Wait! Did the Son of God just say that when night comes, no one can work the works of the Father, not even God Himself? (Jesus says He must work while it is day.) These must be some of the most remarkable words in the Holy Gospels. We must stop and read no further, not until we have pondered this thoroughly.
What then is this night, which leaves all powerless to do God's works .... including Almighty God? And what are the works of God? Naturally, the context is important: Jesus has said that the man born blind has not sinned, nor his parents. The occasion for his state of being is that God's glory be known, that is, that God, Who is intrinsically glorious, be known. Knowledge of God, therefore, is set in the foreground.
Let us begin with the question of God's works. That is, what does God do? What are His defining actions? During our Sunday meditations, we have often said that God alone is Life. And all else beside Him is not Life. And before His Creation there is nothing, only a non-living void of chaos.
In this vein, the revelation of His Name to Moses in the Midian wilderness remains seminal. In the Orthodox Tradition, we follow the words of the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures from which Jesus of Nazareth quoted in His teachings:
|
Εγο Ειμι `ο Ων
Ego Eimi ho On (Exod 3:14) |
Taking extreme care,
we say
that this is untranslatable in spoken English.
But let us humbly render
this conceptually
as
| I To-Be (absolute) the Being-without-end. |
St Jerome chose the Latin
|
Ego Sum Qui Sum.
I Am Who Am. |
for his Vulgate translation.
We have before us, though, the deepest, we might say most essential, sentence ever uttered: The first person subject I followed by the purest aspect of being, the verb "to be" in its infinitive (we might say infinite form) linking to is own participle, being, in an appositive construction, that is, a statement of repetition .... without end. The repetition becomes a kind of closed, self-referring system: the infinitive followed by its participle, an action that goes on indefinitely, infinitely, eternally. The Latin expresses this closed system, a relative pronoun whose antecedent is the verb "to be" which is linked only to itself, each infinitive being explained only in terms of the other: Sum Qui Sum.
The Greek, obviously goes deeper, for the first form of the verb "to be" Eimi is infinitive, an absolute, while the second form On is a present participle, that is, its essence in action, a continuing action of be without bounds: pure being.
Let us say reverently, as an aside, that this participle, though nominally common, appears only three times in the entire Septuagint: our present instance, once when Job cannot but speak out of the anguish of his spirit (Job 7:11), and when Job speaks-but-does-not-speak to the Lord-in-the-whirlwind (Job 4:40). All three are burning-point moments in the Hebrew Bible, and all three are mysterious constructions linguistically.
We recall that all of the Hebrew Bible in the original, Pre-Masoretic text is mysterious. St Paul calls these books the "oracles of God."
The sentence is an incommensurable statement of pure being: being at rest, being in action, being as an absolute, being as a Presence without end.
Let us take our leave from this quantum with awe and reverence observing that all living things on earth have being; God Alone Is Being. He is the Creator. We are His creatures. Inevitably, it is through our creaturelyness that we begin our apprehension of our Creator. As we read in the Book of Wisdom,
|
For from the greatness and beauty of created things
comes a corresponding perception of their Creator. (Wisdom 13:5) |
Following a Patristic principle that "Scripture glosses Scripture," we attend to Jesus explication of this statement in the Temple:
|
Jesus answered, "You know neither Me nor My Father. If you had known Me,
you would have known My Father also." These words Jesus spoke in the treasury, as He taught in the Temple; and no one laid hands on Him, for His hour had not yet come. Then Jesus said to them again, "I Am going away, and you will seek Me, and will die in your sin. Where I go you cannot come." So the Jews said, "Will He kill Himself, because He says, 'Where I go you cannot come'?" And He said to them, "You are from beneath; I Am from above. You are of this world; I Am not of this world. Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I Am He, you will die in your sins." (Jn 8:19-24, emphasis mine) |
Repeatedly, Jesus announces His Name, "I Am." And what is the context for these annunciations? It is knowledge of God: "If you knew Me or my Father" and "If you do not believe that I Am ..." These are deep waters, which I bid you to enter in countless hours of contemplation and prayer seeking knowledge of God.
For this morning we will say that God's vocation is Being, and our participation in it includes knowing God, believing that God is God, and rendering to Him His incommensurable due, which ever recedes before us. Yet does He accept a sincere heart and earnest love as we seek a horizon we cannot reach.
