Beloved

We who are now reaching the end of life know a certain truth: that in any group — high school, parish, convent, monastery, college class, workplace — there is a small number of people who "get it" and a large number of people who "don't care to get it." For to care is to love.

St. John, the Beloved Disciple, "got it." Accordingly, he is crowned with many crowns: Evangelist, Apostle, Divine, Theologian, Eagle. He was the one who shared the soul and mind of our Lord Jesus Christ. He was the Beloved. And he was beloved of all the people right till the end of his most blessed life — his aged person carried on a litter from Christian community to Christian community that little children might touch the head that lay on Jesus' breast.

What was it that the Beloved Disciple understood so clearly as to become a sharer in Jesus' heart and the friend of His bosom? It was that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near in the sense that all of us are already in it .... if we would but let go of our cluttered lives and be open to Heaven only.

To many people that would be an odd proposition indeed. Heaven to them is a distant thing. "I go to church on Sunday ..... I have so many things to do during the week ...." What St. John saw so clearly is that Heaven is the all, the everything, the only thing that matters. Everything points to Heaven .... if only that it points away from Heaven. But no matter where we go, no matter what we do, we cannot elude Heaven. Everything is about Heaven.

As his depiction of the Calling of the Twelve discloses, he understood Jesus' great ministry to the earth not to disclose something new, but rather to restore something ancient and holy.

During recent decades, based on ancient evidence, we have come to see that we had the backdrop for the Advent of God all wrong. It is not the proto-Rabbinical Judaism as we had supposed (at least since the eighteenth century), but rather it is a cultural civil war involving the entire Levant and beyond. Battle lines are drawn between, on the one side, the Mesopotamian party, the returnees from the Babylonian Exile and their descendants, which Ezra styles "the Second Exodus," "the true Israel" (Hans-Georg Wunch, 2021). You see, it is only those returned from the Babylonian Exile and their descendants who are the authentic Israel, by their own account. On the other side of these battle lines, we find the ancient Hebrew religion.

As we have considered in previous reflections, the Twelve were composed of the "First Temple" party except one, whose name says it all: Judas, a variant spelling of Judah, which is the heart of the "Second Temple" party. His party gives rise to the Second Temple religion: Judah-ism.

St. John's Gospel is the only one to single out this opposing party, referring to "the Jews" sixty-six times, while the other Gospels use the phrase a few times each. He understands the allegories and parables and mysterious sayings of Jesus very clearly, for He understands the ground of being that underlies the entire Jesus event. He understands that the paradigm underlying all Christian spirituality is the Holy of Holies of Solomon's Temple. He understands that in this place the boundaries between Heaven and earth are so thin as to vanish.

This is the main thing. This is the Kingdom of Heaven. Where is the place where the boundaries between Heaven and earth vanish — "on earth as it is Heaven"? The paradigm is the original Holy of Holies, but it is happening everywhere, everywhere people are .... who seek to become One with the God-man.

St. John understands that angelic energies charge the very air around our persons with the presence of God. His Book of Revelation is a depiction of the First Temple's Holy of Holies (see Margaret Barker, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, 2000).

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On this the feast day of the greatest teacher in Holy Orthodoxy, second only to the Master Himself, let us stroll briefly through bits of his writings.

What is God's first Creation? With this question, we enter most holy mysteries, for with God is no before and after. All points of time are present to Him, and He is present at all times in every place. With a sense of humility, conscious of our intellectual lowliness, we begin to feel our way into a cloud of unknowing, yet we are bold to say, God alone is the "Life Creator," creating first, Himself, Which is the Logos, the Creative Word of God, Who is "First and Last .... Who is and Who was and Who is to come, the Almighty" (Rev 1:8).

His gift to us, Whom He made in His Image, is Himself. All that does not belong to God is not of God, causing us to be lost to Him. We are most fully ourselves in all of our individual geniuses by being One with Him as He and the Father are One (Jn 17:11). Our destiny, which we all share yet which is different for each of us, is to follow Him, to follow Him so faithfully, that ultimately His light fills us with angelic energies imparting the unmistakable family resemblance, which we see on the Mount of Transfiguration. With St. Stephen our faces shine like angels. With St. Photine our radiance transforms the world around us. And all for love, sweet, sweet love.

As the Beloved knows, love is the only Divine property to be found in our world. And it is the gateway to His love, to the love of God: to be so filled with unselfish love that we are moved to a new level, where our heart stretches and stretches. It stretches until we are certain our frame can no longer hold it .... just as Heaven and earth could not hold Him .... because of His love for us.

It is this self-denying love, the love of pouring Oneself out, with which He redeems the world. And it is this self-denying love which flows out of us redeeming the world around us. The Beloved writes, "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8).

So let us love each other — a Divine command. By this we are known to be God's. And let us abide in Him as He abides in us with pure love, denying ourselves and seeking always to be filled with His Light, which is Life (Jn 1:4).

Let us, then, be children of the Light (Jn 12:36), where there is no darkness at all (1 Jn 1:5).

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