the mix, we find that the project is hopeless. For the extremes of unalikeness are so great that if we were birds, an ornithologist at first glance would instantly declare that we most certainly are not of the same species.

But God's Image is not displayed on our outsides. Our Divine family resemblance appears within us. It is impressed upon our souls at conception. The wisest among us would have been struck by the truth of this during the moment in history when we actually meet with God. The keen and penetrating seer would have recognized that He is the God-man and that within each of us, men and women, resides Divinity in the form of an immortal soul. Do we not know this, living with each other? Do we not see it?

Among the many gifts of the Incarnation of God, surely this is one of the greatest. For knowing ourselves aright, knowing who and what we are, more surely enables us to live our lives as God designed us to. We are all God-men and -women. Yes, we could scarcely be more different on the outside, yet within ourselves, we are nearly identical: we rejoice when our children are born; we sorrow and mourn when loved ones die; we bond in loyalty and friendship; we are ennobled and inspired by the Divine. For these deeper things, much deeper than the texture of our hair or the color of our eyes, are rooted in our Divine souls, the same soul in everyone. In the words of St. John the Theologian:

And that light has no organic connection to our mortal being. Our Divine souls are deathless, made in the Image of immortal God, and endowed with God's mind and heart and ways. If you doubt this, then look out at the animal kingdom and tell me which other creatures gather in holy places to sing hymns to God.

What sets us apart from other creatures is this incommensurable difference: we are not men or women; we are God-men and God-women. And our connection, our bond to each other, and to the Lord Jesus Christ, lies in this most deep truth. For this is the place where love, that one Divine property to be found on the earth, has endless freedom and capacity. It is the basis for what Jesus calls the Kingdom of Heaven.

This war I speak of, this invisible conflict nearly as old as our most ancient race, is the struggle between God-within-us and our bestial part. Being God-men, we may live our lives communing with God and seeing the world as God sees it or we may "get in touch with our inner animal" to borrow a phrase of the late twentieth century. That is our choice.

An Episcopalian rector I served under during the early 1990s told me that he wanted me to give up one more thing (as I lived under spiritual disciple). He wanted me to give up giving up things. He advised me to reflect on the sensuality of dogs, for then, he said, my life would open up to me in all its fullness and freedom. This man would later become the Canon to the Ordinary to Bishop Gene Robinson.

With this offensiveness still stinging my nostrils, I was afforded a clearer apprehension not of dogs, but of dogmatic theology: the Incarnate God, Jesus, has two natures and two wills, not one. Godly life consists in ordering the whole person to our God part, not dragging down what is noble so that we might lie at the feet of an animal .... reversing GOD to DOG, a devilish idea. And our ancient war is fought between this immortal and Heavenly identity and every impulse within us that, perversely, rejects and rebells against our Divine part. The most important work of our lives, of each human life, is to soldier on with our most mighty power, which is our will, taming the animal, domesticating it to love the light of our soul. And we give thanks for our inner freedom, for the privilege to engage in this holy battle, which is marks our Heavenly lineage.

Here is our nobility. For even Heaven had to endure rebellion brought on by unwholesome passions — of pridefulness, of rage, of envy, of unruly hunger for more, more than even Heaven ..... Our conception of Hell, into which these once-bright angels fell, is defined by animality: "Goats and monkeys! Goats and monkeys!" cries out inchoate evil. Is it coincidence that the same people who seek legal protections for their sins — for their pornography, for their drugs, for their unsavory lifestyles — who most strikingly descend into animal nature, disfiguring purity, virtue, and nobility?

Each year we set aside a pilgrimage whose only purpose is to beat down the unruly animal within. In this, Great Lent becomes a wonderful formalism in which we express our solidarity with Jesus and exercise our Heavenly birthright, rejecting the world and embracing "soul life." The last part of this journey we call Holy Week. Here the drama of our ancient war rising to a climax. It is, therefore, a wonder of the modern world how few people in the U.S. even know what it is.