Do you recall our meditation "A Love As Deep As Hell"? We pondered in the Book of Hosea,
| "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge [gnosis] of God more than burnt offerings." (Hosea 6:6) |
That is, what God desires is gnosis, that deep interchange of heart and mind, which we call "knowledge of God." Just two weeks ago we considered the healing power of knowing God versus the vain worship of Greek gods in search of healing and life. The point, of course, is Jesus' simple statement in the Temple that He Alone Is Life and that our only claim to life lies in knowledge of Him. Else, we die in our sins (Jn 8:24). And what are our sins but fatal separation from God? For the universe apart from God is the House of Death, or Hell: not-Life.
The haunting phrase echoing through the Gospels
| "Who has ears to hear, let Him hear. Who has eyes to see, let Him see." |
concerns knowledge of God versus ignorance of God.
The defining trait of fallen humanity is spiritual blindness,
represented by the man born blind.
That his condition of life points to spiritual blindness is stated plainly.
That is,
when the Twelve ask the Master to explain this man's state,
He does not answer them directly.
Rather,
He tells them that while He is in the world,
He is the "Light of the World."
And what is blindness if not darkness,
or
separation from God's Light?
The subject, then, in not the man;
it is darkness and light.
As an aside, we recall that the man born blind has not willfully withdrawn from light in the sense of sin. He is an instance of one who by birth was separated from light. In this, he participates with God as a living creation in process, not yet completed, in which God's glory will be seen.
We honor the Light of the World today by posting William Holman Hunt's painting of the same name. Jesus stands in a ruined garden. He knocks on the door of our hearts. The door is to a tomb, our tomb. It is night. The epigram appended to the painting, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock," is from the Apocalypse of St John the Divine (Rev 3:20). So we are given to know that this is the last hour and that Heaven and Earth are about to pass away (Rev 21:1). Here, we take our first steps in understanding what Jesus means by night, when no one can work, not even God.
Let us reflect on these questions in the scale of our own lives. God is our life-line. He is our oxygen supply and the source of all life, which is light. How do we retain connection to this All and Everything? This is revealed as the first "WORD" of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. We do it through love, which is the most intimate and all-encompassing knowledge, for the lover seeks the Beloved in every way at all times with all one's might, with all one's heart and soul and mind and strength. As God is Our Father, we seek to do His will within this bond of love conforming our will always to His, which mysteriously is our own higher way.
We do well to ask next, "What then is the length and breadth of this relationship of self-offering to God?" The answer to this question will open to us the concept with which we began: night.
First, let us take care to understand our self-offering of will. The Creator endowed two kinds of creatures with free will: humans and angels. The Greek αγγελοσ (angelos) is defined as messenger. As the messengers of Heaven who gaze upon God's face, we behold a will that is perfectly conformed to God's. Else, the name, messenger, is meaningless. For a messenger with a mind of his own is no messenger at all, but rather a figure who undermines the Truth he has been charged to bear. In this, every angel is an instance of God, a living, fulsome particle of Divinity. An angel veering from his own self-definition, perverting who and what he is, cannot by any meaningful sense of the word be called angel. He now has chosen a new name in the exercise of his free will: demon, the Greek δαιμονας, which means a spirit that has become evil, sometimes called an imp because it seeks to spoil good. The classical scene of this hideous morphing from angel to demon, of course, is the War in Heaven. And Hell is the domain of all demons: pan-demon-ium.
In this, we learn two things: our will is changeable, hence its name, "free." And this alterability is its essence. Free .... ever subject to change.
Our own experience of earthly love teaches this fact. Should our commitment of love change in any love relationship, then everything instantly changes. We might go from Heaven to Hell; alternatively, we might escape Hell becoming available to Heaven. If this change of commitment has to do with our passions — say, sexual curiosity or compulsion — then we find that we, like the fallen angels, have morphed from goodness to evil, undermining our identity as God's Image.
We console ourselves in the belief that we do have mastery over our wills, after all ....
which is not to say that such mastery comes easily.
We find in practice
that the more we commit ourselves to illicit thoughts
—
whether drugs, alcohol, illicit sex, gluttony, power, money, ....