When I began my conversion from the Anglo-Catholic tradition — a devout minority of the Anglican Communion I was born into but which now has vanished, — I offered my priestly vocation to the Roman Catholic Church. I soon learned that these parishes were intent on being "relevant" to a world that did not care for devout life. (The priests privately mocked their devout parishioners.) The first Good Friday service I encountered was designed to be "Incarnational" — a late twentieth-century movement designed to banish any talk of sinfulness. The church that first Good Friday evening was brightly lit, and the music was upbeat. The priests, who were stuck with a mandated liturgy, attempted to upstage any hope for somber reverence by announcing "The Lord is Risen! He rose two thousand years ago!" The general effect, mostly accomplished by a selection of jaunty songs, was "Resist Good Friday!" And the faithful willingly joined in the giddiness, for long ago they had imbibed in the heady brew of liberal theology. "Eat, drink, and be merry! For the bill never comes due for our many betrayals!"

But, you see, these priests had overlooked one detail. The problem is not that God has failed to be merciful or that He insists first on our sins. The Old Testament is nothing if it is not a long and unrelieved account of God's faithfulness and love, often tender, sometimes tough, but never-failing. They had overlooked the most basic truth: our struggle is not with God; it is with ourselves. And the distraction of liberal theology has only served to feed the inner animal more and more red meat.

Small wonder that we live at a time when most children or young adults have no idea what Good Friday is. A challenge faced by any priest or minister today is to explain God, and therefore our faith, to an unchurched and unevangelized society. "Good Friday," young people ask me. "What's that?" For they have seen post offices and banks and schools close on President's Day or on Martin Luther King Day, but never on Good Friday.

Try as it might, however, secular humanism ultimately fails to paper over the ancient war. Reports might not flash across our television screens or smartphones, but they are felt nonetheless, deeply felt. For the most important part of every human born, the most powerful aspect of our being, is the God within: God's nature, God's ways, God's gift of a Heavenly birthright. It's all there. This is the main fact of our existence. It cannot be ignored. Any diversion from this must ultimately fail. For our world is not intelligible unless our immortality — our Heavenly birthright, our innate repugnance to evil, our suffocation without Heaven's oxygen — unless all these things are known and embraced. And be sure of this: it cannot be hidden, much less destroyed.

Its history is etched on our racial memory: rebellion and a War in Heaven, rebellion in the Garden of Eden, rebellion in the days before the Great Flood, rebellion in the Sinai Wilderness. And the enemy is always the same: the lusting animal within seeking more and more and more. Our inner darkness wars with our beatific souls. Its dark victories are hideous: luminous angels disfigured into demons; deathless, noble humans devolving into diseased and dying dogs; human societies rejecting holy marriage, sacred children, and the dignity of life descending into pandemonium. It is so clear and obvious.

Who can imagine a war with more dire consequences? Certainly, no horrific carnage of the twentieth century has brought about anything like this. Do you remember the 1950s. World War II was nothing by comparison. For in this conflict, everything lost, even beyond the grave.

Which will we be then? Do we continue to do and say nothing as our angelic part morphs into a disfigured demon? Or will we fall down on our knees and weep on Good Friday? Will we look up at the Cross and own our bitter part in the conspiracy against God? For as surely as we have warred on our own souls, we have crucified the Son of God.

No. Good Friday is not about something that happened two thousand years ago. Its struggle is our struggle, today, tomorrow, and then on until heaven and earth pass away (Rev 21:1). This ancient war carried forward by elemental spirits who hate the God that made all things good can either be resisted or abetted. There is no middle or neutral position. We must take up the fight in our time and within the space of our own lives. For, it turns out (against all expectation), that the war we fight within our minds and within our hearts, is where the tide will turn and where the battle will be won.

Yes, Jesus is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. He has shown us what and who we really are. But our family of faith comes to nothing if it does not consist of every God-man and God-woman that has ever proceeded from God's hand — joining in godly affection; helping each other fight the good fight; offering encouragement, compassion, and understanding (sometimes under shameful circumstances); patience and love .... until everyone is safely home.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.