—
the more these thoughts gain the upper hand over us.
We lose mastery;
our freedom of will becomes diminished.
And we are in danger of having hardened into our worst desires.
As we come up to the time of our death in this state, repentance is nearly impossible, for the callouses upon our hearts have become old, thick, and insensible to the soul. The Western Church teaches that the "clock is up," the Last Four Things, as our a particular judgment now unfolds. Yet one, last opportunity to exercise free will remains. We look in the Lord's face and see the entirety of our lives in perfect clarity with nothing left out. We may follow the bad thief and rebel, denouncing God's "accusation" (when, of course, we ourselves are the accusers, disfiguring our own lives). Or we may follow the good thief, who sees the truth of his life and repents.
The Orthodox Church teaches of a forty-day period when we are tested. This is more realistic, for it is in the nature of free will that no one is frozen in any particular state of being until our career of free choice has reached its end. Anyone might do or say anything and at any moment. The evil one might flood our minds with illicit thoughts and images, yet do we choose whether to receive them. St Seraphim of Sarov told a man troubled by such thoughts. This man told the starets that the filthiest images flooded in at the holiest moments. (We may imagine him approaching Holy Communion.) And the Elder told him, (I paraphrase) "Blessed are you that the enemy has singled you out, for your life must worry him deeply."
Our freedom of will is being in constant flux. In His magnificence (and in a mystery), All-knowing God cannot know what our next choice will be, for He has made us this way, granting us the sovereignty in this freedom. And this is the point of the forty-day period. During this time, every sort of scene and image and thought will swirl about us. St Columba walking across an open area of the Iona cloister saw one of his monks, just deceased, doing battle in the air with angels and demons fighting, assisting, influencing (Vita III.6). When we too have passed through this process, which the Fathers have called "Aerial Toll-houses," our state of being, mastered by our will, will have been tested. We will have "flown our true colors." We will have become settled, constant, messengers of God's will to the universe, by the grace of God.
What is the period of night then? And what is the day? The night is the end of all choices. The freedom of our will has now passed. We will have become forever hardened into what we have desired every minute of our lives. If it is love of God, then we will have become all love, and, in this, true Images of God Who Is Love. We say, in aside, that this is the fullness of theosis in the blessed sphere of God's Will for us.
If, alternatively, we have hardened into a rejection of God signified by choosing the things that have separated us from God all our lives, then we will have chosen forever not Love and not Life. That is, our eternal home will have become the House of Death.
What are the things Almighty God cannot do? He cannot make our choices for us, for in this He would forswear Himself, abridging the gift of free will, being little more than a puppet-master. And His Creative Art rises far above the workshop of a Geppetto. God's art is the object of Geppetto's prayer: "a real boy."
Here is the darkest night
—
where God cannot work the works of God because God cannot forswear Himself:
| For when God made a promise to Abraham, because He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself, saying, "Surely blessing I will bless you, .... And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise. For men indeed swear by the greater, and an oath for confirmation is for them an end of all dispute. Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath, that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, .... (Heb 6:13-19) |
God's promise of the freedom of our will is unbreakable. It is a promise He will never forswear.
|
If we deny Him,
He also will deny us. If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself. (2 Tim 2:13) |
He is our Creator. And we are His creatures. The Eternal Word of Creation underlines this particular relationship when He heals the man born blind. He might have said from a distance, "Be healed!" as He did even to raise the dead. Instead, He chooses to reenact the Creation story in Genesis, taking new clay and completing the man born without eyes:
|
He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva;
and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. (Jn 9:6) |
He is our Creator.
He miraculously brings about a creature that is nearly Divine,
planting within us a soul, which is His Very Presence.
As He has with the angels,
He has endowed us with the Godly quality of consciousness and free will.
We alone may choose or reject His Light.
This is our choice alone.
We alone may adore or turn away from the Light of the World.
Light or darkness,
darkness or light.
Whichever we choose,
each leads down its own road to the end of all choices,
where no one may do the works of God.
The night or the day:
hour-by-hour,
minute-by-minute,
moment-by-moment,
we choose and choose and choose.
Nothing is more decisive,
in the Light of Eternity,
than these choices.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen.